Category Archives: Knitting, Spinning, & Weaving

The Day After The Deadline

This is the day where I let my brain turn to mush, after gunning for a deadline. One day off.

I dropped the boy off at school and did half my errands. These are things that have piled up over the past two weeks because what energy I had went to working and thinking. I went to the thrift shop and bought a pair of jeans and a new cotton jersey top that fit and look terrific. I picked up some white lithium grease for the new wheel, because the metal treadle bar is squeaking where it moves in the wooden sockets. (Coincidentally this should make the track for the sliding back door a bit quieter and perhaps less rough to move; it won’t solve the issue completely because most of it comes from a chewed-up track that was like that when we moved in.) I have to stop by the library and the grocery store on the way to get the boy after school, too. Yes, the school bus strike is still on, not being the potential one-day-only thing it was coyly suggested it could be. The boy is aggrieved; riding the bus is one of the best things about school.

It is HRH’s birthday today, and so I am making a Special Dessert. I may make a Special Dinner too, or as special as it can be with a five-year-old who has to eat what we eat. It is Wednesday and orchestra night, and for ease of prep Wednesday night is usually Breakfast for Dinner night; I don’t know what changing that up will do to our dinner equilibrium. I can’t quite bring myself to serve HRH eggs, sausage and toast on his birthday, though, especially since he usually makes it. Even if he enjoys it.

I tested the new wheel last night, and very quickly fell in love with double drive. I found a 6-gram handful of Falkland fibre to test it with, perhaps not the best thing because the only other time I have tried it was to test a Hitchhiker wheel at Ariadne Knits, my LYS, so I’m not that familiar with it. (That did not go well, if you are wondering. The Hitchhiker has some innate design/physics flaws that I’m sure I’d find workarounds for if it were my only wheel, but as it isn’t, I played with it for an hour and concluded that it was pretty and cute but not practical to use.) I remember the Falkland being sort of like Corriedale, but with a sproing to it that now reminds me of Polworth since I’ve spun that since then. The Symphony handled it beautifully. I first had the tension and takeup set too tight, so when I broke my single I couldn’t pull the spun stuff off the bobbin without it drifting apart. I moved the mother of all closer to the drive wheel and magically the single took more twist, and I spun a fabulously thin, strong single in a short forward draw worsted style. Alden Amos gave me a rundown of how to adjust tension on a double drive to attain certain goals and talked about the difference in ratio between the bobbin pulley and the flyer pulley, and thank goodness I have his book with details and descriptions and physics lectures, because double drive is only barely mentioned in my other two spinning books that focus more on drafting and plying and such. I then transferred my bobbin of singles to the lazy kate and chain-plied it into 15 yards of a sample skein, which means I got roughly 45 feet of worsted single from 6 grams of fibre. I forgot the check the WPI of the single, but the finished yarn is about 24 WPI.

I have the rapturous task of sorting through my big wicker basket of indie dyer fibre to choose what to spin first. I think I want to try something I’ve never spun before. As I said to Jodi Meadows, another writer who spins, there’s some Rambouillet from Squoosh fibre arts in a burgundy/brown colourway I think I might try, or I may finally break into the Northbound Knitting fibre I got last fall in a three-month subscription to her fibre club; perhaps the Wensleydale, or ooh, there’s some Rambouillet in a lovely blue-green colourway there, too.

I had to re-tighten the leather connecting the footmen to the treadles, but apart from that and the treadle squeak, I am tremendously pleased with my initial experience with the Symphony. I discovered an oddity, though; among the two whorls included in the wheel, the smaller one seems to have a plastic bushing in it with no threads, so I can’t screw it onto the flyer shaft. It’s also got an odd cut across it. I’ll take a photo of it and post it to the forums to see if it’s supposed to be like that (can’t think why), and if it’s not I’ll contact the North American distributor and ask for a replacement. Fortunately I ordered the extra-small/fast and extra-large/slow whorls to expand the wheel’s ratio range, so I have plenty of other options in the meantime. It’s just that one of the reasons I got the wheel was to have the 16 and 20 to 1 ratios at my disposal.

