Wedding Ring Saga

Wednesday of last week (maybe Thursday...hmmm) Ben and I decided to go to Rock island with Daniel and Nathan to do some swimming and jumping off really tall rocks.

We were initially concerned about the weather because it was raining EVERYWHERE, but apparently not at Rock Island. We got there and it was glorious out! The water was cold, but we braved it and swam around for a while. We jumped off some really tall rocks. I reckon it's about 20 to 30 feet up. Don't worry. The water was pretty deep. At the time we figured somewhere around 9-10 feet deep.

We had all jumped off the rocks once and were about to jump for the second time. Ben noticed that I was still wearing my wedding rings and said I should probably do something to make sure I didn't lose them. He was also wearing his. We decided to put them on my watchband for safe keeping. My watch is water resistant so I didn't bother to take it off. (It's one of those sports watches with the velcro band) I put the watch back on and jumped in. I swam to get out of the way of the guys who were about to jump off after me.

When I had gotten to the rocks on the edge I was checking my arms for bruises (I hit the water pretty hard!) and I noticed that my watch (along with ALL our rings) was no longer on my wrist!! I screamed up to Ben and pointed to my wrist indicating that I had lost our rings!! :(

I....lost it. (as in started crying) I was really upset, for obvious reasons. Ben and Daniel started diving for the watch hoping to find it, but they were diving blind. No goggles or anything. As I said, we guessed it was about 10ish feet deep.

We ended up not finding them and went home. I didn't sleep that night at all. I kept thinking about our rings and praying that they would still be there by some miracle.

I went back again with Ben's dad and Byron and Molly (my bro and sis in-law) on Thursday and we tried diving for it again. Still no luck. We decided we really were going to need scuba gear if we were going to find this thing. Brad (Ben's dad) guessed it was somewhere around 15 feet deep.

We tried calling everyone we knew who might have scuba gear or know someone who has scuba gear or ANYTHING we could think of. On Saturday, my mom and I drove to Nashville after calling a place about renting scuba gear (and purposely leaving out the information that we'd be using someone else's scuba license). Well....that didn't work out so well. The guy said (as we pretty much knew he would) we couldn't rent equipment without the person that the license belongs to being there. :( Another dead end!! (However, mom and I did have a fun time going to Mid South Ceramics about 4 miles down the road)

I talked to Robert on Sunday (our associate pastor/friend/guy we borrowed the scuba license from) and he said he'd be in Nashville Monday and would be willing to rent the gear and dive with us/for us on Tuesday before he returned to Nashville for the week. (What a blessing!!)

We got all the equipment together on Tuesday and hiked up to the dive spot. (Ben quickly realized just exactly how heavy oxygen tanks are...especially when trying to run across slippery rocks) Remember, the water is COLD!! Ben and Robert both had wet suits. Robert's was a long-sleeved/legged one and Ben had one of the short sleeved ones. They took about 30 minutes or so to get suited up and Robert gave Ben a brief lesson on what the heck he'd be doing (since Ben had never scuba...ed before) sooooo then we swam over to the middle of the swimming hole, I pointed to wear I thought I jumped in approximately and they started the decent.

After a bit of a false start, they decided they needed more weight. Fortunately the flippers we had just bought at Wally World came in these nice mesh bags with carrying straps so you could strap it to your back. Ben filled one of these with rocks and took his flippers off and they went down with no problems. I was just sitting up there watching the bubbles float to the surface. (This is completely nerve wracking, BTW) Within another 3 minutes I saw a huge storm of bubbles come to the surface and I assumed that something had gone wrong. They came up and....THEY HELD UP THE WATCH WITH ALL 4 RINGS!! I could NOT believe it!! (My wedding and engagement ring, my birthstone ring and Ben's wedding ring) God had PERFECTLY preserved the rings and even my watch which still works just fine!

We are SOOOO blessed!! After 6 days of sitting at the bottom of a waterfall we were able to find our wedding rings! The Lord truly takes care of even the smallest things in our lives.
Thank you SOOOO much to everyone who helped us and prayed for us! We feel SO loved and blessed to have all of you. :)

Oh! After the three minute dive, Ben and Robert decided to look around for other stuff for a while! They found 4 pairs of sun glasses, a pair of water shoes, a hair bow, $19 dollars, dog tags and a necklace!! Crazy!!

More dyeing!

I finished off the rest of the dyes I mixed up last week. I dyed several more balls of yarn and a skein too. It's been a lot of work! I remembered that reds, oranges and pinks (aka ANY of the warm colors) are ridiculously difficult to wash out. Boooo! So my back is a bit tired right now. I ended up throwing the whole lot into the washing machine in stockings (aka: panty hose...Is that spelled right??)

Anyway, I shall try to get pictures of them soon, but my camera batteries are currently dead as a doornail.

I DID begin weaving on the orange silk warp...Once I completely re-sleyed the reed in order to make the sett closer. 20 EPI is TOO loose for 20/2 silk. :D This I learned. So now it's at 25 EPI and looks much better.

I wasn't really liking how the Tencel looked with the warp. It was too shiny and slippery. SO I decided to wind two colors onto a bobbin at the same time to see what that did...I think I'm in love. I will be using brown silk and a teal 20/2 cotton together as my weft for the first scarf (which will now have to be shorter due to sampling on the front bit of the warp). But that's okay. I'm happy with it. I believe I'll either be doing double teal or teal and royal blue for the second scarf's weft. I'm purty excited about it. :) Again, I'll try to post pictures soon. Can you believe we're COMPLETELY out of AA batteries?? Mom always used to keep TONS in the house. But that was back when everything used AA batteries. Now everything has its own charger. Oh how times have changed. haha.
~JoAnna

Orange silk

I gots some orange silk on my loom and ready to be woven. :) I'm gonna weave up two scarves in the undulating twill I used with the rayon. I'm pretty excited. I will be using Tencel as the weft in a yellow/green and an aqua. Hopefully they'll be as pretty as I think they will be. I love the silk. It's so wonderfully light and completely different than any other fiber I've worked with. But if you're gentle with it, it's not difficult to manage.

I must admit, I'm missing cotton though. I love cotton because it's just so dang tough! I may try to weave something up in cotton soon. I'd really like to do some painted warps with cotton, but all I have is 10/2 cotton in white and that's pretty small. I could just do skeins of it or balls of it and use it more as an accent.

My mom made a good point that I should really try to weave more fabric for messenger bags since I have so many scarves at this point. Although I'm still planning on weaving up the remaining scarf warps before I start on bags. But perhaps I'll use the rest of the dye I have to dye some cotton. :) Painted warp messenger bags are quite lovely if I do say so myself...And I do. :D

I'll have to figure out something interesting for the strap. I really like my orange and green one best. (It matches the bag) But I did really like the brown ones with the embroidery stitch from my sewing machine...Decisions, decisions. haha.

I guess we'll see what happens! :) Hopefully later this week.
~JoAnna