much time doing nice things

I haven’t even been able to bring myself to write, since I’ve been doing all these other things around here that I like so  much. yesterday was pretty much the perfect day.

first, I got up with the sun, made coffee and tackled finishing off the bobbin I’d started the night before, and then plying it.

easier said than done, four hours later!  first the plying ball wouldn’t cooperate, then everything got tangled and I spent a lot of time getting it untangled. 

but the spinning looked better than it ever had before and I didn’t want to lose it.

sure enough, around 11 I emerged from the struggle with 120 yds at 16wpi, right on target. it was still too squiggly in places, which I don’t really know why. especially since I have no way of knowing how much twist I lost in the untangling part, but a lot.  I had spun it with 3 twist treadles to one release treadle (is there a notation for that?) but I had to untangle so much, who knew? still, when I put it on the niddy it came to 120 yds and when I took it off, magically  it was balanced, somehow, and I adjourned to a gorgonzola omelet and read for the rest of the afternoon.

when it dried I had this:

16wpi

120 yds

so my first two real skeins were 100 yds of corriedale at 12 wpi (top) and 120 yds at 16 wpi. the Tour de Fleece starts on sunday and runs through the sunday I leave here, so what I do before then will be practice for spinning up the café au lait fiber I got for daedalus.  i’m thinking it just might work--even considering the carving class I’m taking right in the middle!

I fired ash up again when the guys came out for chores and spun another bobbin until the fireflies came.  then I put that one on the kate, and will do another bobbin this evening so that tomorrow morning I can make two plying balls and see how they ply.  (still don’t want to chance the disaster that was plying from the kate the last time I tried that!  streamers all over the place!)

spinning until the fireflies come out is just about the most perfect thing I can think of these days.  so I have been doing that and not writing about it.  today I slept in, possibly a result of the benadryl I took at 4am, and then made coffee and futzed around here until I went down to town around 11. stopped by silva gallery on the way in, where I gave the last two pairs of soxes to pam and we chatted, mostly about local drama I didn’t really need to get involved in much. then I went to yarn circle, where that pam, karen, and becky walker were having lunch, but I barged right in anyway.  did a little chatting and a little knitting, a little email checking, and then left to do errands, which consisted of mailing my little/middle checks to the bank and grocery shopping.

and that was today, until I came home and put everything up and made myself some mid-afternoon spaghetti with tomato basil sauce and ingles’ barbequed chicken legs, and had a glass of pinot noir. and here I am. Michael gave me the first cuke of the season, and I bought some tomatoes and a vidalia from the stand.  I have peaches and blueberries and a big seedless watermelon.  I have hot dogs and apple pie and chips for the upcoming holiday.  And I have my book, which I’ve finally gotten into (Anathem, which took about 200 pages and well over a year to engage me, but has finally done so, and i have some 600 left :) what more could one ask?

Flickr Tags: brigadoon,spinning