Tuesday, June 17, 2014

A Trip to Missing Willow Farms

Earlier this month I had the incredible fortune of having befriended a fellow crafter on my favorite crafting community Craftster. "MissingWillow" kindly selected me to be her partner for the Altered Spool Craft Swap that I signed up for. Each participant was to decorate or alter a thread spool - or in some cases larger ribbon or chord spools - in a theme from her partner's wishlist. Generally items are shipped to another crafter that could be anywhere in the country, or in some cases anywhere in the world. MissingWillow and I live a little under two and a half hours from each other, so she invited me to visit her farm and swap our crafted items in person. When she sent me an invitation, I was pretty thrilled to be meeting another member of Craftster in person for the first time ever. I've been a member since 2008, so I'm sure there have been other opportunities for something like this to happen. I adore animals, so the added bonus of visiting a farm made me ecstatic.

We started our visit with an amazing brunch that I sadly did not photograph. However, among the several choices of food, was a whole loaf of La Farm sourdough bread that I bought that morning in Cary, NC, before heading that way. This loaf was crazy huge. I couldn't resist buying the whole loaf to present to our hosts. Pretty much everyone present at brunch let out an expletive upon first seeing this giant. It was so tasty on top of being a bit of a spectacle.


After a delightful meal, we traded our altered spools. MissingWillow presented me with an amazing Alice in Wonderland-themed spool which was accompanied with a hilarious story about pressing a Walmart employee to sell her the over-sized spool along with the undesirable clearance-marked ribbon it held. I'm extremely happy to be the new owner of this delightful piece of art. As soon as I find a small china cabinet or curio for our kitchen, it will find a place next to my teacup collection. It even had the teeniest of pastries - my favorite are the macarons because I am crazy about macarons these days!

 

And I gave to her a needle-felted zombie sheep complete with an antique wooden spool body with an embroidered scroll wrapped about it.


After some moderate squealing over our new possessions, our tour of the farm began.  Our first stop was to visit the flock. For being a crafter that uses lots of wool for creating, I am painfully unaware of the type of sheep that might be found on a farm. One variety we saw were hair sheep that didn't require shearing. There coats looks like they just pealed right off on their own. My photo-taking was obviously lacking because I failed to get a picture of Lizzy, the wonderful Great Pyranees puppy that is to be the sheep guardian.We also got to see their dog Jack working the sheep, which was super impressive. I am so amazed at what dogs can be taught.



There were goats that shared the pasture with the sheep, but our next visit was to see a goat named Summer about some milking. I have never milked an animal in my memory, so this was quite exciting. I was really no good at it, and my husband put me to shame when he had a go. Summer was quite patient with us (as long as she had food in her bucket!)
 


After our go at milking a goat, we visited the chickens. They got to enjoy some leftover biscuits from brunch right out of my hand. This was torture, mostly because the biscuits smelled so yummy. 


We had such an amazing day visiting Missing Willow Farms. I look forward to meeting MissingWillow in person in the future, and I send many thanks to her and her husband for having us!



Jessica



1 comment:

  1. I love my spool to pieces and that bread you brought was epic! I'm so glad you were my partner in the spool swap and am looking forward to seeing you and Chad again.

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