Spincerely yours,

Hi Everyone! Hope you all had a wonderful holiday week! Tomorrow it is time to get back to “real life.” I even went to the store tonight to get cold cuts to be prepared. However, I went to Price Chopper, home of the world’s slowest deli, and I had number 33 and they were on 19. No way I was waiting!

The Agents are all back from camp and we swam them hard today so they shall sleep well! Tomorrow, two of them are off to day camps so the driving begins! Oh, what fun! Really though, I think I just have this one week where there is lots of diving and the rest of the summer all the driving is closer to home.

As my new banner proclaims, I have been doing A LOT of crafts! I don’t even think I will have time to blog about everything I have been doing! One of the more exciting things is dying and I will be posting more about that during the week, but let’s just say my Terry’s Tub components are no longer head wear and they are “going roof*” with high temps!

One of the really romantic things that IHA and I did while the agents were at camp was to make a tensioned Lazy Kate. While at Brighid’s dyers, I was lamenting my lack of one, and Leslie suggested that I make one (I wonder how close this is to what she described to me?). Spinning Spider Jenny then suggested that I make one and blog about it. Hummm… like I need more things to do! But I did it with IHA and I photo-chronicled it in infinite detail and now I’m going to share the experience with you.

{Just an aside to my non-spinning friends: A Lazy Kate holds bobbins of “single” spun yarn that are spun together to make a thicker, more balanced yarn. Finished yarn can have have all sorts of plies to it. You can actually keep it as singles (it will have a little “energy” to it), or you can have 2 ply or 3 ply, or you can ply 2 stands of 2 ply together. The possibilities are infinite. If you have a Lazy Kate that is tensioned it helps to keep the singles from tangling or knotting up on themselves as they go back through the spinning wheel to be twisted with their mate(s).}

First, we choose a piece of wood from the garage. I had a choice of pine, oak from our own trees, or left-over maple from a long ago rocking horse project. I chose the maple because it was really pretty and also had substantial weight. We figured out the size that we would need by placing 3 bobbins and the tensioning knobs (found at Webs by LFG) on top. IHA used one of his long neglected power tools to cut it to size and I gave it a good sanding.

Next we did a little more detailed measuring (or rather IHA, the engineer did).

Oh and we also had to find some dowel and find the right size drill bits to match the size of the dowel and the size of the knobs. This was probably the most difficult part as finding anything in our home always seems near to impossible even though we probably spend a quarter of our lives cleaning and organizing. So then he drilled in the holes and

cut the dowel with another long neglected power tool.

I sanded some more.

IHA inserted the dowels and they have a really nice tight fit. I put a little wax on the tensioning knobs before putting those in as they have to be able to rotate a bit.

I added some string for the tensioning and it seems to work. Time will tell though, I hope to test drive it soon! I’ll be sure to let you know how it works!

* When temps get hot, I always think in my head “Going roof! Going roof!” That is what Agent K would say when she was wee-little and we would take her temp and she had a fever. “Going roof! Going roof!” You don’t even want to know the thing she says now! Not that it is what she says that is bad, it is just the sheer quantity of how much she can talk! At least we always know what she is thinking:)

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 9:40 pm and is filed under spinning.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.