One of the classes I’m taking at Madrona is a Hand Embellishments class by Fiona Ellis. We’re supposed to bring with us a 6×6 swatch of stockinette, several lengths of smooth, medium weight yarn, a blunt ended sewing needle, and fancy beads and buttons. So, although it doesn’t say as much, it seems to me that the beads and buttons should be big enough to string onto the worsted weight yarn, don’t you think? I don’t have any of those. When I think of “fancy beads”, I don’t think of the big honkers that you could pass an embroidery/end weaving needle through. I guess I need to get out there and look. I hope the class goes beyond sewing on buttons, that’s for sure.

Yesterday was interesting. I managed to do almost all of the laundry. Wanna see what 9 days of laundry for 6 people looks like? Hold on to something.

That picture doesn’t accurately communicate the magnitude of those piles, which are almost as tall as my dresser.

That’s 3 loads of darks/blues, 2 loads of reds, a stuffed load of whites, another of lights, a load of cold/delicates, a load of Clark’s clothes, and half a load of towels.

Whew!

So I did that yesterday, and then decided to get out the jumbo head for my spinning wheel.

I’d never used it, and I thought it might come in handy in the Spinning Novelty Yarns class so I wanted to put it all together and see how it worked. I’m glad I did. It took most of the afternoon and evening to figure out and get adjusted.

As it turns out, I’m missing the little peg that holds the scotch tension brake across the flyer.

(When the regular flyer is on, it’s a double drive wheel). So I hunted all over the house, looking for things that might fit in the hole, and I found one.

Know what that is? It’s an eraser that you stick on the end of a pencil. As it turns out, it works very nicely.

It took me awhile to adjust the length of the driveband and the tension to get things “just so”, and to get everything sufficiently oiled and smooth, but I think I’ve got it. I had to wrap one end of the flyer shaft with masking tape because the bobbin was very loose and knocking around quite a bit. It’s all quiet and smooth now. This thing is huge!

HUGE!!!

I spun a bunch of teal merino top on it to get the feel and make the adjustments, then pulled it all off and threw it away. It was pretty bad.