It’s freezing outside. Here is my current favorite easy recipe because let’s be real it takes forever to get these kids in and out of all of these snow clothes and I just want to goof off.
Cowboy Chili
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The Perfect Winter Comfort Food:
Buffalo chicken stuffed sweet potatoes offer a delightful twist on traditional winter comfort foods. The combination of tender chicken, tangy hot sauce, and savory spices creates an explosion of flavors that will warm you up from the inside out. The creamy sour cream and cheddar cheese topping adds richness to the dish, while the crispy bacon bits and green onions provide a delightful crunch and freshness. But what truly sets this recipe apart is the choice to stuff the filling into sweet potatoes, which elevates the dish to a whole new level of deliciousness.
The Importance of Recycled Wool
The First time I heard of using recycled yarn was from my friend Dawn who owns Twice Sheared Sheep. You are probably falmilur with this brand because I love to collaborate with her for our yarn kits and bundles. Like most of us she started her business out in one direction and then it has grown and changed since then but I know that one of her main focus when she started was “recycled" or “ reclaimed yarn” You can hear more about that directly from Dawn here
Here at CHY I’m not so much up cylicing yarn but rather enjoying using reclaimed wool in our products. In our case that is where wheel the fleeces are processed into clean and useable wool for our batts or custom rovings we are able to work with boutique mills that will save and reuse some of the wool that didn’t make it though the first pass. If you’ve ever used a drum carder yourself you know all about how a good bit of lovely wool and fiber can be stuck on the machine while hand blending. Where in many cases larger mills would end up not saving this wool we love that we can reduce it and give it another life. I had fun using some myself for some incredibly soft Merino Batts I was dividing up. You've also proababy seen it in our work in the way of reclaimed Sari silk and “ wool neps “ for a tweed texture.
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It’s ok not to fit in. I myself and too “traditional “ for some folks and too “ offensive” for others. I used to try to hide these things about myself first just in my life and then later in my business. I named my silly little crafting business which I was never planning to grow this larger “ Crafty Housewife Yarns” kind of as a joke because I was tired of being treated like having an interest in these sorts of things and having kids and prioritizing my family time was somehow making me less than. Really owning that joke really helped me put a name to a stigma that pissed me off. Then as business grew I found myself once agian trying to people please but now it was though branding. I was trying to make myself and this brand be the crunchy, perfect, flowly , feel good vibe that everyone in the fiber arts seemed to respond to.
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If you've ever looked at a knitted or crocheted item and wondered how someone could translate emotion into something so mundane, then you're missing the point. Knitting and crochet are art forms that require as much thought, skill, creativity and talent as any other medium of expression.
You don't have to be an artist to make beautiful things by hand with yarn and needles. The materials are cheap and plentiful, but like any crafty endeavor there's also a learning curve involved. It takes time to learn how to cast on correctly for beginners, measure gauge accurately for others who already know their way around needles—or both!
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I am so excited to have this Blog/Assembly guide put together for you. You for sure will want to follow the step by step directions that come with the wheel and contact the SpinPerfect customer service if you have any questions. This is meant to be an overview so you can see me putting mine together as sort of an over the shoulder view.
Read MoreHere are some tips from this video for spinning pet hair on your spinning wheel:
You may want to blend your pet hair with other fibers you can use hand cards for this
You can gather most of the fiber from the hind quarters most of the fur is an undercoat. Shorter dog hair like a lab, would not be spin-able just because there's no soft undercoat, it's just too course.
You may have to gather hair from multiple pets or multiple grooming.
While you want a good bit of twist to hold the fiber together don’t go too fast because you make get too much momentum behind these delicate fibers. A smooth quick rotation with slower feet like seen on this SpinOlution Monarch is ideal.
Will spin similar to Angora or Alpaca.
Find out the top 4 reasons I think that these spinolution spinning wheels are the best spinning wheel on the market today.
They have a wide range of bobbin sizes and features. The big bobbins and the open face orifice make it very accessible that way while having the fastest spinning ratios, meaning that you can spend very fine easily because you've got a really smooth and really quick spinning ratio at the same time. And then the really lightweight 3d printed bobbins,four-ounce and eight-ounce bobbins really are great for fine spinning. You end up having the wheel range options where you can really go between the really big and the really fast I definitely think this is what sets these wheels apart.
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This is the third installment in our Braid to Belt series from Jessica Jane Patterson from Spinning Shadows. Make sure you check out the first installment here first.
In the first segment you learned all about planning out the colors in your braid , pre-drafting, separating fiber and attaching the fiber to your spindle.
Learn to warp and weave a belt with hand spun yarn
You would want to first divide the braid long ways as she shows in the first video becase you are going to be spinning two identical single ply yarns
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