I'm getting much better at spinning a smoother and more even single, as you can see by the cop currently on my spindle. This is about a total of 30-40 minutes of spinning, most of it last Friday evening while Chris was talking on the phone with his brother and I sat on the couch to keep him company.
This is my spindle along with the bulk of the combed top roving that I bought specifically for the purpose of practicing spinning. Given how much of the singles I am getting out of the first little piece that I pulled off of the batch, I'm going to have a lot of practice spinning and hopefully some usable yarn at the end of it. It's now making more sense to me why people buy/sell such small looking amounts of fiber - if you spin it finely and evenly, it really does go a long way!
Incidentally, I'm still learning my terms and how they apply to the different fibers available. I think the stuff I have right now is roving, but the label says it is combed top, and I'm still not quite sure the difference between them. That would be a nice addition to a beginning spinners class!
.JPG)
Some of the goodies I've ordered recently arrived in the past few days, including the set of interchangeable circular needles (the tips screw on to the cords and lock with a key, so you can combine any tip size and cord length), a new set of pretty embroidery scissors for my hand sewing kit (so my others can go back on my tool board in my sewing room), two new drop spindles, and a "party game for horrible people" called Cards Against Humanity. The games is very simple - it's basically like Apples to Apples in how you play it - but the cards and topics are decidedly R-rated and not for the close-minded.
The two new drop spindles are ones I bought off of Etsy primarily because they were pretty, not because I need more of them (though I do tend to collect things when I first get interested in them). One is made of ebony with inlaid crushed lapis lazuli, and the other is made of bloodwood for the whorl with a maple burl shaft. While debating how to store and display them, it occurred to me that I had kept a lot of the empty Dublin Dr Pepper bottles from my Christmas gift, and so I washed out a couple of them and will keep the spindles in them when not in use. The ebony one is about as heavy as the student maple one on the right, which are both lighter than the purplewood one I'm using right now, and the bloodwood/burl one is very light. I should weigh them for comparison purposes.
Yesterday marks seven weeks post surgery for Curzon, so we're over halfway to the median survival point of 90 days with surgery only. While he's not fond of posing for pictures before 6am, he's looking great and is doing fantastic - it's truly like he never had surgery. I have found no additional lumps or bumps on him, he's tolerating the artemisinin/butyrex and Hoxsey's quite well, and his behavior shows zero change from pre-surgery. He's back at flyball practice now, and this week he ran the superjump exercise (7 flyball jumps in a row at the regular spacing of 10 feet apart, for striding practice), was a practice passing dog, was a "bait" recall dog behind gates for a chaser, and worked up to all four jumps in the bounce drill. Despite a collision with the green dog he was practicing with (the lab was just so excited he ran straight at Curzon, even though he's been successful with the exercise before), he is showing no issues with any of the exercise or drills and only wants to be let loose to run the course again. We have a tournament this weekend, and then next weekend we will start putting him back on the box, planning that he will return to racing in the May tournament.
No comments:
Post a Comment