The hat maker has no hat (and Christmas deadline for ordering)

The deadline for ordering a spindolyn as an “on time” Christmas gift has come.

I am very much enjoying the rush and the day and night work in my newly rearranged shop and using my newly oiled tools and new dust mask and headphones with seasonal music on them, but I can only work so fast.

So remember that big wind? It blew the roof off of the goat shed. The silly goats stood huddled in it without a roof.

The sheep don’t use a shed, they prefer their fleece to be frosted.

We got the roof back on without too much arguing, but my ears were very cold during the process because I lost my hat. I got out my old hat pattern and when the rush is over, will be knitting me a new one, and I will design it with room for my hair clips inside. Maybe I will reissue the hat pattern in a better format…… things to think about while I sand and glue today.

Waving at all you frantic knitters!!!!

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Love and thankfulness

(sung to the tune of Al Green’s Love and happiness)

Has it really been this long! ?

Missed posting for thanksgiving, missed showing you my dye results, and my new skein winder, and some great ideas for spindolyn bases, but by and by I will get a minute to blog again.

I am running about 4 days behind (rapidly catching up toward 3) but things have been a little scattered lately, due to family matters. So if you didn’t hear back from me, I am not ignoring you, just might need reminding. One thing about being in business for yourself is that you don’t have other employees to call in when you have to be out for any emergency, big or small.

We had a big one(emergency, not employee) a few days before Thanksgiving, Daddy fell and ended up in Neuro-ICU, and then in the hospital for over a week. I can honestly say that Thanksgiving in the hospital is quiet, the nurses are terrible and don’t want to be there, and the food is worse. But I can also say that love conquers all, and I have a wonderful loving family (what is left of us) and for that I am more thankful than any turkey can express. Daddy is home now, but not out of the woods, so we do what we can, with love and thankfulness.

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pixie takes a hike (or, samplings of samplings)

I have a spindolyn sitting by almost every place I sit down in my cabin. I call them my little “head clearers”
They are “in progress” testing of two things, a sort of sampling and sampling. Some are sampling the spindolyn prototype itself, some are sampling the fleece or blend.

I like to make blends, blends of fiber even more than blends of color, and that is a lot. I am very blendy, I guess, and so could call my spindles “mind blenders”

Anyway, sometimes the samples become part of a big project, sometimes they become part of the little balls of fibery goodness sitting around in baskets, calling out wistfully as I pass my glance over them, “if there were only more of me, you could make a shawl or a sweater”.

And sometimes, I hear them singing in soulful voices “all of me, why not take all of me”

hmmmm.

So when all of me is not very much, you have to think small. Pixie size small.

So, here is a sampled blend of cotswold and jacob rump fleece for pixie hair and beard. A sampled blend of space dyed merino and nylon for the hat and a sampled blend of gray romney and overdyed gray romney for the little sweater.

This pixie himself is a hiker pixie, I carved his little face, and body (the body is cedar) and his arms and legs are a bendable wire armature and tennessee river cane. The problem is, he lost his hiking stick, so as time permits, I really need to take him out into the woods to find a new one.

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Look what the stork brought!

Not really, but when you work on and work out a design that takes more time and revision than you expected, when it finally falls together it feels somewhat like a birth. Not all designs are like that. Some you say “yes, that is nice, that works, I like it” and some you say, “wow, this is precious” and you gaze fondly and proudly upon it like a newborn puppy. Ok, so that sounds a little extreme, but I love this new spindolyn design.

I had thought about calling it the “Rubato” staying with the musical theme, but then I reconsidered presenting it as a restricted “type” because I like this base the best and then it occured to me that it would be nice to offer all the bases and spindles mix and match. So I will be revising the website soon to reflect that…but back to the new spindle.

The base is called the cubio style, the spindolyn is the new “mezzo” it is a nice size and weight in between the tenor and the soprano, and spins lovely. They are seen here in walnut.

Unlike the other spindle base styles, which are lap only, and not table top. This new cube base allows you to use it on the table, at an angle. The angle is a trade off, it slows down the spin, but gives you a longer and more comfortable draft angle for your arm. This cube style allows you to draft out to the side, reducing arm fatigue and overhead clearance. The square base can be set at a variety of angles in the crook of your lap; straight up for faster spinning, at an angle for more leisurely spinning.

Wheeeeeee!!!

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Work, the curse of the dyeing woman!

It happens every year at this time (at least for the last 30)

I start to notice all kinds of natural dye sources around the farm or wherever I be outdoors. The golden rod is in full bloom, the pokeberries are ripe, as are the elderberries. The morning glories are wound around every spent cornstalk and the marigolds are just flat out loaded.

I want to start collecting, and stuffing gallon jars, and mordanting wool, and generally making a mess of the tiny back porch and tiny kitchen. But this is also a busy time for getting ready for winter in more practical areas, firewood, hay, hoof trimming, manure spreading, garden bed clean up, row cover repair and so forth. Not to mention getting things ready for festivals, harvesting spindle making and trying to make a living.

But really, it makes sense that the color lust would peak just when the natural dye materials are ready to harvest, because there is a whole winter of spinning and knitting ahead and it would be nice to have our colors already dyed and ready at hand.

It strikes me so hard, that even when I am doing something else, like getting firewood, I think about it…as here

…this piece of bark that I peeled off of a black oak log, to save the inner bark for a bright yellow dye, or this shelf fungus growing on it…does it make a dye, too, I wonder?

But there is not really time to experiment with it, and these things will just pile up around the porch, little aborted projects to be swept off the porch come spring time.

This year, I have succumbed to the calling of color with a 5 minute dash around the yard clipboard and paper in hand, to get a quickie fix of natural color.

I visited the red cypress vine, dark purple morning glories, pokeberries, goldenrod, pink butterfly bush, marigolds and giant knotweed.

I grabbed a flower from each and rubbed a smudge of it on the paper, and this is what I got.

Now what I find interesting about this is that, it is kinda what you would expect. ‘Course, there is no mordant, no heating, etc, but see how the knotweed flowers, which where bright pink, yielded blue (indicating the indigo in this species) and the pink butterfly bush flowers, did not make pink, but made a green/yellow streak, which is what they would dye, and the orange marigold flowers made a bright yellow.

No, no time for wool, but it was a fun 5 minute color fix!

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autumn creeping in

Funny how fall is at once a really busy time, festivals, harvest, school starting back, and yet it has a kind of slow and lazy overtone to it.

I am trying to get my fall garden in and the last of my summer things put up, but on the side table are 3 almost full spindolyns with a different fiber on each (cotswold, gray angora, and brown alpaca.

When I come in for a rest and a glass of water, one or the other fiber calls to me and I spin a wee little while, just enjoying the process. It is like I am not in any particular hurry to get enough of one thing or another spun, but just enjoying the process in the gradually slanting sun.

The alpaca came from KY at a farmers swap meet. It is lovely and wonderful to spin…

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