Whatcha been up to?

Hmm, I've been up to a variety of stuff lately - and as you can tell by the vast amount of time since my last post - none of which has been blogged. I think I have to admit to myself that I'm a sporadic blogger. (Ooh, I'm going to name my next band "Sporadic Blogger"!)

Lots of October was taken up with our annual Skeleton Theatre project. My husband and some of his friends build animatronic skeletons which perform on Halloween and the night following. This year was "Pirates of the Scary Beings" with 4 skeletons, a parrot, a huge talking skull and 2 pirate ships in our front yard. Chris wrote an original script, hired some of his actor friends to do the voices and once the electrics dried out from a Seattle deluge, we had quite a show! Along with my cooking duties, this year I was costume mistress and tooth creator.

Two of the pirates are of the dandy variety, so we got some coats from the thrift store and I fancified them with lots of gold trim and hot melt glue (Crafting note: do not listen to David Sedaris while working with hot melt glue - burned fingertips are the inevitable result of this ill-fated mixture!). Here's the finished result:

That's Captains Black and Blue. They are the evil pirates. To see a little behind the scenes, check out this lovely write-up from my favorite local news blog.

Once Skeleton Theatre finished up, I played around with my new loom! My sister scored an Easy Weaver loom at a thrift store and gave it to me for an early birthday present. Thanks, Cam! It took a little time, 3 books from the library and some googling, but I finally managed to weave a fairly presentable scarf!

I started with this poorly dyed (and photographed) roving I did in the crock pot:

Spun it into this sloppy yarn:


Had a blast weaving it on my Easy Weaver:



And ended up with this scarf:


I'm amazed. Colors that looked so wan and icky as roving and yarn blend so well once woven. I'm very pleased with my scarf and itching to warp my loom again.