Today I also have to cram for orchestra tonight, as our principal will be missing which means I’m technically the section head (ha ha ha ha ha). I am mostly concerned about keeping up with the runs in the Beethoven hitting the right notes, and not losing my cool when the conductor turns around to wave his baton right at me, which is infallibly a recipe for startling me and making me lose my place.

EDIT: Contacted the North American distributor about the small whorl that doesn’t fit the flyer or match the construction of the other; turns out it’s a whorl for a totally different wheel in their line. They’re shipping me a replacement. Hurrah!

My Deadline Carrot

Carrots work so much better than sticks, don’t you think?

Gentle readers, behold: HRH and I finished the staining and waxing the new Kromski Symphony spinning wheel.

It’s a bit darker than I initially envisioned, but it will lighten with time. Finishing it took about two weeks, but that’s because I didn’t have a lot of time or energy to stain it all in three days straight, and then there was a delay before the waxing step because I refused to use the stinky petroleum-derived paste wax that is ubiquitously available. There were tonnes of tiny finicky pieces to stain, too. HRH did about half of the work, staining the drive wheel itself, and doing the second coat of golden-tone stain over the initial walnut colour on everything. I love the homemade beeswax polish I made, which was essentially one part beeswax to four parts walnut oil, with about five drops of lavender essential oil stirred in as it cooled. The wax really brought a nice glow to it. It’s already fading; I may want to wax it more frequently than I thought. We assembled it Sunday night while rewatching the penultimate episodes of the first season of Farscape.

Today is Deadline Day. I am theoretically supposed to hand in half of the bird book, but I am actually a couple of thousand words or so below that. My editor, bless her, said not to worry about it when I contacted her on Friday with the grim facts. Things are actually going very well now, and I’m getting the entries for about two birds a day done. No matter when the wheel got finished I wasn’t going to be allowed to play with it anyway, until I’d handed in my half-book. That happens this afternoon, so tonight or tomorrow, I get to sit down and test-drive my new beauty.

She does not yet have a name. I did figure out that my Louet’s name is Lillian during this whole process, though. Poor Lillian; she has not been used since I decompressed in early January after the November/December trudge doing the two ounces of laceweight Polworth with those lovely creamy four ounces of Merino. I have no idea what I will spin first on this Symphony. Goodness knows I have a lovely basket full of indie dyer braids that I have collected over the past quarter-year from which to choose. I think there’s a Rambouillet in there somewhere; that might be nice.

Back to the salt mines! I need to finish the entry on doves before I give it all a quick once-over and e-mail it to my editor, because I have to drive out to pick the boy up to school. There’s a school bus strike that began today, you see, which cuts about an hour off my already truncated work day. No idea how long it will go on, either. The school appears very organized, though, as does the school board.

EDIT: I seem to have neglected to post a photo of that delicious thick-and-thin single of Merino in the Blue Bells #2 colourway that I spun in early January. You poor, deprived readers! Here you are:

LATER EDIT: I have just handed in my partial manuscript of the bird book. It’s only a couple of thousand words shy of the halfway point, which was the goal for today’s deadline. Go. Me.

And now I will fall over, until it is time to suit up and go collect the boy from school.

Weekly Update

I see it’s been a week since I updated.

This past Saturday was Tarasmas. For those who know what that is, yes, it’s a bit out of season, but it was scheduled thusly on purpose. This year’s theme for the interconnected radio plays was history; the evening began with the creation of the earth and went from there. There were some truly inspired casting choices, some great moments where people stepped up to fill in for missing cast members, and great hilarity and deep literary and historical appreciation were enjoyed by all. We stepped out into a Siberian winter storm, one of which had gone on for several hours while we were indoors and yet hadn’t been responded to by city snow crews, so the drive home (for us and pretty much everyone) was interesting, to say the least. When we got home at midnight we discovered the next-door neighbours shovelling our driveway and steps, so I came inside to make coffee and HRH helped them do their own side. At that point there was about fifteen centimetres on the ground, and another five to seven fell overnight. The boy slept over at his local grandparents’ house, so HRH and I got to sleep in. I even brought HRH coffee in bed as an apology for having to wake him up at quarter past nine in order to shovel again. The boy was delighted with all the snow; he had his grandma out at nine AM to build a fort in the backyard, and we picked up a snow saucer on the way home that afternoon with him, so he and HRH could build more of his snow slide in our own backyard, as well as a fort built under the play structure.

