Colourful days, mucky hands and a guilty conscience!

Yup, that title pretty much sums up my Easter break.  Lol!  I've had a fantastic time, so far.  Even the delights of public transport on a holiday weekend (think sardine can) could dull my spirits.

My folks are away on holiday (gone to South Africa to visit family), so I've had very little reason to stay in at home... well... besides revision, which I really should be doing!  As a result, I've pratically lived at Sarah's house (ohhh, you bad bad bad enabler) thanks to her generosity and open house policy.  I've had lots of time to catch up with friends, have baby cuddles, play with the kids, eat good food, have a thoughtful Passover celebration and play, yarnie style!

Connor has been growing like crazy.  I can't believe he's already starting to experience the delights of eating food.  He has got the most gorgeous big grin of a smile and is so quick to laugh and charm whoever catches his eye.  He's absolutely lovely!

And Chris proving to me why I don't get people to pose - they pull faces!  Lol!

And this little toddler, who is soooooo not up to any mischief!

Morgi being typically opinionated!

Jenna polishing off the olives!  Mmmm, tasty food!  Thanks to Sarah who's feed me almost everyday this week!

Including very tasty choc chestnut torte, which the baby found too irrisistable!  Even if that meant having to lick the plates left within arms reach.  Yum!

And the joys of happy laughter filling the days with just the simple things of a hideout created by the tablecloth from dinner.

And on to adult games.  Following the amazing time I had on my hand dye workshop, I decided it was something I just had to do again, especially if I could use it as an opportunity to share the fun and excitement.  So Sarah and I got planning and set about getting ready to play.  And apparently I can't say no!  We ended up with the most ginormous pile of wool to experiement with (approx 4kgs), and a whole host of colours (I think a total of 11!).

 Piles of yarn and wool fibres

Starting the epic pre-soaking

We decided since we had so much to play around with, we would experiment with loads of different techniques.  So we:

Painted

 Steamed

 And used a pot for immersion type techniques

We also used it as an opportunity to try out some other things that I haven't attempted before with dying, namely, playsilks (clearly, not for me, but I did get to paint one which is for Emma and Connor) and "raw" wool fibres, which are going to be for me to learn how to felt.  And I also got a couple of sock blanks to play around with and hopefully eventually get some socks with some pretty cool effects - stripes and a green of varying depths of tone, hopefully should work out as light at the cuff, getting darker down the leg and onto the foot.  We'll see...

Sarah making her massive rainbow play silk.  It looks very impressive (I'll have to get a picture of it at some point!)

The playsilk I made for Emma, all wet and clinging to itself.  I was actually quite proud of it especially as I thought I had screwed it up a little when I was painting it.

(The baby didn't want to get out of the shot!! There was too much pretty wool to play with!)

Most of the haul from Day 1 of dying.  Most of this here is for Sarah or Emma.  The purple and red (bottom), massive rainbow hank (under the yellow and purple in the middle) and the earthy rainbow (near middle next to yellow and purple) are mine.  The two rainbow ones were done in a similar way, but gave very different effects!

We eventually had to do a second day of dying as there was so much yarn!  (Apparently I have issues with self control when it comes to ordering yarn online!)  The products of this day are still at Sarah's drying, but once they're all dry, I will catalogue them all and show them off in all their full glory.  I can't wait to see them in their final forms, all dry and in proper light to see what I got in the end!  And I can't wait until I get an opportunity to create things with them.  Can't wait at all!

And in terms of other non-dying events, I've spent some time with Sam, who came to dye day 1, and later had me round to a very tasty Indian diner and a bit of a games night.  Appparently I'm a dreadful gambler (in that I loose money very quickly!) and a movie buff  (well when teamed up with Sam!).  I had a bit of an upset tummy over the weekend, but it turned out to only be a 24 hour type thing, so I spent most of the day half heartedly watching tv or asleep in front of it, before bouncing back to be in the swing of it in time to dye and eat out some more.

"And the guilty conscience?" I hear you ask.  Well, that would be down to the shockingly small amount of revision that I've done.  Especially compared to Easter last year.  I'm just finding it very hard to focus and find the motivation, and there's been so many other more exciting things to do.  I know I'll get there eventually, but it's so hard.... No I don't think "hard" is the right word.  But it's just so.... blah.  Anyhows... enough blogging.