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Merit Badge Awardees (click for latest awards)
My featured Merit Badge Awardee of the Week is … Mary Jo Boyd!!!
Mary Jo Boyd (Quiltsister413, #5559) has received a certificate of achievement in Stitching & Crafting for earning an Expert Level Knitting Merit Badge!
“While in Lincoln, NE, for a business conference, my friend and I stopped in to the local yarn store and found an adorable shawl pattern that we both had to make. We purchased two skeins of Crazy yarn and got to work right away in our hotel room. It took me about a month, but I finished it.
I think it went well. The pattern was by far the most challenging one I have tried, but I enjoyed knitting a little each night and watching it grow. I got to use circular needles for the first time and found I really loved them. The edge called for an I-cord bind off, which was completely new to me. YouTube videos are so helpful in these situations! I found several videos to help me through and it turned out very nice.
I taught four ladies how to knit at our last Faithful Farm Girl meeting. Each of the ladies brought size 7 knitting needles and some practice yarn and I taught them how to tie a slip knot, do a long tail cast on, how to knit and how to purl. I also provided them with two patterns for knitting dishcloths and they are off and running … or is that knitting.
The fifth person I taught to knit is actually my friend and knitting teacher. I actually got to teach her two techniques I had learned that she didn’t know. How cool is that! I taught her the long tail cast on method and also a new way to add a new color or skein in the middle of your project. She now uses both new techniques and loves them!”
Have you seen these spooktacular specters billowing around the Internet?
Photo courtesy of Shadow Manor
Photo courtesy of Wacky Archives
Oh, the chills, the thrills!
I love the “Wandering Woman” crafted by blogger Lori Nelson of Shabulous Creations:
Photo by Lori Nelson via Shabulous Creations
Crafted of good ol’ chicken wire (poultry netting), these ghostly figures and free-floating dresses are perfect decorations for frightening farmgirl fun on Halloween. Just imagine hopping on a hayride or wandering through a pumpkin patch at dusk …
Photo by Visitor7 via Wikimedia Commons
When suddenly you spy strange, ethereal figures drifting through a darkening field …
Plowing at Dusk by Leon Bonvin, 1865, via Wikimedia Commons
Gives you the shivers, doesn’t it?
Whether you have enough acreage to host a hayride or are nestled on a tiny townstead frequented by trick-or-treaters, your visitors would be delighted to find fabulous femmes fatales twining though the twilit shadows on Halloween night. And, you have just enough time to rig up a few ghostly gals using the basic technique in this tutorial from P. Allen Smith (leave out the rebar and pumpkin heads for a simpler project):
While out in the garden snapping photos last week, our farm photographer, Karina, was startled by a bee.
But not just any bee …
Not the industrious honeybee, who’s busy gathering pollen for the long winter ahead …
Not the giant, fuzzy bumblebee who buzzed past her ear, sounding very much like a very large, very close remote-control helicopter …
Yes, this bee had the signature yellow-and-black stripes …
but his upper body was bright, shiny GREEN!
What the heck? Were her eyes playing tricks on her? Was Karina’s camera lens hooked up remotely to Photoshop? She quickly snapped a couple of photos, then buzzed on over to her computer to find out more about this shiny, green bee.
Turns out, our visitor was something called a Metallic Green Bee (Agapostemon). They’re commonly called “sweat bees” because they resemble (and are kin to) other species of bees that are attracted to human sweat. But don’t worry, these little beauties are too refined to like your stinky sweat. There are about 40 species of Metallic Green Bees in both North and South America. And our guy was a guy—the females are usually metallic green all over, while the males have a yellow-and-black striped abdomen, like our guy did. There are two generations of Metallic Green Bees a year: one in the summer, which is almost all females, and one in the fall, which includes both females and males.
Photo by Dan Mullen via Flickr
These bees are ground-nesting, living alone instead of in a hive, although many can live in close proximity. Sometimes, a couple of dozen females share one entrance, but each one then builds its own little nest off the main corridor—a kind of Miss Lavinia’s Lodgings for Ladies, if you will. In this case, one of the ladies (Miss Lavinia?) guards the entrance and you can see her little green head sticking up slightly above the hole. Don’t mess with Miss Lavinia’s girls!
Keep an eye out for these gorgeous green buzzers … and their bright-blue cousins, Augochloropsis sumptuosa … simply sumptuous!
Photo by Bob Peterson via Wikimedia Commons
In a laboratory deep in the heart of Fillmore, California, a mad scientist named Tony Dighera gave a face to a monster pumpkin … literally.
Photo by Tony Dighera
Tony’s monstrous pumpkins are organic, but that’s not the reason they’ll fetch up to $125 apiece. That’s because these pumpkins aren’t carved, they’re grown into little likenesses of their muse, Mr. Frankenstein himself. Tony came up with the idea to create plastic molds that fit around the pumpkin plant when the fruit’s still small.
Photo by Tony Dighera
But his vision wasn’t … small, that is. He grew over 5,500 pumpkins in his first season on his 40-acre organic farm near L.A. For over 30 years, Tony worked as a tractor operator for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. But his real love was farming, and in 2003, he bought his small farm and struggled to make ends meet as an organic farmer. Then, inspired by a photo of a square watermelon grown in Japan, Tony got the idea to grow his vegetables in shapes, starting with square and heart-shaped watermelons, then imprinting logos onto melons for Whole Foods, then trying his hand at creating a monster. And that’s translating into a monster business … Tony sold his entire crop to suppliers for $75 apiece. Let’s see, roughly 5,000 x $75. Monster math, I mean, monster mash.
Buy props used in MaryJane’s books and magazine!
5% of profits will benefit www.firstbook.org, a non-profit that provides new books to children from low-income families throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Here’s how:
MaryJane will post a photo and a description of a prop and its cost along with a few details as to its condition here: https://shop.maryjanesfarm.org/MaryJanesCurations. It’s a playful way to be the new owner of a little bit of farm herstory.
