It was Mayhem, I tell you, Mayhem!

I LOVE it when the girls come to do crafts. This Saturday, though, they came with some prerequisites. First, no huge dinner prepared by my husband (last time he made us a double batch of his world famous Spaghetti a la Bolognese). Channyn claimed that they wanted to bring some food and were "hoping to eat light." Oh, and Denise, tired from a stressful week, didn't want to do anything big this time.

Bua ha ha ha ha.

Come to my house, my friends, and it's wildness and mayhem.

First through the door was our friend Linda, carrying a cage. Followed by two dogs. Followed by another dog. Followed by Denise and Channyn, three children (we actually have 12 children between the three of us), two spinning wheels, and several collections of in-progress projects. Let us not forget the food. In the end, they actually forgot to bring two apple pies inside. I thought that was pretty funny.

We toured the current stash, and reviewed the giant frosting buckets full of dyed fiber. Channyn set to spinning.

Channyn's project

And then Channyn cooked an amazing meal. Which was not light. Not the least bit. Then Linda also started spinning. Denise reviewed my project and came up with a solution that absolved me from learning to crochet, bless her heart. And then she got to thinking that a wee project - nothing big, mind you - just a couple of ounces of silk, space dyed in the kitchen, wouldn't hurt. The space dying took longer than expected because we had to go into the basement and garage a few times to find the officially designated "craft microwave oven", which I eventually found inside a dog kennel in the garage.

The girls were impressed with my recently purchased bakery trays. I can stack them!

Somewhere in there, Denise laid out her current project, which was bee-utiful, and the dogs concluded they wanted to sit on it. It is a testament to our maturity that we now think it a compliment when dogs want to sit on our work. Not so much when one of them peed on it, but one of Denise's children was kind and washed out the panel that was blessed.

Denise finished cleaning up all the loose ends on this. Now all that's left is sewing it together.

Here's my project. I am making a lap blanket for a man friend. But I am addicted to angora, so it is a lovely fluffy bunny lap blanket. Because I did not follow a pattern, I need a way to add on some additional strips of manly color (black) to the blanket, and thought that I would need to learn how to crochet to accomplish it. But Denise showed me how to knit a panel on from a different direction. I still have one more panel to go, but this came out amazing.

Before

The addition of a black panel really made a big difference

By the end, Denise looked like she was going to fall over. Her eyes were almost shut. She went home with a bin full of carded fiber that I made up after our last dyeing adventure - lovely blue, lovely purple, and lovely aqua. I think it is enough to keep her busy for a year. Linda actually fell asleep on the couch in between attacks by the dogs and general rabble rousing. I think she found the spinning rather stressful. I tried to comfort her by showing her a big ugly ball of my early spinning, and I assure you that Linda's spinning was a million times better than my early work, but still, it takes a while to get your mojo when it comes to spinning.

Linda's spinning is coming along exceptionally well

Here's my example for Linda of how not to spin:

It keeps me humble

We also reviewed Channyn's Tweed, which was pronounced very nice but not Tweed. NOT TWEED! Yes, it seems I created Heather. I have no idea what heather is, but there you go. So I am back to contemplating how to get Channyn her tweed. I have a theory that if I were to make a bold colored silk - say, yellow or orange - and then blended that in with the over-dyed Barbie wool in it's 70-10-10-10 mix, that the silk would end up nobby (nobby apparently is a requirement for tweed), and then I might have something. So it is back to dying and back to the drum carder.