The fibro is making things pretty miserable, as I outlined here. I’ve been making ruthless choices about what I can and cannot do, and most of the time it’s working, except for the appended guilt and frustration. I just kind of keep gritting my teeth and trudging forward, losing ground. Yesterday was one of the worst days I’ve had since that bad day two weeks ago. The boy was home on Monday thanks to a ped day (not-so-helpfully announced a single week before the day itself, the late notice of which completely bolluxed my planned work schedule for the week) so we drove out to the western tip of the island to see the doctor and get his vaccination booster shots (to which he said, “What? That doesn’t even hurt!” when the doctor injected him), then spent a couple of hours with Ceri and Ada. That was okay, although moderately tiring. Driving takes a lot out of me, and since my minimum commute to my bare-bones regular activities is forty-five minutes each way, it’s not inconsequential. But yesterday I had a cello lesson, so I gave myself an hour to brush off the car and have a leisurely drive. Good plan, and it would have worked if I hadn’t discovered half an inch of knobbly ice under the three inches of snow. It took me half an hour total to get the car clear, and I was so tired when I got in that I considered calling my teacher to cancel, except I’d done that two weeks ago when I had too much work to do and we’re missing a lesson next week because she’s out of town. So I got out there, exhausted, told her that I wasn’t in a good place, and she tried to give me something different and — she thought — intuitive to do, and it just stressed me out more. I don’t think I’ve adequately communicated to her what the fibro actually does to me in terms of focus, energy, and exhaustion-wise, because when I said I might not make it to orchestra the next night because I was so bad she just smiled and said, “I’ll see you there.” Or maybe she just knows me really well, and knows I’ll fight to get through it and sure, I’ll get there because I’ve made a commitment, but I’ll blow what energy I have for the next two days.

I’m fighting this weird zoning out thing while I do the 45-min drive out to my lesson, the boy’s lesson, and orchestra. Orchestra is the worst, because it’s at the end of the day. I don’t know whether it’s physical weariness, or fibro fog, or both. The drive takes so much out of me, and then I have to buck up and focus on the music for two and a half hours at orchestra (for example) and then I have to drive back home. I don’t know what to do about it. I keep telling myself it will get better as winter fades. I hate that it takes so much energy just to deal with the weather.

The book writing is going along. Because I’ve been so foggy and the typing of bird facts has been going so slowly, I haven’t been getting as much word count down as I’d like. I managed 3,000 words today though, which is more than respectable when I’ve been doing 1,000 a day for the past bit, so I’m happy with that. I have a 50% of book check-in date of February 15 next week, so I’m trying to get as close to 50% as possible. I’ll probably come in just under it, but I’ll have done all I can do to date. I need to choose six to ten actual bird entries and make them as complete as possible for the hand-in, too. That’s going to be time-consuming, and not yield much wordage.

The spinning wheel got its second coat of stain this weekend. I chose a warm gold to put over the cool dark walnut, and it’s perfect; it came out exactly that shade I wanted it to. I’d give you a picture, but I can’t seem to take one that looks any different from the first one, although they look very different in real life. I was going to wax it last night, but I opened the tin of furniture paste wax HRH had brought home from work and slammed it shut again immediately. It stank. There was no way I was going to breathe that while I waxed all the fiddly stuff, nor did I want any hint of that chemical smell clinging to the wheel. So I’m currently searching for a non-petroleum-based wax. My mother tells me she uses Brimax, so I’m looking for that. There’s a distributor in Pointe-Claire, but I don’t know if they sell direct to retail customers; I’ll have to call and ask later this week. Etsy lists a few handmade organic beeswax- and carnuba-based polishes with either lemon, orange, or lavender oil in them, so I may order one of those. I could always concoct one myself, too; there are enough recipes out there. I’d have to find the ingredients first, of course.

