Some Striped Fun

This has to be a quickie tonight, I am tired and my baby is sleepy.

Today I sorted all my dh's soap oils into a wall-mounted cabinet in our back hallway, taking them out of boxes to free up the shelf they were in, so I can put my bins of listed yarns in those shelves. Immediately when I put the LAST (glass) bottle in, the cabinet fell off the wall (on me), cascading everything in it to the floor. Artemas came to my rescue and we got it out with no loss of limb.

Fortunately only bottle cap cracked, and that only had about an ounce of oil in it. So my house smelled like grapes. Cleaned that up... later on I found another bottle that the cap had come loose, so my house smelled like peaches.

Instead of getting to do anything yarn-y today I got to clean up the back hall. I put up brackets for shelves but can't put shelves on the brackets, even tho I have some wood, 'cause my SIL has our circular saw. I managed to find safe and relatively baby-proof homes for the 3,000 items dh had in that cabinet. Guess where? Back in the shelving unit I was going to use for my yarn bins. I want a new life.

Despite feeling lousy and going through like half a box of Kleenex, I made some killer chicken veggie noodle soup with lovely garlic in it for dinner. So then my house smelled like something good to eat, which makes me happy.

Oh and we got our fabric today for the Weird and Ugly Fabric Challenge. It is both wonderful and horrible, and I had an immediate vision of an art quilt out of it, which will make a LOT of work for me. I sometimes wish I weren't so dang creative.

I did make one really cute pair of felted, striped fingerless mitts for my HeartFeltFun shop at Etsy. These are warm and soft and just wonderful!

Ok that is as Quickie as I get, and my baby is asleep. Was it good for you too? ;D

Biserable

I hab a code. But dot really, I do'd thig, because dobody else id by fabily is gettig sick. By daughter says it is just by body shuttig dowd agaid, requirig be to rest, because I hab beed doig too buch.

Darlig Richie is off today. So I thig I will lie aroud on da bed ad play wid yard ad poidty sticks a little and sleeb. By house still stigs.

Oh by da way... I hab da page up for da Weird and Ugly Fabric Challenge 14 quilts. Go see them and bote (vote!) Polls are oped until Oct. 15. Copy and paste:
http://www.rossoaps.com/n2quilting/weird

Why Don't I Go Lie Down?

Well to quote Dustin Hoffman as Hook, "I never lie... the truth is FAR too much fun."

No, I don't think what I mean and what he means are the same thing, even though I love that quote.

I am sick. I am coughing, my head is stuffed up, my throat is sore, I feel like I have a wad of stuff in the back of my throat and like I have a low-grade fever.

So today I unwound and hand-dyed a HUGE skein of wool/angora, another of wool/nylon, a third, smaller (20 gram) of 100% cashmere and overdyed it, a fourth, 33gr of another 100% cashmere, and a fifth, 60-some grams of 100% lambswool in black. I am going to ply the cashmeres with the black (tomorrow!!) for selling.

Also worked on pages and pages of webcode for the Weird and Ugly Fabric Challenge 14, wound 2 skeins into balls to fill an order (and wrapped them, and made the freebies to go with them). And cooked dinner... which also ended up including my sister, her dh and their 5yod. They "borrowed" my 16yos Artemas today and were returning him. While they were here, I made Strawberry Yogurt muffins from scratch. When they left, Darling Richie asked me, "Why don't you go to bed?"

Well, I have to take meds again at midnight and I am too dang miserable to go to sleep for hours without them. So I will nurse the baby, check my Etsy, write my blog, sneak a little Black Raspberry Chocolate Chunk ice cream, and THEN go to bed... having had a full day, and feeling like I should curl up and die. (Though that ice cream made life a little more worthwhile, LoL.)

Who the HECK is Squanto anyway?

My latest yarn series is Squanto and The First Thanksgiving. Why would I choose that? I have some GREAT ideas for yarn series for Christmas... why not go on and get those up? Some reasons:

I LOVE Autumn! For those of us who are Olfactory learners, it is a Smell-O-Rama!

