Indigo Blues and Mama's Wearing Velvet!

I know it is 'talk like a pirate day' but I'm sparing you the experience because I make a crappy pirate in both speakin' and piratin'. I'm really more the 'woman who slaps slimy pirate' (read here, gullible wench) person. But, I do love me some pirates.....nough said.

WWWWWeeeee! I am ecstatic with how the indigo yarns came out this time. On the bottom, there are three lace skeins. I dipped them in the bath twice but did not fully submerge them because I wanted them to get a variegated absorption of color as they sank into the yellow-green abyss that magically turns them into this awesome blue bonanza. Oh, if only I didn't have to sell yarn to feed my family. The skeins on the top left are all my Cotswold singles (handspun). Always, you can count on Cotswold to please you when it comes to color. I'm totally lusting after these as well. Things 1 and 2 each spun a strand of LACEWEIGHT (where did they come from?) and we plied them together and dunked them in the first of summer's goldenrod batch. You really do see a huge difference in color if you use the first of the summer flowers. The later goldenrod is kinda lazy and gives you a greenish yellow. That first few weeks, though, you get an electric yellow! We threw the yellow skeins (one is the Things handspun, one is silk handspun and the really green one on the bottom is superwash sock yarn)into the indigo 'magic' solution just once to get a stunning olive-greeny-yellow-happiness-underneath thing. It's hard to explain, even harder to photograph - but I like it much.

All this spinning and getting ready for a show has been kinda boring, eh? I mean, in its own right, spinning is never boring - but reading about my spinning may lose its appeal after a while, no? Me too. So, whilst grocery shopping last week I decided that some fabric would be required as a back-drop (work, work, work) in the booth. What I found was destiny - a cosmic message that practically ripped me out of boring working girl mindset and said, what you need is a little rolling in some Velvet. I don't know why the blue crushed velvet was on clearance while all the other colors were twice their price. I didn't ask questions, just threw the bolt on the table and tried hard not to start twitching. Hubster appeared on the scene and after ascertaining that we would not have to have a 5 day family fast to afford the stuff he began to even LOOK like he was going to sing at me. This is a sore point at the moment as my dear Thing 1 has put her amateur singing practice and her 14 yr. old, 'things I will do while mother is talking to me so I can ignore her' together in one fine package of auditory torture! Don't. Sing. At. Me! And also, the blue velvet thing just infuriates me. I've always loved velvet. And, my color of choice tends to always be blue. Why must I always hear that song in my head, or worse, coming out of someone else's. Oh, go ahead and do it, then....she wore.....blueeeeee-velvet. Urgh, hand me a cutlass I think I've found the pirate within! I made a dress. A very hard dress with many pattern pieces and the pic of it so royally sucked that I'm only posting a bit of the fabric so you'll know I'm not lying. I don't really think ya'll think I'm a liar. I just say that because I can't think of any other way to express my dementia because someone is standing behind me right now singing! Send help!

I love the curiosity of the the teen mind. Thing 1 had a rough go of the weekend while ragweed makes her final and most brutal triumph. I remember that this particular phase of my life was a little harder. The colds were harder to kick. The exhaustion, coupled with a feverish desire to never sleep because there is so much living/reading/singing to do seemed a brutal paradox. So, I've been doing what all annoying and clueless moms do when their things aren't feeling well. I've followed her around offering to massage her neck when she had a headache, making her cups of tea, comforting her in any way I can. If I did all this thinking she would be nice to me forever than I am clearly stupid. She did give many hugs of thanks once she was feeling better and that is a grand reward in itself. Course, because I am a mom, an old person, and a fool, she's right back into the 'help mom get a clue' place again. Also, I have this affliction of love for blue, as you know. So, Ms. Critique tells me that I wear, dye and spin ALOT OF BLUE AND GREEN. And, let's face it - if I had my way about it the whole knitterly world would love blue and green just as fervently as I but this just isn't happening. Reluctantly, I have forced myself over the years to work with THE OTHER colors and I'm glad for it - because I've just found more colors to love (and more ways to sneak blue and green into a hand-dyed colorway for yarns, heh!) I was taking pics of the blue stuff and pulled out her little dolls that she made last summer. Are they wearing pink? orange? yellow? Non, it is blue and green. Aha! The gene pool grows secretly stronger! The whole world will soon be M-I-N-E!

This little treasure of fabric is one I bought a couple of years ago and have been 'saving' for a day when I don't have to go through a significant amount of body-hate just to use a great fabric to make myself something. It is an old, old, creep of a problem that I'm, frankly, ready to be free of. So, with it's little sparkly gemstones rich red and gold colors, and bee-utiful print - what will I make with it? That's a dilemma for next week, after I've labelled the rest of the yarns, packed up all the totes, made sure to lay out clothes for everyone for the weekend, done more grocery shopping (if there's a lordnsaver in the world that spruce green velvet will be on clearance then, too) and knit on my new 'therapy sock'. I hate to tease without pics of it but its just another crazy idea I had. See, I'd like to say I'm all 'pro' with my sock yarn dyeing - and sometimes I am. I get a wild hair to make a self-striping yarn here and there and generally have an idea of a 'look' I'm going for. But, MOST of the time, I go into a sort of 'state' over the dye pots and let my colors work for me. I can't keep a skein of everything but I am learning to repeat my successes and clearly document my failures so they don't happen again. My last batch of skeins had an odd number of yards and I hate that because I suck at math and I don't see that 12 yards is worth all that brain crunching. So, I stole 12 yards (really, I didn't steal it. I wish I could but I would just end up confessing it anyway so I just changed the yardage on my labels to accurately depict the # of yards - do you think maybe I've got a problem?) Now, I'm making socks out of the last 10 or so sock yarns I've dyed - mixed in with some crazy colors and ends of other batches I dyed in large skeins and re-skeined (skinning off the ends for meself). It's sure to be real ugly or real interesting. I'm doing it for Winky - who seems tragically forgotten in all the HP movies. Winky socks. I'll be back with them on Monday. Okay, that's a genuine lie. I'll be drooling on myself, struggling the educate, feed, and entertain the things after a very long weekend on Monday. Let's say Tuesday which means I'll probably make it by Wednesday or Thursday. It's all about understanding your own warped mind. Mine, apparently, needs to be tricked to get anywhere on time or remotely close to it. If you're at the fair, come see us in the Ag section just across the road from the Wednesday Spinner's tent!