Spinzilla kind of tripped me up. I’ve been production spinning, and it took me a little while to get back into the spinning for fun groove.

The Mazurka prototype is chugging along. It’s a delightful little wheel. I ordered the upgrade parts for it, so now I have an unfinished Minstrel/standard flyer plus the Minstrel front maiden. HRH and I just need to figure out how to kitbash those into the current mother-of-all setup. The MOA may even be long enough, which means it wouldn’t need a cap or extension! It turns out the new flyer will fit into the hole in the existing back maiden (woohoo! I was concerned about the clearance for the flyer arms!), but the height of the new Minstrel front maiden doesn’t correspond. And the new maiden has a metal bolt through it all for inserting through the MOA bar; it’s not a peg, the way the existing front maiden on the Mazurka prototype seems to be, so we can’t just cut it down to size. We need to mull it over.

I’m still spinning the same blue/green rolags on it, the last 2 oz to the 2 oz I spun during Spinzilla. I think I have just about 10 grams left to go. (Pardon the uneven loading of the bobbin; I was watching a movie with Sparky this weekend and lost track of switching hooks.)

Last week I wanted to spin something on my big Symphony, too, so I pulled out a lovely braid of Merino from Daybreak Dyeworks. I won this on the Daybreak Dyeworks team during Tour de Fleece this past summer. I rarely spin Merino, actually, and I’m having a lot of fun spinning longdraw from the end of this top. This particular Merino is really spongy and crimpy, so longdraw is pretty much effortless. I’m planning to chain-ply it when it’s done. It’s going to poof up beautifully for some very snuggly worsted weight, I expect.

That looks awfully lemon-lime, I know. There’s blue in the braid as well, it’s just not visible in this layer of singles:

And last but not least, what could this be, that has just arrived via our terribly nice parcel postman?

Oh, just a truly lovely Texasjeans Tibetan-style support spindle, whorl in maple burl with a curly maple shaft, weighing 22 grams and measuring 10 inches. I scored it in a destash last week. I’ve been wanting to try support spindling for ages, since drop spindling tires me out very quickly (thanks so much for that, fibro). I also have a Russian-style support spindle by Miss Lucy P in lingum vitae coming my way, also scored in a destash. All things come to those who wait! I’m still rather stunned that I scored both of these at a time when I actually had the money to do it. The only reason I sent “yes I want to buy this is it still available” queries for both was because I thought for sure I’d lose out on one, if not each. However, the beauty of the fibre community is that if I don’t like them (weight, balance, spin speed, whatever) I can simply offer them up for sale in the same forums these were offered in originally, to pass them along to the next person. I may do that with one of my two drop spindles, actually, since I rarely use them.