I have been caught up in the daily grind and not posted. Doing things like laundry, ironing, vacuuming, not eating, etc. I also seem to have my diurnal clock shifting. I am no longer tired at normal bedtime. It's not insomnia. If I go to bed (with the normal dosages of pills) I sleep (and wake up in horrible pain but that's the way every day starts). I just seem to be going to bed later and later without feeling sleepy up to that point. Hence it's midnight and I'm still awake when ordinarily I'd be sound asleep by now.

Here is one of my spindles, the Bosworth mini, with some of my first truly lace weight luxury fibre, camel down. This fibre is truly "down"; I can see no draftable length of anything but somehow it holds together via the magic of a spindle. I would never be able to get this to spin on my Roberta, or I might but only after many naughty words, much ruined fibre, and a great feelings of inadequacy. The beauty of spindle spinning with a fibre like this is you have total control over the drafting and twisting process at a minute level. I imagine if you were spinning something more straightforward like a wool with a reasonable staple length, you could easily learn to do it without even looking, and walking around spinning would be possible. For now I think I will reserve my spindles for luxury fibres that I can't spin any other way and perhaps sock yarns because I have not gotten the fineness of commercial sock yarn under my control reliably on the Roberta. We'll see how the spindle works out. I will have to disagree with those spindle makers who feel that putting a notch in the edge ruins the perfect symmetry and balance of a spindle. I love the notch and my first spindle, which had none, also had a habit of having the fibre sliding off mid spin (it also has a round hook which makes that even easier). I really have no interest in fancily painted or designed spindles. Some of the Goldings are quite pretty but since I want a light weight top whorl spindle (and everyone said the Bosworths were the best), I won't be buying any fancy painted ones.

On a lighter note, while shopping today I was staring into the shop in the Canberra Centre which carries all manner of Aussie souvenirs, gifts, doo-dads and art work and found Christmas tree ornaments. Since I usually have to buy things a year ahead because by the time I need to mail stuff the Christmas stuff hasn't appeared yet, I swooped on some adorable Aussie animal ornaments. The Bear insisted we have a wombat (sentimental attachment to the wombat) and I thought an echidna should stay with us too. Got the standard animal icons (koala, etc.) to send overseas and some special ones for special people. They also had an entire calendar of wombats which of course we had to get and proceeds go to saving orphaned womabts.