This is my new company logo for my knitted and crocheted finished goods. I decided to separate it from the yarn processing and the alpaca business as I knit from fibers other than alpaca. Since my email address is Brit Knits I thought it was only fitting to keep the name. Brit Knits was not available for my url so I added the "the" in front. I have posted a lot of new hats on the hats2 page of the website. Of course I also offer a lot of other finished items, shawls, scarves and clothing. I am really into the lace knitting right now so there are a lot of shawls.


Since I'm getting prepared for a 3-day holiday show at Fort Concho in San Angelo I am busy knitting hats so I have a good selection of sizes and colors. I do make hats in all different fibers but right now I am concentrating on using alpaca. I have made some in my handspun that has been dyed and some in natural colored alpaca. Our boy Donncha gives us such a selection off his fiber as he's shaded from a medium fawn all the way to a soft off-white.

This is one of the hats, obviously, hand dyed fiber then hand spun. After spinning up a single ply I then took some rayon that I dyed in the turquoise and plied it together. It's nice how the rayon sparkles in the fiber. You have the softness of the alpaca paired with the soft shimmer of the rayon, making a fun hat.



I am having a lot of fun designing hats. I have a lot of knitting books and have now found that most of them are simple plain hats made with chunky yarn. First, I don't like knitting with chunky yarn, I think the finer yarns have a much softer look to them. Secondly, I don't like knitting plain old stitches with lots of decreasing.



Consequently I have decided to select nice pattern stitches and choose ones that are easy to decrease with. Cables are one style that is easy to decrease automatically and now I'm researching some rib patterns that will work too. I'm currently working on a hat in the Harley Davidson colors, black and orange. I'll post a pic of it when I get finished.



The other thing I am doing with a lot of these hats is instead of making a pompom to put on top I am knitting up a long tail at the top of the head which I then knot. I am calling this style of hat Brit Knots. Just like a play on words. Here's an example. This is a man's size so it's a little loose on the "mannequin"

An open letter

To: Waco Animal Humane Associate
From: Gracie
Dear Everyone at the Waco AHA,
I have had quite a time in my life since leaving you last Saturday. I was placed into a vehicle with those two nice people and we drove off. Wow, what a lot to see, I was kinda scared not knowing why I was no longer in my home with all those other barking dogs!
I took a long time for us to get finished with the drive. It was almost dark before they stopped the vehicle and let me get out. What a wonderful place they bought me to. I don't have to sit tied to a tree, or even in a cage, they let me run all over the place! This first pic is me after I had

been on a "tour" of my new home. It was so nice just to be with people that like me as much I as think I am going to like them. They gave me tummy rubs, let me run after their cats and I see these long necked big animals out in the big yard but I am not at all understanding what they are and why there are also here on this great big yard? I got my own room that night and I slept so well, what with the excitement of going for a long ride, then getting to run around, plus they let me into the inside of their home to let me be with them! Wow, it's a dogs life alright!


The next morning I ran, and ran, and ran, and chased cats, and ran but no-one tied me up! The people, whose names are Jerry and Vanessa, were outside putting together something called a Coop. It looked like a cage to me, wonder if it's for me? What's a coop?
They were making loud noises with machinery cutting wood and metal and going back and forth to their other buildings to get things. And all this time, they let me run around, get petted and explore! I love to explore. Then I sat down and just watched. I was getting tired with so much running around.


I don't know why they have those long necked animals on their place with me, I guess I'll find out eventually but for right now I'm pretending I haven't seen them as they look scary. But, I did find piles of poop. Wow, this poop isn't smelly, so I rolled in it. I think I'm supposed to do that so that I smell like the other animals on this farm.
Oh look, I'm no longer that pretty white dog you remember, this was after I rolled in the poop.

I think I see a cat! And look, grass for me too!

I am finding out that a farm dog's life is very tiring. I don't know how I'm going to keep this up, it's a tough job!

Thank you everyone for giving me to Jerry & Vanessa, I already know that I am the happiest dog in the whole wide world. And I'm going to do everything they tell me to do so that I don't have to come back and live in a cage. Not that I minded some of it, everyone was so nice to me.

