Hairy Scary!

I was in the basement when with one hand I pulled back the heavy duty black bag and with the other hand reached in... to the hairy scary!

It was wool. 

Nothing to be afraid of. silly...

But it has been sitting in my basement, freshly sheared and unprocessed. It stunk. And it scared me.

What if bugs were in there? What if a rat or mouse had made a home...

What if those things ARE in there but I just didn't reach them yet when I scooped up the top pieces and put them in a box.

My house smells like a barn.

I have wool boiling on the stove.

(No, I'm not joking)

Of COURSE there is a story...

Once upon a time, there lived a young couple who went to a Sheep Shearing Festival with the husband's parents. There, they met many nice sheep farmers, looked at prices and chatted with sellers and even purchased a small sack of New Hampshire grown Alpaca wool. You see, this young wife had a joy for doing things the old fashioned way. She intended to find a wool supplier so that she could make and sell wool dryer balls.
Little did she know, a special blessing was waiting for her. An acquaintance found the young wife at a sheep herding show and said she would like to give her some fleece from her small flock. The young wife was astounded and asked why this woman wanted to simple give her wool- they hadn't met until this point! The young wife's in-laws told their friend about the small business their daughter-in-law had started and the mission behind it. And that was that. The woman wanted to support a business that supported something beyond itself. 
The young wife walked away humbled by this woman's generosity. She journeyed for weeks trying to find a local wool processor to clean up this giant bag of wool, but alas, she came up empty handed. So one night, after the young wife tucked her sweet babe into bed, kissed her husband as he went off for a bike ride, she plopped herself down in front of her computer and found Google. All the same things came up as before. A little saddened, but having energy and new hope after finally feeling well (she had been sick for days to finally learn that she had strep throat!) she ventured fourth in her journey. She looked up how to clean wool by hand, and save the lanolin, shrugged her shoulder and thought to herself "that looks easy."
And so the story continues. This young woman has never done this before and has no one to reference to but the internet. She is hopeful and being smart about it, has started off with a small test batch.
The lesson to the story is this, when you can't find somebody to do what you need to be done, in the means in which we want it to be done, do it yourself!

... And they lived happily ever after.

Time + Money

I was recently talking to a friend who is considering cloth diapering. People were discouraging her saying that it is too time consuming, messy, you don't actually save money because of start up costs and the washing process.

WRONG

From my experience cloth diapering. Making food from scratch. Making laundry & dishwasher soap from scratch. Making home made cleaning products. My oh my, the money we have saved. It pays to put a little elbow grease and carve out some time to do it home-made. Most of the time anyway.


I was recently asked to share my "money saving tips" with another stay at home Mom. I wrote up my list. Several pages later... She told me that I should blog about it. I thought blogging was weird. People just write on the internet for the whole world to see? They share their thoughts and lives with people they don't even know? Weird. Maybe you think so to. Yet, here you are. And here I am. Writing a blog. I have been inspired by two blogs that I follow and have peeked at a few others via their suggestions.


So here it goes. Not my effort to blog in general. But to blog with purpose. I actually wrote up a list in my personal journal of "goals" I have with my blog. Here is a little looksie at what I hope to write about:
- Our family and ministry. (www.cwtrials.com)
- My passions (too many to list write now)
- How we choose to live intentionally (we are talking about MONEY here. Resources. Food. Clothing. Etc.)
- Recipes and ideas of what I make from scratch/ repurpose.
- And to tie it all up and the #1 reason why we do what we do- our love for Jesus and passion for sharing the Gospel by living it out in EVERY area of our lives. This is a daily, moment to moment effort. And we fail a lot of times. But this is about the hope we have found in Christ.

I am working on the whole posting pictures thing. I really would love to have a pic or two to go with what I write about. We recently got a Mac (awesome story behind that!) and I am still learning it. My camera is dying... and not just the battery here. We have poor internet connection. So, I'm working on it. Hang tight. I promise to put some serious effort into this rather difficult task for me.