Some friends recently offered to buy yarn from me. Of course, I immediately panicked because my yarn sucks and also WTF have I been doing since last August when I got an awesome new Majacraft Aura spinning wheel and Electra’s fleece? I’ve had both for almost a year now and almost nothing to show for it (see above). I literally had to go through my camera roll to figure out what’s happened in my life since then.

Well, apparently, the day after I got my Aura, we also started unexpectedly fostering a litter of five kittens. This did indeed end up taking up a lot of my time for several months, but it also seems that getting Elektra’s fleece in the auction seems to have sparked an obsession. I scoured a ton (6? 7?) of fleeces and started buying fleece processing tools, including a hackle and comb, hand cards, a box picker, and a drum carder (once I figured out that hand cards are not for people with hand pain).

I experimented a little, spun a little unprocessed Shetland, and still had a litter of kittens living in my craft room. At the end of September, I planted way too few flax seeds and had scoured my last fleece.

By October 2, the flax had already germinated.

And on October 10, the kittens went to Cat Haven to be adopted. I reclaimed my craft space just to be given five antique to vintage sewing machines (not all pictured).

I also got a fig tree and some other plants and became Farmer Fred. And Athena came back to us for her forever home but with some health problems from her spay surgery.

The flax kept growing, but November brought complete chaos when a house I had fallen in love with when we bought our current house came back on the market. Since it is such a very unusual house for the area (who builds a house with a flat roof in a place with habitual torrential rains?), this time, we investigated it a little more and discovered that it has been built by the brother of the infamous former Governor of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards.

Obviously, we had to sell our house. Immediately. Except that water was coming through the first floor ceiling from the upstairs bathroom when we walked in for the inspection. But, I had already decided that we must move, so the house hunt began and we decluttered our current house into a storage unit. Everything broken (which was a lot) had to be fixed, the siding had to be replaced, the squirrels had to be driven out of the attic, and the HVAC had to be replaced, which meant contractors and coordination and lots of stuff I had never done.

The craft room was emptied. It sucked. Still the meager flax grew taller.

And, then near the start of January, on the way to storage to do I don’t even remember what, my husband falls and breaks both feet. Orthopedic boots and crutches for weeks. He’s still not completely healed.

Meanwhile, we changed all the doorknobs and hinges in the house from flaking gold to square black. That’s when the squirrels were evicted, and the HVAC got swapped out as well. The Hurricane Ida stump was finally ground, the siding finally changed, and the whole house was painted by the beginning of February. Because I was driving us everywhere, we also bought a new used car that is easier for me to drive. Finally, the hollow tree right next to the house was removed.

By early March, we had decided that we liked the house we already had better than anything we had seen when house hunting and told our agent we were no longer looking or selling. That was March. This is the end of June. We are still trying to put the inside of the house back together, but I am finally getting to a point where I have a functional craft room. Today, I received a new toy and worked on trying to process one of the more challenging fleeces that I acquired and scoured last year. But more on that later.