Let The Gardening Begin

I got my little mache (corn salad) greens tucked in the garden on Saturday. (Thanks, Suzanne.) First planting of the season! Since it was raining much of the day yesterday, I decided to garden inside instead. I’ve got my little indoor flats planted with some of the early stuff including woad, parsley (both curly and Italian), rapini, lettuce, mixed salad greens and some flowers such as lobelia, purple alyssum and mixed coleus. Then I went out to the greenhouse and planted some more mixed salad greens (lettuce, arugula and mizuna). Of course I got carried away with what I was doing and missed going to my Ravelry meetup! Sigh. I am happy that my early seeds are finally planted though. Much more to come.

The weekend was quite productive in more ways than just the planting. T-Man (more expert than I on these things) decided that the threadlocker was not the right stuff to fix the spinning wheel. He used some strong wood glue instead and we’ll see how that holds up. Here’s the badly-behaved screw:


It holds the footman’s bearing on the wheel. The footman has a cup that fits over it and is removable so the wheel will fold. Here is the bearing with the footman attached:


You can see how I might have missed the screw’s loosening because it’s completely covered with the cup. Hopefully I won’t have any more problems now! I would like to get the silk/wool lace yarn finished so I can dye it and get on with the knitting. Meanwhile it’s hard to avoid the siren call of my new-to-me drum carder, Debs:


Here she is modeling her “production” drum, which is supposed to handle coarser fibres. I figured I would start with that and then try the “fur” drum, which is standard with the Deb’s Deluxe and has shorter more delicate teeth. Both of these are considerably finer and with many more teeth per square inch than my old carder, Porcupine. She was perfect for the strong fibres like Romney that I learned to spin on back in the mid-70’s. But not for today’s finer wools and blends including silk, angora, soy silk, alpaca, cashmere etc. I can see using Porcupine to pre-card some fleeces before final carding on Debs. However I have to stay on track! Spin silk/wool laceweight. Must. Finish. First.

In other project news, I got stalled on the gloves because I made the ring fingers too long and will have to pick out the tips and rip back a round or two. Sigh. And I am determined to finish at least the spinning for the lace scarf before I start knitting on Papyrine, the paper yarn shawl. Too many projects; so little time. Right this minute I need to finish the 4 loads of laundry I started this morning. Housework is a constant no matter what else is going on.