The boy and I encountered our first challenging cello practice this past Monday. He whined and complained so much that he didn’t even ask for a sticker when, five minutes in after the ten-minute struggle to get him set up, I said that maybe we should do it another day. He decided that maybe it would be better to practice as soon as he got home from school, then have his snack and play on the computer a bit, because then he wouldn’t have to be told repeatedly to get off the computer and set up for the practice session that actually enjoys when he isn’t wanting to be doing something else.

Right. Boy-fetching time.

Wheel Progress

I started staining the wheel yesterday. The European alder and birch softwood is taking stain to different degrees depending on the angle of the wood and how it was shaped. For example, some places are paler because the wood was cut or sanded with the grain, so the wood cells aren’t as open and thirsty. If the sanding or shaping took place across the grain — like most of the spindling, I discovered — it soaks the stain up in great gulps leaving nothing to wipe off and swathes of dark colour behind. I wonder if I shouldn’t have used some of that wood conditioner prep stuff to even it out (not that I knew this would happen, or where; you can see some sections of the pieced wheel rim are darker right next to paler sections, for example). Eh; done is done.

Last night it took half an hour to do the table and an hour to do the drive wheel alone. As you can see, the spindles of the wheel still aren’t done; they’re very finicky, and I’ve asked HRH to do those. There are more bits and pieces and fittings like bobbins and whorls and pegs to do, too, and the lazy kate to stain.

This is just the first coat. I have to sand these and do at least one more coat of stain, and as it’s come up so dark already I’m considering applying a lighter, more golden-toned stain over top to warm it up (I know I have at least one half-can of golden mid-brown left over from staining various shelves and the Louet). The table and the flyer are the colour I was hoping for, using Miniwax Dark Walnut 2716. I may adjust my level of sanding depending on what piece I’m doing, to try to get more off the darker parts. Waxing it will warm up the colour a bit, too, because right now the finish is quite matte and absorbing light instead of reflecting it.

Because my retailer was short-shipped the rods and tension peg for the lazy kate in the original wheel delivery, they shipped separately from the North American distributor directly to me, and the parcel guy dropped them off today. The boy and I had made it all the way to the corner when the van pulled up to our house, and as there was already a decent amount of snow to trudge through plus wind, I made the decision to keep trekking to the bus stop even though the boy kept pointing out the van. The postman would drop off a card and I’d collect the parcel at the post office tomorrow, I reassured him. Well, we’d gone round the first corner and had reached the next when there was the beep of a horn, and I looked up to see that the parcel guy had pulled his van over to the other side of the street and was waving at me. So the boy and I scurried across the road and he gave me my package of rods and pegs, bless him. “I saw you’d left and I thought that maybe your husband was home,” he said cheerfully, snow whipping into his face as I signed for it. “I knew you weren’t far.” I thanked him fervently. I shall pick up a Tim Hortons gift card and leave it by the door to hand to him next time he drops by. Except I don’t think I’ve ordered anything else that would arrive by parcel post, now that I have both my spindles, the wheel, and the short-shipped stuff; the DVDs and books I’m waiting for arrive by regular mail. Doesn’t this mean I ought to order something new?

Weekend And Otherwise General Roundup

The big standouts this weekend: The boy’s first cello lesson, his first at-home practise on Sunday evening, and the arrival of new spinning equipment.

If you hit the previous post or the RSS feed early on Friday afternoon, you may have missed the two small updates to it, including photos.

The biggest obstacle to the lessons may be the travel time. Forty-five minutes, while fine for me because it’s roughly the length of a cello concerto so I get a sense of completion, is long for a squirmy boy in a snowsuit in the back. We’ll have to figure out a way to keep him busy.

