You Found WHAT!? WHERE!?

As you can see there's been another small lapse in my blog posts.  For a good cause I may add.  It all started when my husband and I were having one of those conversations that turned into a debate and the horrible "C" word was thrown out at me.  Yep ladies(and gents in fairness), you guessed it...the word "CLEAN" (what else were you thinking?).  Our house was starting to look like something off of hoarders.  Not that we hoard anything, or meanfully try to.  When you have small tots, you're playing with them and ooops, someone found a pair of scissors or a fresh cup of coffee. They get placed up out of reach and playtime is resumed.  Well, after months of it clutter starts to stack up in high places.  For years I had been nagging my husband about a bookshelf (well a wall of bookshelves).  A little over a year ago we finally got them and I proudly placed my books on them.  Until this past weekend if someone were to stop by I had wished I had curtains over my bookshelves so they would become hidden from view.  They were a catch all for everything.  Not to mention I have been pestering my 11 year old son, Zeke, to clean his room for what seems like two years now and mine looked like a tornado ran through it.  I had lost about 60 lbs since before I was even pregnant from my second son so there were piles of clothes that were too big.  There were piles of maternity clothes that go from sister to sister when she's expecting.  There were clothes my kids had outgrown or hand me downs they had not grown into yet.  My husband had a plethora of band t-shirts that he felt were too juvenile at his age but he didn't want to part with.  All of that, and then some got done this weekend.  No blood was lost, no lives taken.  Everything was taken back down to being simple and tasteful.  I have an eclectic taste and have all kinds of things placed everywhere so it was hard parting with a lot of furniture and nick knacks.  Thankfully, the new found functionality takes all.

Back:  Jacobs wool before cleaning
Front: Jacobs wool after cleaning

I'm just glad there weren't too many surprises.  Kids love to hide things in odd places.  It took us all weekend to find our Wii remote that Danny (my 18 month old) lovingly shoved in his play kitchen stove.  We found candy from who knows which child shoved between books.  Medical ID bracelets from when we had to take Danny to the ER from a high fever (he was actually seizuring) that we couldn't bring down.  We even found some tablets used for high school and college homework.  I think my favorite find of all was this hippy single shoulder bag I had from when I was in high school.  Not so much the bag but inside I found a small bag of puppy food from when our pit, Sable, was a puppy.  I used to bring her to work with me.  In there was also one of those fine toothed pet combs that had never been used because her hair was so short.  I had been trying to find something to help me clean out vegetable matter out of raw wool in order to spin and couldn't find anything fine toothed enough.  So although this may seem silly to you, it was a treasure to me!  I still have about two pounds of Jacobs raw wool wrapped tightly in a garbage bag stashed inside one of those wooden porch bench/toy box deals.  It was the scariest thing ever when I got it in the mail.  It didn't look anything like the picture.  It was matted with urine and feces and clumped together.  There were whole dead bug carcasses and carcasses of bug butts, like cockroaches.  I don't know much about cockroaches as I've never seen a real one but I guess the eggs are carried in the rear and the rear breaks off with the eggs in it or something to that effect.  Well, you get the idea.  Just as I was about ready to dump it out so I could go through it better a large, giant, millipede crawled to the top to meet me.  So, that's why it's still sitting outside since October.  I did get enough courage to clean a little of it to see if it's even worth cleaning. As you can see from the pictures it did clean up very nicely.  I think I may keep it around to practice some techniques with and maybe make some felted mats for the doggie out of.  This was my first and only run in with raw wool and I have no clue if that is the norm.  The raw alpaca I got from my aunt seemed like it could have been eaten off of compared to this stuff.  Alas, alpaca doesn't have the lanolin in it either so I imagine raw wool in that shape is normal.

See, I got this far!

I guess I should be moving on to other things now.  I have my shop scheduled to have a showcase promotion this weekend and planned to have a lot of different things ready by then which probably won't be happening.  I've been caught up lately at working on my knitting cable technique.  Not that I can't cable knit, but try it with an 18 month old running around and every time you get up and leave it lay he decides he needs to "help out".  So I guess you can say it's more of a "retrain myself to get through a cable knitted project and not let the kids get to it" state of mind.