I LOVE Thanksgiving. Not only is it a uniquely American holiday, but how can you go wrong with an entire holiday devoted to eating? Break out the Maternity pants and pass the yams with marshmallows, I say!

I LOVE the idea behind Thanksgiving. Most of us aren't NEARLY thankful enough. No, let me rephrase that. Most of us don't give a minute of thought to anything we have to be thankful for. In fact I would venture to bet there are a lot of us out there who think we don't really have anything to be thankful for.

It irks me that our Major Retailers skip right from Halloween (news flash, not all of us "do" hell-oween) to that Major Moneymaker, Christmas.

Every one of my kids so far has loved the book Squanto and The First Thanksgiving.

So who was Squanto anyway? He was an Pawtuxet Indian brave (hey, I know the Politically Correct term is Native American, but as a partial Native American, I don't take offense to the term I grew up with, Indian. Besides, you expect a woman with 7 kids to be politically correct? HA!) under the leadership of Samoset. Their tribe befriended our totally discombobulated Pilgrim ancestors and kept them from starving... teaching them to hunt like snipers, plant a dead fish in with their corn and bean seeds to fertilize them, showing them how to survive the drastic climate changes of our Northern Atlantic coast. (For more info, visit http://www.nativeamericans.com/Squanto.htm )

Because of these, some of my yarns are called:

Squanto - a lovely wool in self-striping reds, oranges, and tans

Venison - earthy tan and brown wpp;cashmere/acrylic

Planting Fish with Corn and Beans - pale gray wool hand dyed with yellow and green

Cornucopia - deep rich colors!

Log Cabin - deep red, tan, brown, black in 100% rustic silk

Johnnycake - looks like homemade bread! A nice thick chunky yarn.

and Pumpkin...

Well what can I say? Pumpkin is a very fine 80% wool/20% nylon yarn in pumpkin tweed with slubs of cream, tan, and blue. The entire sweater this came from weighed a mere 204 grams... not even 7 oz. At 800 yards to a 100 gram skein, this would make great lace or the softest socks. I said to Richie (my dh, who for years went by Dick, until one of our pastors' wife couldn't bring herself to say it), "Shall I hand dye this yarn?"
" No, honey... it looks great just like that. "

And I tried to listen to him. Really. In fact most of the time I do listen to him. No REALLY! But after being up several days, poor lil' Pumpkin has no one to heart it. So today my itchy fingers, that haven't had a good coat of dye in a week, got hold of Pumpkin. I overdyed some areas a nice earthy olive green, and some areas a nice dirty brown. Now Pumpkin will be Pumpkin On The Vine, and I think it is much happier.

Speaking of pumpkin, I have a funny story. We built a scarecrow with a Cashmere sweater (don't gasp, someone partially felted it so I can't unravel it) for a head, a flannel shirt, my old jeans, and my dh's ancient boots that he wore on a 22,000 mile motorcycle trip. No really. We set him (the scarecrow, not my dh) up on a haybale with some pots of begonias and some pumpkins, out under this totally ridiculous shelter that some previous owner of our house built out near the road.

I came home from my daily walk escape a day later to find the scarecrow lying on the haybale with his "head" on a pumpkin, a newspaper as a blanket and his boots off and setting next to the haybale like he took them off for a little nap. I figured the Neighborhood Vandals got to him. But no, one of my kids said to me, "Mom, the scarecrow kept falling over so I gave him a little rest." Hmmm. My kid is the Neighborhood Vandal.

Tomorrow is busy... I have handmade double-pointed knitting needles to mail, my daily walk, three of us have quilty objects to finish for a challenge, by Wednesday. School for the kids, two more yarns to unravel/dye/put up in the shop and I have some merino batts I am nearly dying to try to spin. But finally I got a chanceto take a picture to share, of the scarecrow.