With that comes heating the sauna up more.

Plus doing more knitting and over at Ravelry I joined a knit-a-long and made this cowl.

I also joined a spin-a-thon over here, and day 1 have one spool almost full.  I don't think I'll be spinning very much, I signed up before my mother passed away and now my aunt passed and it's been busy over here.

I have been quilting too, and have started to put a quilt on the frame.

I just love this time of year and I think I always will.

They are finished and in plenty of time before the cold winter weather comes.  My very first pair of mittens that I have made with yarn that I spun myself. 

Correction, I have made mittens before but never with yarn I have spun. :))

It seems I only get around to posting once a week these days.  I'll show you what I have been up to.  Mr is working on remodeling my quilting frame for me so that I can get the most of the throat area on my machine.  So quilting is put on hold for right now and I have two quilts that I'm itching to get on the frame to quilt...patience, patience.

I took a learn to spin wool class back in December of 2013.  Since then I have done just of bit of spinning, and I've recently started spinning again.  I am so loving spinning.  I took a drive to get some roving from a yarn shop a few towns over, where the owner raises her own sheep and then sells the wool or spins it herself into yarn and sells it in her shop.

I bought some blue roving that I am going to spin and knit into mittens for myself.  I'm knitting a cowl from the yarn I spun from the roving that I received as a Christmas gift. 

But what I love the most about spinning is that I sit in the chair that my grandmother used to keep in her bedroom.  Where she sat to put on her shoes, where she put on and took off her stockings and unwrapped the bandages that she put on in the morning and took off at night to help prevent her legs from swelling.  I can still remember her sitting in this chair while talking with her while she was getting ready for bed on our summer visits.  I received this chair when we lived in Illinois and it moved with us here to Wisconsin.  This chair has memories for me and I love this chair.

Grandma's chair.

We had a traditional Christmas this year, it was quiet and simple.  The menu was simple, the day was quiet.

I made homemade eggnog from this recipe, I used raw milk, farm fresh eggs, my homemade vanilla and our maple syrup.

We didn't have all the traditional foods on Christmas eve, we just couldn't eat it all so we had some on Christmas day, rieska, smoked salmon and rice pudding.

I have to show you my all time favorite gift which was from Mr, I already played around with it some and it is AWESOME!!!

We've had snow falling the past couple of days and it's beautiful!

The feeders have been full and the birds have been eating as much as we have.

I hope you all have had a wonderful Christmas.

Oh no, I'm hooked again.  I took a spinning class and fell in love with it, not the exercise kind of spinning class, but the kind of spinning class where you spin wool into yarn.

I had to set the twist of the yarn.  I first soaked it in warm/hot water and a little bit of dish soap.

Then I soaked it in warm/hot water in vinegar.  The last process was soaking it in just plain clear water so that your yarn won't smell like a salad.

Now it's hanging to dry.

It's not the most even, but for my first time I was pretty excited.  I have enough yarn to make Mr a hat.

And to think it all started as a cloud.