Plates in the Air

Ever feel like one of those performers with all those spinning plates in the air? Call me old... they used to feature acts like that on the Ed Sullivan show. Of course I was a TINY baby at the time. (You X generation people, go look him up on YouTube, LoL). The performer would flit from stick to stick, rubbing them furiously between his hands to keep the balanced plate on top of the stick from slowing down and falling. That is what I felt like yesterday.

I went from task to task, and at 5PM I said to Diantha, I wanted to get yarn and blocks and my room done today, and still haven't gotten any of those 3 things done. ~~sigh~~ It went kind of like this:

Make a batch of muffins, While the muffins are baking, make another batch of muffins. While they bake, go get dressed. While the kids eat breakfast, go take my walk. Put in a load of diapers to wash. while the diapers are washing, process the alpaca fiber that Marion sent me. While the fiber is soaking the 2nd time, go get lye and put down the tub drain so the muck off the fur the first time will drain. While the Alpaca fiber is draining, go sit on the couch and help Artemas and Diantha with school. (Yes people, we homeschoolers sometimes even do school on SUNDAY! Especially if people weren't HOME for a couple days during the week!) While I am helping them with school, direct Veronica to clean up the living room floor.

Go put diapers in dryer. Go check on Alpaca fur. Separate some of the mulberry silk and dye it. This proved to be about a 45 minute task, as that mulberry silk is STRONG! In order to separate it at staple lengths, I had to separate fiber bundles down to almost individual fibers. While I am separating silk to dye, direct Josiah to load the dishwasher and clean the sinks. While the mulberry silk is soaking, unravel a sweater and skein the yarn. This one is a vegan cotton/acrylic/metallic blend called Mordor, from the Lord of the Rings series, and is now available in my my7kids shop at Etsy. Drain the silk. Put the alpaca in the dye. Put the silk outside on the railing (where it froze, LoL). Hang the bags of alpaca over the kitchen sink. Take pics of silk, fur, and yarn.

Get everybody dressed. Because I am a brave woman, I took all 6 kids still at home out to dinner without my dh. We met Des and Tony and their babies and went to (oh dear, shall I say it?) Hooters for some buffalo chicken. We got home at 9 o'clock.

I still hadn't made my last 2 Morelli blocks! So I sat down and sewed, and Diantha squared up pieces for me. So here we have Joseph's Dream (left) and Ball and Chain. The Ball and Chain block should have been done to finish 9" square, that way all the little sub-components would have finished to 3" square and each little individual piece would have been 1". But NO! I needed a 12" finished square block. Glutton for punishment that I am, that means that each piece of the block had to be cut to 1 1/3" plus a 1/2" seam allowance... HSTs cut 1 1/3" plus an inch. Do you have a ruler with 1/3" measurements? I don't! So each piece had to be cut 1 7/8" plus a hair, and so on. It's a wonder this block fit together at all. It won't win any prizes, but it isn't BAD.

While I sewed, I made the kids get ready for bed and have a nighttime snack. How in the WORLD can they want a night-time snack when we just got home from eating? By the time I was done with the blocks and took the pics and nursed B to sleep, I was too dang tired to write my blog. I never did get around to cleaning my room, which is starting to resemble a very disorganized Thrift Shop.

But I am told that today we must go out of town, adventuring. So the room will be scary another day. Gotta go, I see a plate starting to wobble...