When I get geared up to go for something, I'm full speed ahead until I drop from exhaustion and burn out.  It's sort of unhealthy.  This weekend, I kind of felt like I needed a break before I got to that place, and so not a tremendous amount of anything with any crafty value got accomplished.

Something I am glad that got done (or started at least) is I made my daughter start cleaning her room out.  (I've been doing some early spring cleaning around here in my quest to get the house back in order this year) Say what you will about boys, but my nearly 11 year old girl is the biggest pig of them all.  My 18 year old boy even called it "frightening" and "creepy".  Yeah, it's that bad.  Her room is very small, and we still managed to put FOUR of the large black trash bags on the curb from her mess.  And she's still not done!!  

To keep from having an aneurysm over the state of affairs in my daughters room, I picked up a catalog that came in the mail this week with a free pattern, pulled out one of the yarn balls from my stash that I'm trying to clear out (so I'm still on task and all) and started making a winter cap.  It's cute. 

I love cables and I just love the way they look.  Once I get started on a cabled pattern though, I always adore it much less after several pattern repeats……… until the next time when I forget how obnoxious cables are and get wooed by a really cool cabled design. It's a sickness.

Well, this weekend didn't hold all the steam that I had hoped it would.  I just felt tired, so not too much happened.

I painted the frame on my daughters mirror and got it hung up.  Boring.  I also went through the stack of magazines that I've had piling up since Vin was born that I never had time to read and pulled out recipes and decorating ideas that inspired me.  Also boring… but at least those couple of things got done.

The only 'plate cleaning' that I got done was minuscule at best,  but it was something at least.  

A few months back, I took my first foray into needle felting, and started working on a dragonfly.  It became larger and thicker than I had intended, but at least I'm learning and getting my feet wet, right?

This is where it was when I picked it back up again on Saturday: (I apologize for the crappy lighting.  I know it stinks!)

I fully intended to finish the whole thing, but alas, it was not to be.  I added veining to the wings.  Still no body yet.  I just couldn't get inspired enough to dig out the black alpaca fiber that I plan to use for that part.  It's coming along though!

I did get one thing accomplished that I think is worthwhile, and I hope that you will too!  I've marked down all of the items in the Warm & Wearable section of the store to 50%!  There's a few other odds and ends marked down too, so have at it!

I just really want to kind of get out of that thing, at least to such a degree as I'm in right now, and get back to more supplies and items for spinners and knitters.  Getting these things sold will help make room (and capital!) for more of the stock that I really want to have.  

:::Sigh::: Recovering from baby land has taken me a whoooooollllle lot longer than I expected.  I'm on the right path, but it's an upward struggle just about every day.  

Help me out and start stocking up for next winter / Christmas's gifts, k??    Click any of the store links on the page to get there, or just go here: 

Fiber Fancies Fiber & More Store!

Well, it's that time of year so a lot of my time this weekend got all tied up in doing TAXES.  Yuck.  I spent a good part of both days working on it, and I'm not even nearly there yet.  I was doing amendments to 2 previous years, so 2007 hasn't even been touched yet!  That will most likely steal next weekend from me.

In spite of Uncle Fed, I managed to finish up using all of that grey and blue yarn that I wanted cleared out of the closet!  Yay!  I didn't measure the 'rug' before putting it in the washer to felt and full, so I don't know the measurements.  What I do know is that it didn't quite work out.

It's probably largely my own fault.  I dumped the detergent in the washing machine along with the 'rug' knowing that someone had just gotten out of the shower a very short while before.  I started filling it, and felt the water not being hot enough, and kind of knew it probably wasn't going to work, but I was so far in at that point that I just decided to go ahead and hope for the best.  Part of my desperation came from knowing that 15 minutes being the only time I was going to get ALL weekend to attempt to get this thing felted, and I wanted it done, once and for all.

Well, it fulled up nicely, but felt it did not.  I'm utterly disappointed with the whole thing, but my kids fell in love with the hideous beast, so whatever.  The Type-A perfectionist part of me still whispers that I may attempt it again next weekend, although I'm technically calling it done.  I'm still not sure it will work though because as it went through the agitation cycle, it lost A LOT of fiber debris.  I think the staple length of the fibers in the yarn may even be too short to do more than full. 

I don't know, but I hate to put it away and call it done when it didn't quite turn out.  Yep, I think I'm probably going to do it.  I'd rather it fall completely to bits in the wash, than to set it aside and call it a lap blanket, and forever know that I didn't at least try again to get it done right.

Here's the pics of it finished, and a couple of close ups of the fluff factor after it was fulled:

If you look at the close up pics in the previous posts on this project, you can see that what it did undergo in the washer, REALLY changed the texture a lot.  I never, ever expected to get such soft fluffy yarn out of that twine I was knitting with!!  It must have had a tremendous amount of sizing on it or something.