Thank you, thank you,

Love,

Gracie

P.S. I'll write to you again soon

Wild Flowers

I can't believe how time flies. I've been diligently taking all sorts of pictures for this blog, only to find 1. I have to go out and help Jerry with "farm work", 2. I'm at work and the camera is at home, 3. I sit at a computer all day and don't feel like it in the evenings. Well all that is going to change. I am pledging to post to this blog at least once a week. There's always interesting things going on at the farm at this time as we've been busy building our infrastructure for the past year or so and it's still ongoing, although we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel!
While making runs to the poop pile at an undisclosed area on our property, I have been amazed at all the wonderful wild flowers I have seen. I pretty much had decided that most all wildflowers are one of 3 colors, white, blue or yellow. . . wrong! So for the next few posts I am going to include pics of the flowers I have managed to capture with my very inexperienced shutter finger.

Of course the first picture is easy to identify, the Prickly Pear Cactus. I know this sounds mean, with such beautiful flowers, but my pledge is to eradicate each and every one of these from our property. They are the most prolific plant I have almost ever met. You can knock off a part of the plant and leave it laying on the ground, next thing you know, there's a new section growing out of the side of it, and it's rooted into the ground! Someone was telling me that the absolute worse thing you can do with a prickly pear is put it through a shredding machine, then you get new plants from EACH of the pieces you broke it into! Nature is amazing about reproducing isn't it? I just know that when you have alpacas, dogs and cats you are committed to taking the best possible care of, you can't have cactus, period, end of discussion. I must say that by eliminating each and everyone of them off our property is going to be a challenge, we've got a bountiful share of them.

I am with mixed emotions about this plant. Another alpaca farmer has taken the fruit fermented it and made it into dye which she said produced a beautiful pink on her white alpaca fiber. I will be collecting my harvest and trying this out for myself, not just on alpaca but on some the the merino wool that I also have. My challenge is to see if I can get that beautiful crimson color out of the fruit. I'll let you know.

OK so it's hard to realize size of each of these flowers as they have been taken as close up as I could get to show the actual blossoms. Prickly pear flowers can be as large as a woman's fist whereas the next one is half the size of a dime.

I don't know it's name, but it, like most wildflowers, is very prolific in Texas and other southern states. I can never remember if it's the small yellow flowers or the plant with the small lavendar-pink flowers that produce the goatheads, but I believe this one is just as treacherous. Why is that? Do they choose to tempt you with their pretty flowers, only to stick you with one of their seed pods that hurt like the dickens? I know, I know, even "cultured" flowers can do that, take the rose for instance.

I just know I am on a mission to eradicate "mean weeds" before they get to the mean stage. I will gladly allow all these pretty wildflowers to produce and delight me, I just remove the blooms before they get to the ugly stage.

OK, the next flowers, the 2 groupings I believe might be wild coreopsis, but I'll have to check on that.

This is a pretty flower that could be in a single clump, or in a cluster so I don't know if it seeds, or spreads by its root system. I believe a lot of wild flowers can do both.

I like this soft yellow. Talking of soft yellow, this one is almost a cream color. When these plants first started coming up I thought we had a strawberry field, they were very prolific and looked just like strawberries. It took a few months for the flowers to actually appear and again, they look like strawberries. I have not seen any fruit develop, but I'll let you know if they do.

This single flower I believe is a perennial and grows only one bloom.

Even though these flowers just all look like they're the same color, it's amazing the variations that they have. Some go towards the golden yellow, while others will have amazing orange or even red-orange centers.
While all I am showing are yellow flowers I thought I'd go through the groups by color. I must say that even though I thought I was pretty good at naming wildflowers, now that I'm in Texas I am totally stumped. I am going to go by the library and see if I can find a book that will help me identify the ones that I have found so far. They are stunning.

Here's one version of the Mexican Hat. These happy flowers are plentiful on the roadsides. In fact, I must confess, that these were on the roadside, along with some red ones and then some that had cross pollinated and were red and yellow. It's always a delight to see these during the late spring and early summer.

I do have a plan for all of this picture taking. . . . . more on my next post!

New Household member

I WAS ON MY WAY TO THE OFFICE. . . . . .

Well there I was, tootling on my way to work. Just getting into town and going under the first bridge when I saw what looked like a little animal rolling off the freeway. "Just keep going, just keep going" I was telling myself, knowing that if it was a cat all we needed was number 9 in our household. Well how could I? Of course I had to stop, it could get hit by a car quite easily if I just left it there! So, I pulled over, walked back to under the bridge and there was this little kitten. I grabbed it as it ran from me and it had blood in its mouth, not like pouring out, just a little blood. I figured it had been clipped by the car in front of me but was sure that it had internal injuries and wouldn't last the day.