Otherwise, the lesson went really well. There was lots of information that an adult would absorb almost immediately about how to sit and how to hold the cello, but the boy had to be talked through it. It was really fascinating to watch the Suzuki method being enacted with someone of the age for whom it was originally developed. He adores his tuning song ( “Ants, Ants, Ants, Digging in the Dirt, Dirt, Dirt, Going under Ground, Ground, Ground, All the way to China, China, China” for the four strings, ADGC), loves the “catapult” exercise where he holds his cello hand out to the side, palm up and hand slightly cupped, then bends the elbow and the hand is “released,” catapult-like, to land on the fingerboard. His teacher lent him her completely adorable Twinkle Bow to use for the week (because the bow that came with the cello set is a 1/2 bow, so it’s extremely unwieldy for (a) the 1/4 cello and (b) the child who needs the 1/8 cello), and put two tiny frog stickers on it so he had a visual reference for mid-point and balance point when he does his bowing exercise (which, he will discover, is the rhythm variation A of Twinkle). He was very proud of showing her that my luthier taught him how to make a bunny shape with the fingers of his right hand, then the bunny opens its mouth a bit and slides over the frog of the bow, teeth and ears kept long:

Not only is the bow two inches too long for the cello it came with (and therefore probably three to four inches too long for the boy), the 1/4 cello is unwieldy; we’ll be needing the 1/8. At the proper angles, his endpin is only extended two inches and his reach around the upper bouts is limited; he can’t get the bow down between the fingerboard and the bridge. The oversized instrument may have been a contributing factor in the slight mishap that occurred about three-quarters of the way through the lesson, when he twisted an odd way without holding onto the neck and the cello slipped off his body and fell to the ground. I thought my heart was going to stop. We all froze, our teacher picked it up and examined it, and all seemed to be well… but it could have gone very, very wrong. She asked him to apologise to me, then taught him about the three points of contact (knees, chest, floor) and the correct way to stand up and sit down with the cello so that he’d have a better understanding of the mechanics.

He’d drawn a picture for her (unprompted) that he gave to her at the end of the lesson, which she put up on her fridge. When we pulled out of her driveway, he sighed deeply and said, “I’m going to miss my cello teacher.” So I think it went well. She made quite an impression on him.

When I got home from my (quite excellent) ensemble lesson on Sunday, we set up his little chair and his endpin plank for his first at-home practice. This little cello doesn’t keep its tuning very well at all. I don’t know if that’s a commonality to all fractional celli or an idiosyncrasy of this one, or even because it’s literally newly set up and the pegs might not fully fit the pegholes properly. I may put a drop of peg dope on the pegs to keep them from slipping as badly as they’ve been doing. Anyway, after I wrestled with the pegs for a bit he got to sing his tuning song about the ants, practised his catapult, did his pizzicato rhythm practice, then again with what he and his teacher call “the magic bow”, and finally with fingers 1 and 2 of the left hand in prep for fingering. He loved it, and I did, too. I wish my practice sessions could be that fun.

In completely unrelated news, this arrived on Friday morning just as the boy and I were walking down the driveway to go to the bus stop:

I had a noon deadline, so I exerted magnificent self-control and didn’t open it until after I’d handed my project in and had made myself lunch:

I love that the maker signed the bottom of the table:

I bought walnut-coloured stain, tack cloths, foam brushes, and fine sandpaper on Saturday morning. HRH will borrow one of the tins of wood wax from work once I get to that point in a week or so. Once it’s all stained and waxed, we’ll assemble it. I figure it will be functional by mid-February (coincidentally, my next big deadline, so it’s probably a good thing it won’t be ready before that).

And two days before, this arrived in the mail:

As I was on deadline I didn’t try it out right away, but I did sit down Friday evening to test-spin some… vitamin cotton. Yes, I was crazy enough to have saved the cotton stuffing from the last few vitamin bottles, and I fluffed it up and used it to test this new Spinner’s Lair reclaimed walnut and oak spindle that weighs in at 0.88 oz. And you know what? Using a good-quality handmade spindle beats using a heavy, mass-produced, beginner’s spindle, hands-down.

