Time to Head Back Out on the Fiber Market Trail

Southern Comforts Fiber Market

Wells kids, it’s time to head back out on the fiber market trail. Break time is coming to an end and I am off to Charlotte, NC for the Southern Comforts Fiber Market. Click the link for more details. I am looking forward to using my new trailer. I have taken it for a few spins just to check on the brake adjustments and such. Restocking the booth between market days is going to be much easier with all the room to spare. It’s all stocked and ready to hitch up today. I will be driving on Wednesday, setting up on Thursday, and market days are Friday and Saturday.

Oh! I forgot to tell you, we found a new owner for the old black trailer. Hopefully, someone will fix her up and get some more use out of her for many more years.

Knitting

I am glad to be feeling myself again today because I was feeling under the weather for 3-4 days. So much so in fact, that I wasn’t up to knitting. I would pick it up and realize I just didn’t have the energy. I wasn’t severely ill, it was just a low grade fever that hung on for days and a couple days of lower GI discomforts, but knitting a lace edging was a bit taxing. After countless cups of various herbal and medicinal teas, and quite a few bowls of chicken soup, I am grateful that I was feeling better by Sunday. I wanted a least a few days to get back on my feed before hitting the road.

Before I got sick, I had started and completed one of the repeats of the lace edging on my shawl design. I decided 3 skeins would be a decent size. I had 20g of yarn left and the edging should only use 17g, so I should be good. I didn’t touch it again until yesterday. When I picked it back up, I worked 3 repeats in one sitting. There are only 18 repeats across and each is 12 rows. The end is in sight! I am excited to see how it looks when it’s blocked.

Work Shop News

Just a day or so before I was briefly out of commission, we decided it was a good time to make a visit to our lumber supplier. The plan had been to work on more Shawl/Hair Sticks for awhile and get more lumber in the fall. We had bought a few new boards of exotics last month at Woodcraft for these. We revised that plan, however, and decided it was better to go ahead and start a batch of Yarn Boxes first. We had completed a small batch in June to fill out the inventory some, but one wood is already sold out. Time to make more boxes. Who remembers the old Dunkin Donuts commercial? You know the one? “It’s time to make the donuts”, says the sleepy guy who is rising in the middle of the night to get the dough started. That’s what I thought of just now. LOL

While I was trying to get healthy again, Jerry has been busy cutting, sorting, jointing, and planing wood. We bought some walnut, cherry, and white oak. We haven’t made any cherry boxes for quite a few years, and while we use oak quite frequently, it is usually red oak. At this point in the process, they are now all planed to the proper thickness and ready to be marked out for cutting down to the dimensions needed for the sides, tops and bottoms. Then the joinery cuts are made and they get assembled and glued together. There are dozens more steps after that to get to the finished product. These are probably the most labor intensive, as far as number of processing steps, of anything we make.

Parting Comments

Thanks for the comments on my new office. I am really enjoying having my own space. As a matter of fact I am writing this post from there. I got a couple better desk lamps and a desk stuff organizer. I have a comfy chair, which I am in now, for work like this. I am, however, realizing that the kitchen chair as a desk chair is going to have to go. It’s not inviting to sit in for any task longer than, say packing an order. So, I am in the market for a suitable replacement. Maybe I’ll have found one by my next post. We’ll see. See you soon!