Monday, October 26, 2009

My husband rocks!!

If you haven't checked us out, you must go and see what my husband has done. He's made our website and he has done a FABULOUS job! Our address is www.shadysidealpacas.com and it just amazes me the things he can do with a computer.

He has all the pages put in and something on every page, now I realize that this seems like how a website should be, but that is what you pay a company to do, not what you do yourself at home! There are pictures of our girls with our alpacas and our mission statement as well as a farm history even! I love it and I can't wait til we get more visitors so that they can leave us messages to let us know what they think.

Alpacas are truly changing our lives. And only for the better.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Busy busy days

Well it was a busy weekend. The wife and I skirted a whole lot of fleece this past weekend. Though we are not sure that we are not being much pickier about our skirting process than others. We are also willing to admit that we are likely slower than people who have been through 100s of fleeces too. I would like to thank Anita over at Windswept Farms for allowing us to go through a couple of the fleeces they had sitting around.

While I'm on the note of fleece, Michelle attended a needle felting class at Windswept Farm this weekend and seemed to have a good time. She has been showing the process to the kids and I as well. We've had mixed success but it is a learning process. We would really like to get to go to a wet felting class as our first attempt at wet felting came out differently than we expected.

Lastly this weekend was finally our prep for winter weekend. I have put up some blockades using wood and straw to help block out some wind in an area of the barn for our boys. We also put down a nice amount of straw for them to lay on to keep cozy. I have plent of extra incase we want to add more. I was happy to find my neighbor had plent of straw and lives right accross the street from me. So it made life a bunch easier. Lastly we changed to the heated bucket and got that plugged in.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

It's alive! ...kind of...

We have finally got a domain name for our farm. However, the one we had hoped for is taken. We were able to get www.shadysidealpacas.com however and it's a very fitting name. We both now have email addresses with shadysidealpacas.com on them so we are ready to roll.

The "kind of" is the part that is still needing some work. The domain is ours, but now I have to get the web site up and running. I'm hopefull I'll have something up simple tonight.

Please feel free to stop over there and check it out as we get things going. We have some items we already want to get in a store.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

I haven't poked myself yet!

As my husband had mentioned previously, we purchased some materials to begin the felting process when we visited a larger farm during National Alpaca Days. Beverly (the lady who was spinning and felting at that farm) was nice enough to show me how the process works and what to expect...she also told me that I would, indeed, poke myself at least once with that sharp little needle.

I haven't done it yet...yea! And the kitten seems to think I know what I'm doing already.

I must be doing something right, because I've intrigued my 11 year old daughter enough for her to say, "That's cool! I want to learn how to do that!"

Hopefully, I can keep going with my felting without poking myself, but then again, maybe it would just be better to get it out of the way so I can stop thinking about it when I'm working. We'll see...

After this, I'm going to have to try my hand at wet felting.