Just a Little Artsy Fartsy Stuff

Today we baked muffins. Took muffins to my spoiled dh at work. Walked. Came home and baked a red velvet cake for my sister's birthday, baked a HUGE Chicken Pot Pie, ate dinner, took cake to my sister.

Sometime during the day Josiah helped me dye some olive colored Merino wool into a deep forest green, and I dyed some mulberry silk into a rusty mauve color. Then I carded those with some indeterminate wool in shades of purple with hot pink nepps. I did up 2, 1.5 oz. batts. The colors aren't the most usual together, but I think they will spin into an interesting yarn. This is one of the things I am sending to Japan in a goodie box.

I finished listing the handspun yarns from Japan in my My7kids Etsy shop, at least the ones I am listing in yarn form. I am keeping a couple myself and putting the donation money in for those. And a couple of them I am going to knit into an item to sell in the HeartFeltFun Boutique at Etsy and give the donation from them that way. Go take a look at these wonderful, fun, funky art yarns!

I also got an Etsy treasury today in wonderful Coffee colors... visit and click on stuff!

Oh one MORE little thing. Easter is coming soon! Here is a page with the baddest Easter eggs ever!

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...

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.)

Don't Sacrifice A Sheep In Your Kitchen

I had a yard sale Friday and started to have one Sat... Fri. night I started coming down with a cold or something (always do whenI go too long with not enough sleep) so Saturday I felt LOUSY.

We closed up shop early and decided to take a drive... they do this thing twice a year here where there is like 100 miles of 411 that is one long continuous yard sale, so we decided to go drive some of it and see what we could see.

While getting ready, one of my kids was in the shower so I put a hank of wool in a dye pot on the stove, thinking I would let it heat while she showered and in 10 min. or so turn it off and it could soak while we were gone. Got busy putting yard sale stuff away, grabbed the kids into the car and left.

When we were out 2.5 hours I remembered the wool. We were half anhour from home; nobody we could call nearby to go in and turn it off and rescue me. Got here to find out house FILLED with smoke and the WORST stench (burnt sheep, or imagine taking 3.5 oz (100 gr) of someone's haircut and putting it on the burner). The wool was CHARCOAL.

We opened all the windows, lit smelly jar candles, put fans in the doorways and stayed outside until church that night. Went to my sister's afterward, left some of my kids there (so they wouldn't have to sleep in the burnt smell) and came home. With my terrible lungs (respiratory allergies and having had pneumonia repeatedly) I don't need to breathe it either but dh wanted to come home to check things. So we shut our room off from the rest of the house with fans blowing fresh air through... I took some cough medicine. My house still REEKED of burnt sheep.

Sunday I got up at 6AM and went to the local Wally World, bought 3 cans of Febreeze and another candle. Our room was actually worse than thebody of the house! When he went to work I went back tomy sister's house for the day.

While at her house I finished my 2ndhandspun... 4 oz. of supersoft green/blue/brown/copper merino that I started out in the yard Saturday. Got it washed to set the twistand it looks like I got 97 yards but I still feel I am REALLY bad at this spindling.

Plus I unraveled and skeined 2, 100-gram components of different sweaters. However I did NOT get my webcode written for the W/U Fabric Challenge. Blek. So much for getting anything done here. Here it is Tuesday and my house still smells slightly. We slept with all the windows open @ 53 degrees for the last 3 nights too.

Next time I want to make a burnt offering, I think I will do it on the gas grill...