My how time flies...

So, a lot has happened since my last post. My husband did not get the job he was wanting in Kansas and after a lot of prayer and soul searching (and a bit of divine intervention) we decided that we were indeed meant to move to Utah. We made our move on November 3. We had no job lined up, we did not list our house until the day we moved, we just up and left. It was really scary. We moved into the house that I grew up in, renting it from my mother. Within two weeks my husband had found a job with immediate benefits (very important for a cancer survivor and a man with diabetes) also within that time we got an offer on our house and we are set to close the deal tomorrow. We have been so unbelievably blessed it is amazing!

It is so nice to be living near family. Pretty much all of my extended family lives in the Salt Lake Valley. After almost two years of trials things are finally starting to look up. My husband has found a good job with good benefits and tuition reimbursement. He is hoping to go back to school and get his nursing degree. We have a good place to live where we can have animals and livestock (I see my own flock of sheep in my future) And Yarn Wyrkz is continuing to do well. Everyone is currently healthy and hopefully will stay that way.

I am going to try to be better with posting here on my blog now that things have settled down a bit. Look for pics of my spinning wheel (yes I finally got one!) and the new yarn creations I have come up with. And gorgeous pics of my new home state of Utah. I never realized how much I missed the mountains until I got here and remembered how beautiful it is to look out the window at them every morning.

I am also working on promoting Etsy here in Utah. There are over 150 etsy sellers in Utah and yet when I moved here there were only about 7 members of the EtsyUtah street team. So I have been working with the new team leader to try to recruit some more members and get etsy awareness here in the Beehive State. I am optimistic that there is going to be a lot of growth which will of course help my own business as well as etsy in general.

Prayer Request for Our Famliy

To all of our friends and relatives:Robert has had the opportunity to apply for a new job. The place that he is currently employed is over 50 miles from our house and he drives there and back 5-6 days a week. For this he is compensated with a salary of around $12 per hour, plus a monthly stipend of $38 to "reimburse" the traveling expenses that he incurs through out the demands of his job that require him to have to drive hundreds of additional miles during the week more than his actual commute.

The job he has applied for is located in Ottawa, Ks and is a job with the City of Ottawa processing permits. It is a Monday through Friday 8-5 job, although it is eligible for overtime pay when needed. He will be driving approx 2 miles each way to work and could conceivably walk or right his bike if he gets in a physical position capable of doing that (or if his car breaks down LOL) The starting pay range is from $12 to $16 per hour. Even were he to get the lowest possible salary we would still be saving $300-$400 a month on gas. And most important is what we will gain as time spend as a family. Once you remove his travel time and the extra days he was working, we stand to gain almost a month out of every year to spend as a family however we would like.

I really feel like God has put this in our path and I am requesting that all who know us and who are people of Faith to please join us in prayer that he will be able to get this job. Those of you you are able and willing may also hold a fast for our family in this situation. This is one of the most important things to me in my life right now. I have been going through quite a bit of emotional turmoil about uprooting and moving back to Utah, until now, I really felt that it was our only choice to get out from under the financial situation that we are in, but this seems like an answer to a prayer to help us find some way to be able to stay here.

Pleas help!Feel free to pass this along to all your friends and relatives, we can use all of the blessings we can get right now.

Opening a new shop for Granny

Well we finally convinced Granny to give me the go-ahead to open up an etsy shop in her name. It is going to be called ElzorahsOriginals and will feature her Tole painting. Here is a preview of her work..

Finishing Something Important

I found out this week that my friend's mother has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. She is 72 years old and she is refusing all treatment. I have been working on an afghan for her in my spare time for almost a year now. I feel so bad that I have not made it a higher priority. I have decided that I am not going to work on anything else until I get it done. It is a beautiful blanket of many colors, but it is slow work, each row takes me at least 15 minutes. So it may be a couple of weeks before I am able to list anything new on my Etsy site. But I feel that getting this finished as quickly as possible is really important. She was so supportive of me during my battle with breast cancer I feel like this is the least I can do.

My Latest Creation

Here is my newest purse and one of my first forays into designing. I almost always modify patterns but this is the first time with Yarn Wyrkz that I have designed something completely from scratch without referring to anything. I am really excited about this bag. I feel like I have reached a milestone here. This bag has been roaming around in my head for several weeks and it is really incredable to me that it is now sitting in front of me. I am hoping that someone finds this bag as pleasing as I do and decides to buy it.

I WANT A SPINNING WHEEL!

I am so close to getting one, I just can't even stand it. They are just so dang expensive! I am hopefully going to be getting one in the next week or two for a really good price, we'll see.