So, I put the little bugger in the car and immediately it wanted to crawl up into the heating duct. Oh no, this won't work, what do I have to put it in? Aha, my file box in the back of the car. I put it in and then took a bungee cord and strapped it down. Actually, I realized once I got it to the vet that the box had hand-holes on each side and the little critter could have forced itself out of the box if it wanted. Well it didn't, it was quite quiet. As I was driving off, about 100 yds up the road was momma kitty who had been run over by a car. If only these animals could talk huh?Left kitty at the vet to have it looked over, again not expecting it to last out the day.

At 4pm, called the vet. "Your kitty is ready to go home"
Me: "What did it have wrong with it?"

Vet: "Just a concussion and a scraped lip, keep it in a quiet place for a couple of days and it will be fine"

Me: "OK, let's take you home to the "house of endless food"

Now, for those of you that aren't owners of 2 or more cats you must understand that the more you have the more of a heirarchy there is among them. There is usually one alpha male and at least two more that want to be the alpha male. This means lots of growling and agressive stand-offs. It just happens that we have 7 males and 2 females. The females are old, over 11 yrs, and just spend their days sleeping on our bed. Sambo, Clark and Smokey are friendly welcoming boys, they are just happy to be living with us and will accept whatever we throw at them, cats, dogs, alpacas, etc. Scruffy, Lewis and Percy on the other hand all want to be "in charge" and so it's funny to see these big bruisers so afraid of a little kitten. Yes, they growl and leave the house when they see it.

Obviously I was aware of all this when I was taking the "I think it's a little boy" (receptionist at vet said) home wishing that I really had a little girl as it might make life a little easier for kitty. Got home and of course for the first two days we kept it in the front porch garden room where we could keep it isolated and away from prying kitty eyes and noses. That was fine as kitty was very sleepy and scared. It had had one hell of a day.

Now we had to come up with a name. Right away Jerry decided we should call it "Little Shit". As I said to him, if men were left to name all pets 80% or more would all have the word "shit" in their name. Why do they think that's cute? Why can't the be more original in naming their pets? Maybe if we left it up to them to name their children they too would be 80% with "shit" in their name???

Well his redeeming grace. . . he said "What about Oliver, like in Oliver North?"

Me: "Why him?"

Jerry: "Well he got into a big scrape and came out of it"

Me: "Well that's kinda clever, ok we'll call him Oliver"

2 days later - Friend comes to visit, we're saying how we're not sure of the sex of this kitten, he looks it over and informs us it's a girl. OK, name change to Olivia, I guess it could have been Olive but I think of Popeye's Olive Oil and it doesn't fit. So, Olivia it is.

Olivia has settled in just fine, is quite feisty and quite willing to make friends with all the other 8 cats. She's finding out who to avoid and who plays rough. All-in-all she has settled in very well and is getting to the point where she's learned to sleep on the bed beside me. Doesn't take long does it?

He thinks his tractor's sexy!!

"HE THINK'S HIS TRACTOR'S SEXY"

TRACTOR DAYS AT A-SQUARED RANCH

Here it is at 6pm arriving on the property. There's Jerry walking over to see what he got himself into!

Yes, Jerry bought himself a tractor.

Ah, but remember, there's a 50% tax break on this, it actually only cost us $12,500!!!

Well we finally got there, Jerry has his tractor. Of course, I didn't go with him to buy it so he purchased a MUCH LARGER one than I was expecting! Boys and their toys!

So, What's this?

Here's Billy Bob, the salesman, unloading the tractor from the trailer. NOTE: He didn't want me to take his picture, but he smiled all the way through this painstaking ordeal!

Now we had our choice of a green, red, orange or blue tractor (that's the different brands available) Remember, our farm color is blue (check out our website at www AardvarkAlpacas dot com) you'll notice our logo is BLUE. As a child my mother dressed me in red all the time to match my red rosy cheeks, ugh! Green is the money color but the salesmen were obviously not eager to make money as they didn't show their faces when Jerry went by to see the machines. Orange, who wants an orange tractor????? Oh, I get it, it's so the hunters won't shoot it during hunting season?????

Here's my favorite shot. It's something they call an engine. Who cares???

(I guess the guys drool over this.)

OK, here's the studman backing up. Now this picture is very exciting isn't it?? You can tell, Desi the alpaca is very excited about it.

NOTE: The green you see are WEEDS, not grass. Can this expensive tractor cut them? Not if you want to fool the neighbors into thinking that you've slaved all year to get you GRASS to look that good. After I took these pictures I got out the regular hand-push lawn mower and cut them so it looks like a golf course out there. Did I take pictures of the lovely pristene grass? NO!

Isn't he cool?????

I think we got a great deal!