Working with our web person, we are putting a new shopping cart together and hope to have it up in a couple of weeks! That is very exciting for us! In the mean time, our Holiday Goodies are available from our current store. New Halloween Kits for your fall creative times! If you go to the "What's New" page of the website, you will find directions for downloading...Spiders, Pumpkins, Witches and Ghosts...

We are having a pin making extravaganza day here at Artgirlz. The good news is that we have so many orders and so few pins! So it's an all out push with sewing machines and needles and thread!

We are also dealing with our dead printer that has put a large damper on things since last week. We thought Xerox was going to approve us for their "free machine, you buy all of your ink directly from us" program. Now it seems like too many managers have to talk to their managers which is now seeming like a way to blow us off...Heading to Providence to work on that!

And finally, I worked on the defaced Obama sign and am ready to put it back up!
It is getting more interesting!!

In the midst of attending to many tasks around Artgirlz Nation, we harvested of our honey. Midge and Al did a masterful job last spring getting our very first honey. Sue and I were on an emergency vacation in St. Augustine when we received a phone call from the girlz saying that they were up to their eyeballs in honey...in the kitchen. Using foil tents over the stove, they managed to harvest a nice crop.

This time we had a lot of honey and borrowed a honey extractor from the Rhode Island Bee Keepers and spun out over 100 pounds of honey. Our little bees have been very very busy!!! We gathered glass jars, cleaned them up and got them ready for the goods.

Al, Sue and Midge brought the frames from the hives to the porch. After lifting a frame out of the hive, they used a soft brush to remove the bees. The walk from the hives to the porch put a bit more space between the bees and their goods. I then stacked them in plastic bins.


I think that Midge was the only one that avoided getting a sting or two.


We had two plastic containers filled with frames for our first round of spinning.
After combing over the tops of the frames with a fork to break up the wax, the frames were put into the extractor, two at a time.

Spinning the frames forces the honey to the sides of the container and down through the spout,

into the first strainer and into the bucket!


The very first drops!

After a second straining the honey through a finer sieve, we bottled it up.


We learned this weekend that we probably should have waited a couple of days to jar it up. The time allows the little air bubbles to rise to the top. For the most part we are all very pleased with our project. We have learned many tricks and have so much more to learn.
We are grateful to all of the local bee people that have guided us along!

and all of the while a whole gang of babies was gathering by the pond and were drying off after a rain storm!

Our Obama Sign was defaced last night....
going out to fix it up and put it back up!