There are a ton of websites out there to help beginning knitters and homebrewers, but almost all of them (especially for knitting) are by experts. Which is good – this is who you want advice from! But, it was daunting to keep reading about techniques as if there were easy, when to be real beginner they are not. That’s when Redbeard and I decided to start this little blog, chronicling our adventures in knitting and brewing. At the least, it helps us remember what we’ve done, and is entertaining for us to revisit. But, hopefully it will be interesting and maybe even occasionally a little helpful for others, too.

While brewing and knitting are the focus, things have sort of snowballed for us since we received a homebrew kit as a Christmas present a few years back.  The steady drumbeat of food contamination scares got us more interested in local food from raw ingredients, and from there it’s just a short step to having adventures in spinning, canning, soap-making and cooking, too. It doesn’t hurt to have relatives with sheep, alpacas, llamas and bees, either.

So, this is the journal of our successes and failures, mostly (but not exclusively) involving yeast and wool.  We’ve been surprised at how easy it is to find locally-made alternatives to all kinds of things.  Learning to make things ourselves involves some trial and error, but virtually everything we’ve tried has turned out OK after a couple tries. And even the errors are usually fun, if not, well, successful.