Snail Spirals

More carding, carding, carding! I now have a 52-inch table full of semi-carded batts for my sweater.



All the accent colors are now carded the first time, and are so pretty. The closest two batts aren't an accent, they're the odd green batch that didn't make the cut to be a main color (they will blend into the final mix just fine). This spread represents about half of the fleece; the second half consists of 4 batches of green and 3 batches of brown-green, which will be the main colors of the yarn.

I've been really enjoying the nightly session of picking at least one ~100g batch of fleece then carding it into a rough batt. It takes longer to pick a batch than it does to card it up, but I don't find it irksome. I did four batches over the past two days, assisted by Emma, who thinks picking wool is great fun.



She does a pretty good job, too! We had a little contest last night, to see whose lap cloth collected the most VM and second cuts. I'm not sure who won, but we got a lot of wool picked!



And speaking of Emma, she gave me a bit of a silly fright on Saturday night. I normally peek in on her on my way to bed, just to make sure she's covered and give her one more kiss. When I went in to check her on Saturday, she wasn't in her bed. This is not an unusual occurrance, as she frequently sneaks over to our big bed, given the chance. So I went into my room to transfer her back to her own bed. She wasn't in the big bed. Hmm. Well, she sometimes decides to sleep in the recliner in her room, maybe I just didn't notice her when I checked the bed before. I went back to Emma's room, but she wasn't in the recliner.

OK, now I'm edging toward panic. Where is my child? I checked both beds again, lifting up the covers completely to check all lumps. I checked her recliner again, I checked behind her recliner, I checked both recliners in the living room, and the couch. I don't know how she could have gone to sleep in the living room without me noticing, since I was watching TV there, but I checked anyway. I looked under her bed. I looked under my bed. I looked on the futon in the loom room, and under the futon. I looked in Emma's closet. I looked in my closet. I looked in the bathtub, and under the dining room table.

No Emma.

I am now slightly beyond "edging" toward panic. It's about midnight. Every light in the house is on. I have been awake in the living room all evening, and am pretty sure I haven't heard either outside door open. Could she have climbed out through a window? Could someone have climbed IN her window? (That made me sick to my stomach when I thought it.) I was walking (quickly) down the hallway to wake up Shaun so we could call out the National Guard and alert the Marines, when I saw this at the end of the hallway, between my bedroom and the loom room, and literally did a double-take:



See that blue and yellow lump at the bottom? That's Emma, in her yellow jammies and blue fleece sleeping bag, curled up perfectly peacefully in the linen closet.

Oh. Well, OK then. Silly me, why didn't I think that she would be sleeping in the linen closet? How obvious.

The funny(-ish) thing is that I nearly closed the closet door when I first didn't find her in her bed and went to look in mine, but was focussed on finding her and just walked past. She wasn't immediately visible except from halfway down the hall because she was close to the back of the closet with her back to the outside.

It's a good thing I didn't close that door. I doubt she would have woken up since she was completely inside the closet and wouldn't have been hit by the door, and was completely, deeply asleep. I don't know that we would have found her without a lot of commotion in the house to wake her up and start banging on the door to be let out.

My heart rate did eventually go back to normal.