Lookie what I got on Etsy!! Custom made for ME, from Sutara's etsy shop. She has such great things, I had a hard time not buying more, but I'll be back. She can do custom banners in any colors, with any saying, and VERY reasonably. I am so excited about my beautiful new banner!

Congratuations, Daytoncat! You are the One World, One Heart winner of a scarf of your choice from my etsy store! I've sent you an email......

Feeling rather swanky becuase I put a little etsy mini thing on my sidebar (scroll down).

And because I listed these gorgeous new naturally dyed silk mawatas (spinning hankies) on my etsy store. They are dyed with garden huckleberries that Jill gave me. Isn't she nice?

I'm joining in this wonderful worldwide blogging giveaway event - One World, One Heart! What a fantastic idea. This is the 3rd year for this fun event - basically it's a fantastic way to meet new folks from around the world, check out their blogs and see what cool/fun/creative/crafty things they are up to, and maybe win free stuff!


I am offering a FREE SCARF OF YOUR CHOICE from my etsy store. I use natural dyes, and have an absolute blast creating gorgeous 100% silk scarves such as this:


or this:
If you win, you get to choose ANY SCARF YOU WANT. Cool, huh?

To win you must:

1. Leave a comment on my blog, on THIS POST, by February 11th.
2. Leave your EMAIL ADDRESS so that I have a way to contact you if you win!

The winner will be announced Feb. 12th.

Please enjoy reading my blog and maybe even check out my etsy store. (I sell naturally dyed silk scarves and hankies, mohair locks, furoshiki and handspun yarns). Let me know what your favorite scarf is in the comments, if you like! :)

If you are interested in natural dyeing, here is a free article I wrote on rust-dyeing for Hobby Farms Magazine - enjoy!

Good luck, and I cant wait to hear from all you One World One Heart blog participants! For all of you visiting my blog for the first time -my name is Maggie and I also co-own an herb shop called Prairieland Herbs. I love to spin, knit, ready, play with herbs, cook, do yoga and martial arts, and have a whole load of cats and dogs.

I've been busy listing some naturally dyed silk shawls on my etsy store. It's getting cool, and time to break out the lovely warm silks and shawls!

I've also started listing some furoshiki - I have quite a few, 12 or 15, which I will be listing (again, in my etsy store) over the next week or two. They are mostly cotton, but some are silk. (the one shown above is rust-dyed cotton). I'm quite in love with the art of furoshiki and have been buying fabric for dyeing and sewing into assorted sizes of furoshiki.

Here is one of our cotton squares wrapped around a book.


And another one wrapped around a wine bottle. I just think they're so elegant, functional, and, best of all, totally reusable and recyclable. SO cool. Visit furoshiki.com to learn more, and get great wrapping information.

Thanks to John for both is fantastic photography skills (he took all those pictures) and his mad furoshiki skills!!!

In other, unrelated news: I created a really interesting cake recipe last night. I hacked the "Beet Bundt Cake" recipe from allrecipes.com, to suit my tastes, and what I had on hand. Here's what I did:

• 1 cup sour cream
  
• 1 1/2 cups turbinado sugar
  
• 3 eggs
• 4 (1 ounce) squares semisweet chocolate
• 2 cups pureed cooked beets
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 4 tbsp. cocoa powder
• 2 tbsp. olive oil

Bake beets; puree them. Melt chocolate and oil together over low heat; add eggs, sour cream, sugar, vanilla, olive oil, cocoa powder. Blend well, and add other dry ingredients. Pour into greased bundt pan and bake at 350 for about 45 minutes, or until done. Cool. Serve with sweetened raspberry puree, OR, raspberry jam thinned with brandy or congnac.

In my opinion, the raspberry (esp. the jam/booze mix) REALLY tie the cake together. It is really quite a heady mixture of tastes. I think it would be divine with black coffee or espresso, after dinner.

I'm busy listing new scarves on my etsy site! This one (above) was potdyed with madder root.

this one was dyed with rust....and this one was compost-dyed with i-dont-even-remember-what!

I have a few more scarves to list, then I will start listing some naturally dyed shawls - I'm REALLy excited to list those, as they are new, and I really love them. (I love shawls and had a really, really hard time not keeping them all for my very own).

Posted this compost-dyed scarf on etsy today! A few more will be coming soon.

In other news- WELL. it's finally harvest-time here. Last summer, I filled our freezer (a big upright one) with all manner of garden goodies: tomatoes, carrots, peppers, peaches, raspberries, corn. We ate from it all winter long - it was fantastic. Hearty winter soups, cobblers, berries for breakfast. This summer the weather was so horrid... I was beginning to wonder if I'd have anything to freezer. Well this past week, all hell broke loose (so to speak) in the garden area. All of a sudden I have LOADS of fruit to deal with - a bumper crop of crabapples, regular apples, wild plums, elderberries, and wild grapes....with pears and peaches still to ripen. A friend of mine has been bringing me tomatoes, 20+ lbs at a time, and I've been making pizza sauce, and freezing tomatoes. Today, I've got jam on the stove, huge pans of roasted root veggies in the stove (garlic, potatoes, carrots, turnips and beets generously seasoned with rosemary and sage...) to be frozen for winter soups. 2 huge bags of basil to turn into pesto, and another 20 lbs of tomatoes to be made into soup or sauce.

It's alot of work, but, frankly, I'm relieved. I'll get to eat local/organic/wildcrafted produce all winter long. Now that I'm used to it, it's really the only way to live.

I wrote this free, online-tutorial about rust-dyeing for Hobby Farm Home Magazine (COOL magazine!) ages ago, and completely forgot about it until the other day. So....enjoy the link everyone, and go find some rusty stuff to dye!

Oh, and if you want to just buy some rust-dyed stuff? Visit my etsy site. :) I'm gonna try to get some rust-dyed cottons (for quilting or sewing) on there soon....

John took these GOREGOUS photos of our scarves. Now i guess I better get them up for sale on Etsy, huh??

these are some compost-dyed silk scarves, dyed with natural materials. the top one was dyed with elderberry....im not sure about the bottom one!

Here is a picture of the hot pink solar-dyed roving! It is up for sale on etsy now.