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Hello all you souls! Here’s a quick round up of things I’ve wanted to tell you about:

Don’t be a candle in a breeze. Be a fire in the wind.

Fools Crow by James Welch is a book I have been reading and will finish up tonight. I wish I could read it again for the first time. It’s an amazing story, I’ve never read anything like it. The style it was written in has required me to learn a new…dialect or…lexicon…I don’t know how to explain it. Maybe if you’ve read it you know what I mean? This book comes with my highest recommendations. It’s a very beautiful telling of a very human story. Please consider searching for a copy of it at your local bookseller or with independent online booksellers before you one click purchase it off of Amazon. Amazon doesn’t need any more of your money.

We revisited the Lord of the Rings movies over the past few weeks. They’re comfort films for me and I watch them multiple times throughout the year. Sometimes I play them in the background on my workbench while I satin finish earrings by hand or set stones. The message of hope is so strong in that story and it never fails to uplift me. There’s one scene in particular when Legolas is in an armory with Aragorn preparing for an impossible battle against ten thousand orcs and he says, “Forgive me, I was wrong to despair.” I love that scene. It’s simple but important. Don’t despair. There is always hope.

I popped out to the Bruneau Cowboy Christmas two weekends ago and it was so much fun to be out and about with ranchy and farmy artists and craftsmen. Everybody kept telling me they loved my hat. Ha ha!!! That actually means a lot coming from cowboys and cowgirls. The show takes over the entire (tiny) town of Bruneau and it really is a sweet time. I felt I was in good company there and ten different people recognized me and asked me if I was “that girl who makes jewelry” and then we had long, warm chats together. I had such a wonderful time meeting so many great people. My friends. My neighbors. My fellow artists. My Idahoans. Are you headed out to any art fairs this holiday season, if they haven’t all been canceled? I really have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the country this holiday season.

If you are looking to add organ meats to your diet (because they’re a remarkable super food!!!) and you’re having trouble procuring a clean, grass fed and grass finished option, or, if you want organ meats in your diet but you can’t stomach cooking them and eating them because you find the flavor off-putting, I want to tell you about Ancestral Supplements. I think they’re doing such a great job. The beef components that make their supplements are raised on grass and grass finished in New Zealand. They operate under the ancient notion that a heart feeds the heart, a liver feeds the liver, adrenals feed the adrenals, gallbladder feeds the gallbladder…etc. You might like to add their medicine to your medicine cabinet as we go into this winter. I’m working on a bottle of their adrenal capsules and I’m grateful to have it.

It’s shrub season! This is a simple yet powerful concoction to keep in the fridge this time of year and it’s easy to make. I use a 1:1:1/4 ratio — 1 cup cranberries, 1 cup apple cider vinegar, 1/4 local raw honey. I put it all in a little saucepan and boil it until the cranberries pop open and the entire mess resembles watery cranberry sauce. I turn off the flame and let it cool and then strain the berries off with a mesh strainer. I’m not a purist about clarity, I like some of the berry to remain in the shrub. I’m the same way with bone broth. I don’t mind some suspended solids. You can get as fancy as you want with it. This vitamin C rich concoction has the added medicinal benefit of cider vinegar and raw honey and can be added to herbal tea, toddies, bubbly water, or cocktails or you can use it for salad dressings or meat glazes. I’m hooked on it. Better yet, you can use really any fruit you want. I’ve made pear cardamom shrub, ginger lemon shrub, apple cranberry shrub…the sky is the limit! Have fun! I’m going to include a link to this shrub post so you can read up a little more on the topic before you embark on this delightful culinary journey.

We killed and butchered Geoffrey two days ago and are deeply thankful to add him to our chest freezer here. We rendered beautiul leaf lard last night and look forward to baking and cooking with it. Top shelf!!! We are currently processing 60 lbs of elk we set aside for breakfast sausage and to this grind we are adding Geoffrey’s back fat as game meats tend to be too lean — as we all know, fats are important for nutrient transfer! We ate pork chops last night and I have never tasted anything that can compare to the flavor of pasture raised pork. Butchering a pig was a steep learning curve, they are put together differently than elk, deer, pronghorn or anything else we have experience butchering. Robert read all he could on the topic and watched as many youtube videos as possible but in the end, we just had to dive in and figure it out. Now we know what tools we need to add to the butcher shop here as well as what works and doesn’t work. We also had a rendered liquid lard spill in the kitchen last night that was terrible. We won’t do that again. Trust me. Learn your lessons as you go!!! We are nearly finished with our harvest season here with only the tom turkeys left to kill and process. We are tired and looking forward to some rest.

Our kitchen is a kitchen that never sleeps.

I plan to list new work in my shop on December 2nd. I apologize for pushing this back a few times. I’ve had hardly any time to work this fall and whenever I make it into the studio I just want to work and not stop to photograph and build listings and ship orders…and the daylight hours are so SHORT now! I feel like I get out of bed and am racing the sunset from the moment my feet hit the floor. I’m also having some computer issues. It’s exasperating. I wish I had a personal IT master at my beck and call to deal with this stuff for me.

The last thing I want to share with you is how much I miss my family and my home province, beautiful Saskatchewan. I wonder when I’ll go home?

Have a beautiful week where you are! Go outside! Let the sun shine on your face, breathe the fresh air, move your body, eat real food, drink herbal teas, wear wool socks, and at night, sleep deeply and wake up refreshed. Don’t be afraid.

I love you all, no matter how you vote, no matter if you wear a mask or not, no matter what you do or don’t believe, even if you don’t love me back…I love you.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2020/11/23/15694/

These are big, beautiful, heavy, decadent builds! Everything about the current price of precious metals would have me NOT work this way but I do what I want and what I wanted to build this week is big, bold, everlasting ring forms. These rings are set with wonderful cuts of buttery yellow dendritic opal. This is one of my favorite stones to work with and it’s difficult to find in this hue. My pal in Boise cut these stones for me and I’m grateful to have his help when it comes to sourcing precious stones such as these. Dendritic opal reminds me of Indian summer here on the high desert when the weather is a perfect blend of cold wind and warm sun and everything turns to gold as far as the eye can see. These rings are all that, in a nutshell.

Random thinking aloud: I’ve been thinking, these past couple of weeks, about one thousand years from now when some human being discovers our farm tucked away in layers of strata and drift and makes it an archeological dig. We look at archeological sites now and we say, “Look! These people had a religion. They hunted. They grew their food. They had art and expressed themselves. They had music. They kept records.”

So, too, they’ll look at the dusty, fossilized remains of our farm and our life and they’ll say, “Look, they had hunting tools. They had farming implements. They had livestock. They had music. They had a God. They had art and craft — they worked with their hands.”

There is only time separating Robbie and I from our early ancestors and there’s something so solid feeling and human feeling about that.

What do you think an archeological dig would look like in Seattle or Los Angeles or New York City 1000 years from now? What would an archeological dig look like at your house 1000 years from now?

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2020/11/19/15680/