If I can spin vitamin cotton on this thing, I can spin anything. I no longer hate spindles.

In other non-related news, I’m getting used to the iPhone. The headphone jack is on top instead of the bottom as well as being on the left instead of the right, which is now my most commonly enacted mistake. It annoys me that when I pull it out of a pocket I have to flip the thing around to access the home button and iPod controls, unlike my Touch, which had the headphone jack on the bottom so it went into a pocket upside-down with the controls easily accessible if I put my hand in my pocket. I need to work on focusing the photos I take with it, too, as you can see from some of the recent images here. It eats battery charge, something I have learned is a common weakness of the 3G series; to partially combat this one must be careful to close apps before putting it into sleep mode. Figuring I had nothing to lose because there was nothing on the iPhone yet and therefore a factory restore wouldn’t kill anything, I updated the iOS to 4, and all was well. I figured if Apple had to have fixed whatever killed most 3Gs back when the iOS4 was released last fall in the last two updates, and I seem to have been right. Now I can run my more current purchased apps like Toodledo and so forth.

My mouse is being annoying, sluggish and recalcitrant even though I just changed its battery and cleaned off the optic sensor, the ungrateful thing. I’m going to go back to working on the bird book.

Remembering To Breathe

Today, I have:

    – Finished my copyediting project and handed it in, right on time

    – Called the luthier to ascertain that the 1/4 size cello is finally ready for the boy to try (more on that later, it deserves its own post)

    – Unpacked the spinning wheel that arrived this morning (more on that later, too)

    – Finally gone to the post office to mail out two packages and a letter that have been sitting here since Monday

    – Bought various pharmacy things like vitamins, etc.

    – Gone to the library to pick up the books on hold for me (and also scored the new Alexander McCall Smith book in the Isabel Dalhousie series from the New Releases shelf)

    – Finally gone to the bank to deposit the three (!) freelance paycheques that I’d been carrying in my wallet for over a week

    – Paid bills; we are now totally up to date on utilities (in fact, I overpaid one, I think)

I’m catching up on what didn’t get done because I knocked myself out last weekend and Monday. Still taking it ve-e-e-e-ry carefully, and turning down new commitments and outings or evaluating already-scheduled ones as they come, though. I have the rest of the winter to get through, after all. I have been reminding myself to breathe all week, and it seems to have worked.

Catching Up

There’s family-related health stuff going on that isn’t for public discussion, much of it stress-inducing, so I’ve been kind of quiet.

Still no call from the luthier about the mini cellos. I’m hoping we hear from them this Thursday or Friday so the boy can go to his first lesson this Saturday. If not, then hopefully they’ll call next week and we’ll get it in time for a lesson on the following Saturday, then the group class on Sunday.

I handed in the edits on the repurposing project. The editor said very nice things to me, which made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside after struggling with the project; she apologised, too, because she hadn’t known I wasn’t the original author till after she’d done the edit. All’s well that ends well. I accepted a new copyedit project, too, due at the end of the month. Because you know, what I really need is something else to take up my work time when I’m trying to get half of the first draft of the bird book down for a review in mid-February. Actually, the way I seem to work these days is doing editing in the morning, then research and writing in the afternoon; it allows my brain to shift gears and I’m more productive.

Oh, right; I’ve contracted to write another book, this one on the symbolism and folklore associated with birds. It’s due at the beginning of May. I have no idea when it will be released. There, now you know everything I know. I’ll do a formal pro announcement when things are less nebulous. I have half a dozen secondhand research books coming my way from the US and the UK, all ordered about ten days ago. The only one to get here so far? The one from the UK, on last Thursday.

