I generally have the attention span of a hamster, so this progress represents more time than I care to admit investing into it.

Life in Craftopia is getting expensive again: Before the weekend I ordered an Ashford maintenance kit for the traddy, and my husband invested in 3 new bobbins for my Traveler (good man.)

My new winder showed up yesterday, and I’ve had a chance to test it with the swift. And the verdict is good, oh so very good. I was a little worried because I couldn’t find reviews of the inline winders, only the description of “smooth winding action”

It does have smooth winding action, that is absolutely true. It’s very solidly built (my other one came with a broken spindle right out of the box, so this is a definite improvement.) Also there’s no way that my yarn can end up skipping off the spindle and into the gears, I’ll miss that about the old one, because it’s so much fun carefully and slowly reversing the winding and untangling my mangled yarn from those gears. And for some reason, the table clamp actually clamps the darned thing to the table and it stays clamped (the old one would pop off the table.)

So far the major flaw seems to be that it was made by Lacis, also the manufacturer of my missing inferior ball winder, so while I feel justified dissin’ Lacis for producing a shabby winder I can’t do it so completely since the new winder is not so shabby. I can say that if I find the old winder I’m trashing it right away, I was going to give it to the kids for their yarn projects  but that just seems too cruel to do to my own children after using this one. I’ll ante up and lay out the cash on a second one of the in line winders for them, much less frustration involved.

My decision, I’ll live with it.

Now that the girls are all rather nice dogs that come when called and don’t (usually) jump up on people, know how to sit and stay nicely, and head for their chew toys when they want a nice soothing nibble I’m starting to feel confident that they can be around my little treasures without causing too much damage.

We still have a few issues though, it’s impossible to do any gentle art with a 130 lbs Great Dane on my lap, I’ve had Greta for 8+ years and have still yet to fully convince her of this point, although if I tell her to go lay on the bed she will happily comply. Georgia on the other hand is completely unconvinced that an entire queen sized bed is just as good as my lap, or that I really want to pay attention to a bunch of string or fabric instead of devoting every waking moment towards staring into her deep soulful eyes and feeding her tripe. Sadie (aka the dog formerly known as Sydney) prefers her little love seat in my bedroom so needlework isn’t much of an issue with her, for some reason the spinning wheel sets her off into a series of long and mournful howls which is then repeated in chorus (and in a different key) throughout the neighborhood; this limits my spinning to daylight hours, away from Sadie, in an undisclosed secure location with the shades drawn.

The typical view of my craft efforts includes a dog nose. A very large dog nose connected to a very large dog.

I’m not quite to the point where I feel comfortable taking my nice clothes, paintings or guitar out of the closet, but I can sneak in a little knitting and needlework if I’m careful to put it all away when I’m done.

Inevitably there’s a rule of craft tools. When one, such as myself, decides she no longer has an interest in continuing with a craft and sells off all her supplies for said craft it’s just a matter of time before a major brainstorm and those supplies would have (if they were in the person’s possession) been put to good use once more.

This makes me reconsider everything. After all, that knitting machine that I’ve been not using may be the next thing. Right now it’s a cobweb decorated white buffalo, but sometime in the future it might actually become some sort of necessity. Then again, if I keep it around I may never have that stroke of genius that actually justifies it’s presence.

Dammit. There really should be a kind of reverse rental service, people could come and take my junk away until I decide I need it, then they could give it back to me. Wouldn’t that simplify things?

I digress.

This is a 3.5×3.5 inch square, I’ve run completely out of the light blue that I was using for the background. All those little loops eat a lot of embroidery floss. I’ll have to get more first thing in the morning as I’m eager to get this off of the hoop and start something new.