Two Old Things

A seal from the Moscarite Mining Company, and an old makeup tin.  These were both salvaged from my great grandparents' house, aka the farm.  I assume the makeup tin was my great grandmother's, or possibly another family member's, but I have no idea where the seal stamp came from.  It is fun to emboss papers, though.  I believe the seal stamp is replaceable,  so I'll have to keep on the lookout for seal stamp disks!

Wool Festival and Spinning Yarn

I know, I'm still catching up with Arizona, but this is actually very exciting an definitely deserved it's own post:  We stumbled upon a wool festival at the pioneer museum in Flagstaff.  We saw an advertisement for it in town, and decided that we must go.  There was sheep shearing, navajo weaving and a group of old ladies with their spinning wheels, who just so happened to be nice enough to let a girl from the city commandeer one of them and spin until she was finally pried away.  Of course, my "yarn" is not exactly finely spun, but I did start to get the hang of the draft, spin, let it go--but don't let it go too much and then spin some more but--ohh! you spun it to tight and it broke. . . time to start again.  It was quite fun.

 The sheep were funny because they would start to put up a fight, but then realize it wasn't worth the fuss and relax.

Look! I'm spinning! on a spinning wheel!

This was the uhh, yarn I spun.

 But I did get some merino roving (and a little bit of suri that I'm saving for when I'm good at this) to work with on my my drop spindle.  Drop spindles definitely take a lot longer to spin the same amount of fiber, but I feel like it's easier to get it consistent.  I'll get it down eventually, I'm sure.

Lucky Me!

Yesterday, as I was out walking Mason, I happened upon a small bunch of clover.  As I was looking at them, thinking to myself how I've never found a four leaf clover, and wouldn't it be "totally amazing" if I found one today, I really did spy an actual, true life four leaf clover.  Needless to say, I was very excited and made sure everyone I spoke to knew about my good fortune.

Magnifying Glass

Precision Burrs

Last week I had to get some supplies, so I went tot Metalliferous (which is one of the most amazing stores on the planet) And I found a box of these old, tiny burrs.  I wanted to try them out so I asked the lady at the counter how much they cost.  She said "you can have it.  I'm sick of looking at that box."  Then she proceeded to fill a ziplock with even more of them. Secretly, I wanted the old style packaging, but I'm excited to have enough that I won't feel bad using them.  I find it funny that people think the employees at Metalliferous are gruff and impolite.  I have always had very good experiences with them (OK, they can be gruff at times).  But having new tools is very nice.