Which one is which???

This is the first time I had a problem telling apart my black dogs in pictures. Quail is a lot smaller than Harley so usually it isn't a problem. But I really had to zoom in on the photo in the top right corner to see the dog tags to id which black dog it was!

Does that make me a bad mother???

It's snowing!

I didn't know it was supposed to snow today and I'm one of those people that loves it when it snows. It was a very pleasant surprise!

We aren't supposed to get very much snow today -- the weather channel says 1/2 inch although I think we have more than that already.

Back in December we had a decent storm come through and Harley and Quail really loved it.
It was Quail's first experience with a lot of snow. It's always fun to throw a puppy out into their first snowstorm. She ran around playing and trying to eat it too.

Harrison (the cat) looked at all the snow and said NO WAY!

Ribbit Woobie

When I found out my sister was having a baby, my crafting buddy, JY, told me the baby had to have a woobie. I eventually learned that a woobie is a tiny blanket with some sort of critter attached to it -- Target calls them a security blanket and theirs consist of beheaded teddy bears attached to a little blanket.

I decided that I had to knit a woobie or two... I had favorited a pattern on Ravelry called Ribbit awhile ago simply because I like frogs. Whenever we go hiking, I look for frogs in the whatever water we may be passing by.

So I knit Ribbit and put him on a green lilypad floating on water -- hence the light green and blue blanket. When I was telling my knitting group that I was making a woobie (or two), one of my knitting friends, told me I should sew on blanket binding because babies love the feel of blanket binding. I'm not a very good sewer so my mother-in-law sewed on the binding.

Didn't he come out cute?

Having a ball...a felted one that is

JY and I usually get together to scrapbook but we do love to craft so we've done other things as well like beading, rubberstamping, etc... We can get each other into a lot of crafting trouble! We decided our next crafting adventre would be felting balls.

Awhile ago, I went to Dancing Leaf Farm in Maryland. I wanted to try spinning and felting so I bought some pretty roving -- unspun wool. I did take a spinning class last summer but I am not sure spinning is for me.

I have a huge stash of styrofoam balls in my basement -- leftovers from another craft project (needlepoint ornaments called Bargello Balls) from years ago. JY brought over some jingle bells and the bells and styrofoam balls made up the core of the felted balls. We had fun wrapping the roving around the cores -- the styrofoam was easier than the jingle bells.

We dunked our roving covered balls into hot soapy water -- it made a wet, scraggly looking wool thing but we were determined to make this work. We rolled the balls (like Playdoh) and the roving began to felt and finally we had balls! It smelled sheepy to me but JY had a sheep growing up and she said it was a "comfort smell" to her.

We were pretty happy with the results! There were some failures but we realized that they were fixable. We also realized that the more expensive roving made for better felting -- again proving, you get what you pay for.

I put mine on top of the refrigerator where it is warm and out of the reach of cats. I had my doubts that they would dry overnight but they did!

Alas, this project is a lot like real life and I realized that I need more balls.

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Ava's Town Walk

What better way to start out a new year than with a Town Walk?

We received a letter right before Christmas asking us to pick a date to come see Ava at her Town Walk. Yesterday was a bittersweet day for us -- we got to see our girl, Ava, for what will more than likely be the last time. We drove up to Morristown and followed Ava and her trainer from a distance while another Seeing Eye person walked with us and told us about training in general.


Ava walked fast! She walked at a decent pace when we had her but now she really moved fast. Her trainer spent some time with us after the Town Walk to fill us in on how her training had been. She said that one day Ava just picked up a lot of confidence and with the confidence, came speed.

She's hoping that Ava will be matched with someone in the next class which will start at the end of January. But we also learned that there are 17 people coming to class and 45 dogs waiting for a match -- we hope that Ava makes it into this class so she doesn't have to wait too long for a person of her own.

Ava's brothers, Avanti and Arctic (I think those were the names) are also in Ava's string of dogs at The Seeing Eye so she went from hanging with her dad, Harley, at our home, to playing with her brothers at The Seeing Eye. I always called Ava our big-boned girl because she was tall. Apparently one of her brothers is really big with a huge head! :-)


Ava is our fourth Seeing Eye puppy. She was so affectionate and while she was a bit on the "feisty" side, she was loving and sweet. Her white coat was beautiful.

It really is a bittersweet moment. We love our pups and want them to do well and make us proud yet we would be so ready to take them back too. We hope to hear about Ava's placement with her new person soon.