Tie Dye Party

[liralen]

Saturday was mostly a recovery and errands day.

Sunday I volunteered to help with coffee during the snack hour, while someone else took care of the Sunday School Coffee, and I was grateful.  It was a busy morning as John was in the service and Jet had a good time with the other kids, and I went to my dream class and got to talk about a few dreams. 

That afternoon was a great tie dye party at our friends' house, and wow it was fun to do and fun to just snack and do a project with Jet and John.  Jet was just all confidence, he knew what he was doing once the shirt was tied.  I tried something new and I'm not sure I like the results but I'll figure that out eventually.  John did a really cool coiled up kind of thing and had some really sharp pleats to it that worked out very nicely.  We tried to help the other families as much as we could, but mostly stayed out of the way and just told folks the minimum they needed to have it work out.

By the time we got home, that night, I was exhausted, but happy.  Then today, I went back over to help with the rinsing and the washing of all the items.  That was a *lot* of work.  Next time, maybe, we should just send everyone home with some of the synthrapol so they can wash the stuff themselves.  But the results were really worth seeing.  It was fun to rinse and untie things and go Ooooooo at how some of them turned out. 

It was quite a lot to do and fun to finish.  The link, above, is to all the pictures I took at the party and afterward.

I'm pretty tired, now, and I still have class tonight. I'm glad I did the homework last Wednesday. Seems that after a few hours in the garden, I really like just sitting and reading.

The dream was of John, Jet, myself and Jet's two-year-old brother all swimming together. We were swimming in an underground cavern, worn smooth with water and it all gleamed blue black. There was some kind of light source which I couldn't see, but it made the walls and the huge boulder in the center of the pool gleam and shine. The water was warm and perfect for swimming in. Deep and still and fresh. The brother was as good a swimming as Jet had been at 2, which is to say, for us it was obvious he wasn't going to drown, and he didn't think of the water as being a problem in any way. Both brothers were quite comfortable in the water and we were playing and splashing and discovering how cool the stone was.

After we had swum a good while, we dried off and I was holding the toddler on my hip and he had wound his hand around the strap of my swimming suit the way Jet did when he was very small. He was warm and cuddled in and I was thinking, "Gosh, he's as sweet as Jet is."

And I woke up.

I mourned the missing brother, as we never had a child after Jet, and probably never will. We enjoy our boy a lot.

This dream was dreamt the second night after I'd turned in my badge and officially quit and retired. But it's been about two years since we really seriously looked into our financed about when or how we could work out quitting. And I started making up all the lists of things I really wanted to do and get better at. I also know that, sometimes, I regret not having that second child with a kind of hungry regret that I can't fix. But sometimes I really am glad we just have the one, and that outnumbers the other immensely.

What the folks in the group gave me were things that I'd never have thought about. That in many dream, if the person isn't one that is utterly familiar, sometimes they're another aspect of myself. So maybe the toddler is the art-me, the creative-me that I've tried to nurture since I stopped working.

Another factor is that water and underground places often indicate the sub-conscious and hidden aspects of things. My knitting and art, while I do a lot of stuff on-line, hasn't really surfaced into something that I am all that known for, yet. I haven't really brought it up to the local yarn shops and I don't write down designs, yet, of my own that other people really care to know about, yet. My paintings haven't had a show, yet, though I've had folks ask, and I haven't had a show for my handknits, yet, though someone actually asked me to participate in a artist's show with her.

It's coming, but it's not yet above ground.

Wow. That's entirely applicable.

That I'm finally giving times to my creative side is very cool. And the tie dye party was a wonderful way for me to try doing some of that stuff more overtly as we really did quite a lot of work in getting people's projects to work out and helping with the aftermath. The shirts really did turn out very, very nicely.

Good things for me to think about as I get on with my life. :-)