My Buns are Burning

I know I'm a bad cook, but come on!!! This week's attempt at getting my Phat Fiber samples ready has been fraught with problems.

I should have known better when the theme was set as "The Sweet Shop" to stick with a candy inspiration and not go for baked goods. But do I listen . . . noooooo!

I decided to make "blueberry muffins and coffee" roving. Let's just say, the first half of the rovings ended up heavy on the coffee. Or, as Brendan (I just can't continue using my kids' fake names!), put it, these were well done muffins. Yup, I sucessfully interpreted a burnt muffin.

But the colors are still great--I really like it a lot and these will go out in the box anyway. But, I still needed to dye the rest of the wool and wanted to try for the lighter look that I had originally  envisioned. So I threw in the remaining 5 braids of roving into two pots and started again.

Everything was going well, and I added the final "blueberries" on the final flip of the wool, put the pot back on the stove and got busy carding in another room.

Do you know where this is going?

Here's a hint: I started to smell the problem . . .

Do you know what burning wool smells like? It's not good!

Here's what burned wool looks like:

I literally burned my blueberry muffin wool!!! How bad is that?!!

The final outcome was three braids saved, one partially ruined (it'll become some handspun) and one completely ruined.

You see, I use a low-water kettle-dyeing technique for adding spots at the end of my dyeing process. And you shouldn't walk away from it and get busy carding in another room!!! Urg.

With the three saved braids, I did get some good muffins though:

Now, with the two ruined braids, I had to come up with something else to add to the Phat Fiber box, because I wasn't going to meet my 50-sample goal.

Luckily, I had some great colors already dyed up in Finnwool and made these "Skittles" batts:

There's only 12 of them, but I'll have some full-sized batts up in the shop next week along with some full-sized Blueberry Muffin and Coffee rovings. But that means I need to dye them. Wish me luck!!!

Now you need to head over to Wonder Why Alpaca and see what everyone else is up to this week!!!