String Notes

I feel so grownup. This weekend we bought new furniture, from an actual furniture store. Okay, it was on clearance, but still…

It took under two minutes for them to receive the Morgan seal of approval. I don’t think we’d carried everything in from the car before he was happily perched on one of them. Can’t have furniture with no cat hair on it, after all.

This was a three-day weekend for me. There was much useful activity – cleaning the kitchen cabinets (!!!), washing dishes, and such. And best of all, the bathroom plumbing is now working! The mail-order washers were actually (amazingly) the right ones, and Nick put everything back together. There may have been some cursing involved; I tried mostly to stay out of the way. He turned the water on – I was scared to look – but there were no leaks! The access for the plumbing is through the laundry room wall, so we also couldn’t do laundry for a week while everything was torn up. I’m now up three loads, and there are several more to go.

It wasn’t all cleaning (as you can tell by the piles of dog fur in all the corners – as if I’d be so stupid as to photograph the floors around here!). I dyed a couple batches of sock yarn, and two batches of roving. I was very, very careful with the roving, and it came out very well. I lightly felted a whole pound of BFL last time I did roving, so I had a strong incentive to do this batch correctly. Don’t play in the roving! See, I know better, but the temptation to squeeze just a little is soooo strong.

I really like the roving and one skein of sock yarn, but the other didn’t come out as I’d hoped. Perhaps once it dries and I reskein it I will be happier. But then, it’s not for me, and someone will probably love it.

And note the completely reassembled wall behind the dryer! Hooray for working plumbing!

I spent a lot of time skeining, measuring and winding yarn of all descriptions. This is all linen:

The little paper quills work beautifully in an improvised warping reel made from a shoebox and a couple of knitting needles (four if you want to do continuous-warp tablet weaving). There were power tools involved in the production of all those cute little bobbins.

I also worked on rewinding the yarn I’d been dyeing. There’s lots of that – a few balls are sitting on the table, but I have a whole box of skeins yet to do. The skeins get slightly tangled during the dyeing and rinsing, so it’s easier to rewind them all before measuring out 100-yard increments. I think – I started to wonder after the first few. Fortunately there are lots of back issues of Cast On to listen to while I wind. I don’t have any power tools for this part, but an electric ball winder may well be in my future.