I got the biggest cheque of the four I was expecting last week, which was a terrific lovely surprise. I paid lots of bills and put a chunk on my Visa, and today I treated myself to ordering my new Saxony spinning wheel, which was the plan all along when this particular cheque landed (whenever that would be). I initially tried to order it from the wonderful and incredibly helpful London-Wul in NB last Friday, but the proprietor called me back, quite distressed, because the distributor wouldn’t let her order it in. She directed me to Gemini Fibres instead, and I called them this morning after lots of wibbling because I am phone-phobic. They were absolutely lovely, however, and I’m all set with them now. They don’t keep the unfinished Kromski Symphony in stock (yes, it amuses the musician in me that my wheel is called the Symphony, and I have ordered the unfinished version) so they need to order one in then ship it to me. I’m guessing that ought to take about three weeks. That’s probably a good thing, since I need to focus on work right now. We’ll finish it ourselves with a walnut stain and a nice satin wax. I ordered the extra slow and fast whorls, too, which will give me a full ratio range of 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 25 to 1 with the 24″ diameter wheel. (Just for comparison, my Louet S15 does 5.5, 7.5 and 10.5 to 1, with a wheel diameter of 20″; I have a high-speed bobbin that gives me ratios of 6.5, 9.5 and 15 to 1, but I wanted something more efficient overall.) A couple of people have asked if I intend to sell the Louet, and no, I don’t; it spins thick lofty yarns very well, and plies quite efficiently. I can also toss it in the car, which I can’t do with the Symphony. It’s also a single treadle, whereas the Symphony is a double treadle wheel, so if I ever have temporary knee or hip issues the Louet is good to have as a backup. I think the Louet will reside in the family room downstairs so I can spin down there.

I, um, may also have bought two spindles through Ravelry destashes last week. I claim brainwashing by the SpinDoctor discussion group on Ravelry. I am hoping these change my opinion of spindling. The entry-level machine-made spindle I’ve got weighs 1.75 oz, and is a bit clunky; these are much higher quality, handmade, and weigh just under and over 1 oz respectively. I’ve got a Spinner’s Lair reclaimed black walnut and maple spindle at 0.88 oz coming to me, and an inlaid Kundert inlaid oak, English walnut, and black walnut spindle at 1.2 oz, too. I knew I needed a good spindle when I went mildly crazy over the Christmas holiday without spinning equipment at my parents’ house. (The alternative was investing in a real travel wheel, like the adorable upcoming Schacht Sidekick, but it’s probably going to cost more than my new Saxony wheel did, so that’s not in the cards. Two handmade spindles costing a total of $50 is much less expensive!)

I got to see the video of my piece at December’s cello recital at last week’s lesson, which was interesting. My physical technique looked really good, which was reassuring. We’re now working on making my RH fingers longer, as I tend to have a very flat hand from the wrist through base finger joints when I bow. I need to arch the unit more. I came home with a pile of work: the Bazelaire suite, some last review of my final piece from Mooney’s Position Pieces book 1, starting book 2 with Pattern 1 in fifth position (playing this totally messed with my perception of every key I played in afterward, as it goes from Bb+/Eb+/Ab+/Db+ because it’s the same finger pattern on each string), and carrying forward with Suzuki book 3 and the Bach C major Minuet revisited with the new bonus middle section in C minor. We’ll be getting new cello ensemble music the the group lesson at the end of the month, too. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with this and orchestra, too, but I now my teacher’s assigning it all for specific reasons, most of it inter-supportive. She put a Stringvision grip on my bow, too, and it makes the frog just grippy enough that I don’t feel like it’s about to slide out of my hand when I relax my grip to lengthen the fingers.

Missed Capricornucopia on Saturday due to fibro dragging me down and HRH recovering from whatever threw his back out. By all accounts it was brilliant, and I’m sorry we weren’t there. Highlights of the family weekend otherwise included sorting eighty percent of the Lego in the house by colour, warping the loom with yarn for two secret swap projects and then having to figure out how to work around the oversight that one project was almost twice as long as the other (lashing a second shorter apron rod to the first to tie on for the shorter warp, and using fingers to beat the weft on the longer one for the first while), dinner with HRH’s parents, and the second episode of Downton Abbey on PBS last night.

Right. Off to punch the first rise of bread down, switch the last load of laundry, and get going with putting more words in the bird book. Or possibly doing the first eighth for the copyediting job. No, definitely the bird book.