Sampler Afghan

Good Morning!  It's definitely winter here now.  The temperature outside is 15 degrees, by far the coldest night this winter.  Our experiment of not using our propane heat system and relying totally on wood so far has not left us frozen.  We've been quite comfortable.  The only problem that we have run into is that our small fireplace insert does not have a lot of room for ashes and, therefore, we have to let the fire go out rather often so that we can clean it out.  Then we have to totally rebuild the fire.  If you can time it right, this happens during the early afternoon and doesn't cause too much of a problem.  We didn't time it right today and the ashes have already built up so much that the efficiency of the insert is way down.  So I'm going to experiment with ways to take out some of the burned out ashes while leaving the hot coals.  If any of you have any experience with this please feel free to leave your advice.

This year I am embarking on somewhat of a large project....a 63 square crocheted sampler afghan!  And I'm inviting you to join me, even if you have never crocheted before.  All of the stitches are shown and most of the patterns use only the four basic stitches or a combination of them.  I'm going to be using this book available from Amazon.com.  This uses three colors:  green, rose, and ecru.  Because just making 1 afghan isn't enough of a challenge for me (LOL), I'm actually going to be making 4: 


                      
These colors will be for one in my room.  The white will be used for the second round of edging and to join the blocks.


              
These are for Joshua(9)'s room.


              
This one is simply because I have the yarn and I love John Deere.  It may hang in my kitchen.


                       
This is for Samantha(7)'s room, which is done in Disney Princess.  These are the colors in her fleece blanket.  I plan on just working through these on a rotation, rather than making a particular square with a particular color.  I will also be using white on the 2nd round of edging and to join.  We'll have to see how it works out.

My goal is one square of each afghan per week.  Next Wednesday I hope to be posting pictures of the completed squares.  So, get your book and yarn and join me in, hopefully, creating a beautiful heirloom afghan, or several.

May Yahweh bless you in this new day!

Laurie

I'm Finally Back

I'm so sorry to have been away so long.  The last part of 2011 was extremely difficult for the farm.  We saw the loss of most of our Alpine goat kids through some sort of disease.  Our most promising young buck was killed by our older buck.  And, to top it all off, we lost the single best dog in the entire world, my daughter, Michaela's, 3 year old red tri Australian Shepherd, Rascal.  Somehow he got out without anyone knowing it and was hit on the highway.  Needless to say, none of us are sad to see 2011 leave and we are hoping for a better year in 2012.

Some changes are coming to both the blog and the farm.  We've been doing some real soul-searching and goal-making.  In an effort to make the farm more profitable and our lives a little more organized we have decided to limit our gardening to what we need only, and will be giving away any extra.  This will allow us to focus on the livestock production.

I also want to focus on passing along more information that I have picked up and goals I have for the coming year.  I'm hoping to do this in a way that you can join me if you choose.

So, come along and see what's new on the farm.

May Yahweh bless you in this new day!
Laurie