Aaack!

My spinning wheel is in pieces!!!

But it will be better soon. I hope. Have a guild meeting Saturday -- will need it by then.

This project has been cooking in my head for awhile. My wheel, an Ashford Traditional, was purchased unfinished and unassembled. I gave it a thorough waxing before putting it together. That was over three years ago, and I'm here to tell you that the Minwax looked nice back then, but was getting in sad need of a facelift. I've been pondering what to do--stain, varnish, paint,re-wax, ignore--and finally decided on tung oil. It's fairly user-friendly. No need for gloves & respirator, just a couple of pieces of an old T-shirt and some fine steel wool for buffing between coats (might use gloves for that; I dislike the stuff.). So the poor thing is in pieces all over our dining room table. She's had the first coat and sucked it up greedily. Tomorrow is a buffing and then the second coat. We'll see how things look then, but I wouldn't be surprised at a third coat for good measure.

And here's my Gulf Coast Native wool project, spun, dyed, and knitted. A hat pattern I found on Ravelry, "Tweedy Cabled Cap" by Zhenya Lavy. You can find it at http://www.aestheticentanglementz.blogspot.com

I washed and blocked the hat today and it's looking nicer now than the pre-blocked picture above. I found the GCN wool pleasant to work with, though extremely full of VM. But these sheep are not coated, since their primary purpose is not as fiber animals, nor would they have been coated in the 1860s. I spun the yarn fairly thick (8-10 wpi), with a hat in mind, and used size 9 needles.

And now, since I must go to work tomorrow, buff and oil my wheel, and bake Irish soda bread for St. Patrick's day, I think it might be prudent to hit the sack. . . .