I went to the Radiation Oncologist Last week for my check up, he says that everything looks good. He referred me for physical therapy so that I can hopefully start improving my range of motion on my radiated side. I am not looking forward to the therapy as I have heard that it can be quite painful, but I really do want to be able to lift things over my head again so I guess I will just have to tough it out. I listed a few more things this week on etsy. I did not get as much done as I would have liked however, I was really busy with the kids this weekend.

watching the grass grow, or in this case, the fleece dry

Now that I have my very own raw fleec I get to have the priviledge of doing the work to wash it and pick out all the vm (vegetable matter) and get it ready to spin. Now I know why people charge so much for ready to spin roving, it's a bit of work. Anyway, I wanted to share some pics of the work in progress.

Sheep and the Fine Art of Growing Fleece

I went to a Sheep farm this evening with the family. I had purchased a couple of fleeces on ebay from a local farm and we decided that it would be pretty silly to pay for shipping when they lived about 5 miles from our house. So we took the girls along because we knew that they would absolutely love visiting a farm (we were right). It was the coziest little place and I was instantly jealous of their rural lifestyle. They had sheep and goats a couple of Alpacas barn cats everywhere, and a lone angora rabbit. They also had recently acquired a peacock from some well meaning friends who had heard that they wanted one. All in all it was a lovely outing and I cam hoem with new freshly shorn Jacob Sheep fleeces. They are really interesting in that they are kind of piebald like a holstein cow so you end up geting at least three different yarns, black, white and various shades of inbetween. it's a nice soft wool, much finer than the Romney wool that I started out with. I am very happy with it and can't wait to get it washed and start spinning!

Spinning...The fine Art of Making Yarn

This is my lastest hobbie. I bought a drop spindle for $5 and some wool roving and away I went! The next thing I knew I was bidding on raw fleeces on ebay, man, you can find anything on ebay. This is my first fleece, I've already gotten two skeins of yarn out of it and I've started on my third. it is quite addicting. I have a vision of a really yummy handbag that is going to come out of this, if I have enough yarn even a mathing coin purse. it is not your typical white sheep wool, but rather a black/gray/brown color with lots of variation, I am just carding it abit at a time as I go so that I get this great tweady varigated looking yarn, beautiful! I have also ordered a bunch of pre washed, pre dyed roving that is ging to make some excellent socks for this fall. I can't wait to start on it. If I'm not careful I may find myself bidding on a spinning wheel. (think of how much faster I could fill my yarn basket!) The hard part right now of course is how to divide my time up between, spinning, crocheting and my next hobbie which is learning to knit (blech! knitting is hard =) of course I've got to fit all that in between housekeeping for my pack of animals (see 3 girls age 5 and under and a gorilla of a husband =)

Anyway, keep an eye out in the future for my handspun purse I'm sure it will end up on the shelve at my etsy store before too long.

Rain Rain Go Away!

Well we have been getting more than our fair share of rain here in the midwest. Here in my little town of Ottawa we have been inundated with water. luckily for me I live on high ground, but unfortunatly a lot of people don't. Thank God for levees or Ottawa would be totally under water right now. As it is there are stil several blocks that were flooded and many roads out in the country have been closed due to flooding. One of the towns downstream from us called Osawatamie has had to be evacuated, 2/3 of the city are under water and they say it is going to be one heck of a clean up once the waters recede. For my part I have had to pump water out of my crawl space due to the fact that a field drains onto my property, we are having a permanent sump pump installed later this week so that we don't have to deal with this again.

Things are heating up!

Well after a slow first few weeks my etsy store has really started to take off. I am pretty excited. Apparently the bath scrubbies are a big hit, I can't seem to keep them on the shelves!

I also have a custom order for one of my bags and I have made a couple of trades with fellow etsy'rs. I set up a promo with one of the etsy ladies who sells soaps so that if someone buys from both of our stores they get a discount on one of our items. check her store out at http://www.bernina4life.etsy.com/ She has some great soaps, I know because I bought some!

Welcome to the Yarn Wyrkz Blog...

Well this is the first time I have really attempted to blog...So we'll see how it goes.
I am hoping to showcase all of the wonderful crochet work I have been doing lately. I started crocheting about 10 years ago, making a random afghan here and there.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in April of 2006 I decided to crochet myself a chemo cap. Well that turned into a half dozen chemo caps and multiplied from there. It was something that I could do while I was hooked up to that damn IV getting poisoned. I was finally declared NED (no evidence of disease) On May 26th of 2007 and decided that I should do something productive with my newly revitalized crochet skills.

After doing a bit of research I discovered a wonderful place called www.etsy.com where I could put my crochet items up for sale. I decided to make a business of it and started crocheting like mad. I didn't stop with hats, but moved into handbags (which I had made three of already, one for myself and two for friends) baskets, clothing and more. here is the link to my store www.yarnwyrkz.etsy.com

So you will see a lot of photos of my latest creations here as well as whatever other random stuff comes into my head at any given moment. I hope you enjoy..,.