ROSEMALING

A friend who comes to our Friday afternoon spinning group does rosemaling and showed me one of Nils Ellingsgard’s books, NORWEGIAN ROSE PAINTING.

I have always loved painted wooden furnishings and was thrilled to be able to buy a few pieces when we lived in Germany. Norwegian rosemaling reached wonderful heights in the 1800’s. Some of it came to this country with the immigrations and Ellingsgard has illustrated some of those pieces in NORWEGIAN ROSE PAINTING IN AMERICA.

I modified one of the Nils Baera designs from the first book on the orange cheese box and a Knut Horne design on the top of the blue one.

The winter here until a week or so ago has been remarkably snow and ice free, but then we got an ice storm in the past few days. There are still frozen droplets stuck to the trees.

SHAKE UP IN THE COOP

There was a shake-up in the chicken coop on Christmas Day. The old rooster, a beautiful Partridge bantam, went missing. He was finally located down the road where he had slunk off to, nursing his wounds.

His half-Auraucana son, black bearded and devastatingly handsome, finally made his move. He drove his father right out of the chicken coop.

Luckily the tiny rooster was located, reduced to mooching leftovers from a bird feeder, and brought back to live in the big barn with the sheep.

The first week of the New Year is off to a bang. I got a strange collection of things accomplished. A sheepskin vest was repurposed as a truck seat cover. Yesterday I sewed a jacket for the Catahoula Leopard grand-dog and this morning I made up the last of the black raspberry jam. Hope to get blueberry jam made tomorrow. This afternoon I’ll be making leather bags for Dungeons and Dragons dice.

Last week I got to try out my new black Scandinavian wheel.

I love how all the turnings have similar shapes for a very graceful look.

Fred had to make all new legs, treadle, bobbin/flyer and even one of the half table supports for this wheel. The story was that it came from an Indian reservation. It had certainly been used a whole lot. One of the legs had a wooden spool glued on to make up for the missing length. This wheel has much bigger bobbins than I am used to and I love how it spins.