holiday time!

Thanks to everybody who wished us a happy holiday! We're having a great one, so far. Here's a photo of my table, before the guests arrived. Even this is related to fibery stuff--I got to use one of my grandmothers' table linens (she bought it in Italy, it's real linen and hand embroidery,) and the matzoh cover at the end of the table was embroidered by my other grandma. I'm so lucky to set my holiday table with these special things! Brisket, chicken soup with matzo balls, gefilte fish, salads, olives, pickles, chocolate cake, wine, and lots of other yummies...wish you could have been here with us!

I'm very pleased by how my gilt mermaid scales turned out. I'm going to press forward and spin and ply more yardage exactly the same way, in the end it was worth it. To answer Terri's question regarding a spacer, I didn't use one because it didn't fit my needs for this yarn. I wasn't aiming to create a series of evenly plied singles. Plus, I suspect the textured boucle thread would require lots of help to feed it through a spice top spacer, but my aim was to create a uneven ply in which the Cotswold occasionally created textured bumps around the threads. I think this would make a fabulous shimmery shawl. Since I'm completely overwhelmed with yarn at the moment, I'll perhaps try to sell this on etsy.com. My new site at etsy: http://www.joanneseiff.etsy.com is getting lots of visits, but I have yet to sell anything...


What I may do to ease the plying difficulties next time is roll all the gilt and boucle and other threads together into a ball before I try to ply them with the handspun. Then I won't have the problems which occurred last time--basically when one of the cones got tangled or stuck while I was plying with all the others. I find plying off cones difficult, even when I put them on a lazy kate--some of them, especially gilt or polyester threads, seem to be designed to catch, tangle, and gum up the works. I can only imagine how frustrating they'd be to work with an industrial textile mill, which is, of course, what they were designed for.

OK, enough of this mermaid gilt! Next time, I promise I'll move on to another topic...as soon as I think one up?..Suggestions, anyone?