spaazlicious

I like this whole unemployed dealie-bob, although it feels as if I'm giving my blog a workout.


Anyway, here are better pics of the skeins, all dried and twisted back up:

The lighter bloom skein, meant to represent the dried bloom and its faded colours.
South African Fine Wool, approx. 330 yards and 4 oz.




The brightest bloom colourway, meant to represent the colours of the bloom on the tree, Blue-faced Leicester, approx. 207 yards and 3 oz.



I just like this pic of it because there's something kind of sexy about it to me:




The darker bloom, in its wet decomp stage, South African Fine Wool, approx 295 yards, 3.5 oz.



And the silk/merino all dried and coiled, ready to fluff and spin:




I must say, I do love playing with the new camera. I hope you guys don't mind the pics.

And this is why you don't buy wool on eBay

This is the picture in the listing:



This is the text of the listing:
This is a white raw wool fleece recently shorn from a finn/dorset ewe. This is a years growth. The wool is very thick. The fleece has been seperated into 1 lb pieces. There is a small amount of hay/grass stems in wool. The staple length is about 2 1/2". [bolding mine for emphasis, here's the listing link for the incorrigibly curious]

And this is what arrived, postmarked two days (one business day) after the seller's stated shipping date:



Here's one of the cleanest bits, I'm assuming the sticky orangey bits are lanolin (one neat thing, I handle this and it is like cotton candy in a humid land, very damp and sticky-slidy and my hands are all shiny and sheepy-reeky) but should I be worried that it is so orange? There is even a kind of orangey smell amidst all the sheepy smell.



I honestly don't know what the seller took a pic of for this listing--it seems to be the custom that if you are selling raw fleece but displaying a pic of washed and cleaned fleece and what you're seeing is not what you will be getting, then this is disclosed within the listing. I have to admit that I took the "small amount of hay/grass stems" bit at face value and assumed that what I was seeing was what I was getting: an extremely clean piece of fleece, perhaps from a coated sheep. Idiot, me.

I will be washing it according to this tutorial, please comment if you have any additional advice or caveats, as I've never washed a poopy raw fleece before. All the fleece has a poopy side and a skin side--is this normal?

But here's a question: what feedback should I leave? I paid immediately after I won the auction, and in the Paypal notes I asked about purchasing another pound piece. The next day (the 16th) I received an e-mail saying that I could buy another pound at the same price plus two dollars for additional shipping and she would be shipping it on the 18th. I immediately Paypal-paid the amount, and today, the package showed up, packed in a plastic grocery bag inside a Pur water filter system box.

So, what should I do? This is one reason I feel frustrated by the eBay system: I hesitate to neg her because I don't want to be negged back (of course she hasn't left me any feedback, despite my rapid payments, despite the fact that I, at least, completed my part as the buyer as best as could be) but at the same time, I don't want to lie and leave any other kind of feedback, because it isn't fair to other eBay buyers. We depend on the rating system to identify trustworthy sellers and if you don't leave truthful feedback it renders the system meaningless. So it's like a feedback hostage situation, I guess. What do you think?

Blah! Boring! The internet is filled with similar complaints--maybe I should just learn my lesson and leave eBay the f-ck alone.

On the lighter side,

check out what I noticed on my new sandals today:



What's with the "waterproof" tag? They're sandals, and definitely not waterproof. I can only imagine that the label is telling me that the nylon struts themselves are impregnable to water...good to know. I guess. I love these sandals because they are hideously ugly yet comfy, and protect me from the ravaging claws of Crivens. Seriously, I love that bitch, but she just loves to rake her claws across the tops of your feet in her greeting frenzy. It hurts, and these thwart that. Hooray!

Also in the vein of hooray, Denny and Doog finally took off for Alaska today. Goodbye, we love you guys, and we'll miss you!

I can't remember what my other observation was. Maybe it had something to do with this:



I finally got around to carding the siberian husky fluff and spinning it. They only want 5 yard lengths so I spun and plied for a natural coloured two-ply, then took two of the two-plys and dyed them and plied them from opposite ends of the dyeing pattern so the middle (green) coincided. The siberian husky fluff takes dye spectacularly well, but the end product of my spinning was pretty rough-feeling, like rug yarn. I threw the rest of the spun yarn away because I couldn't think what to do with it. If I get around to picking out all the guard hair, maybe I'll see about spinning the rest. It was a fun thing to do, and something I've meant to try for a long time now.

Umm, pictures of the hoody will be up tomorrow.

Woo-hoo! I don't have to got to work!

I'm gonna:

• wash some poopy fleece (as soon as I find my mesh stuff sack)
  
  • clean the kitchen
    
    • do laundry
      
      • go for a walk with the dogs and Nick
        
        • read a book
          
          • maybe see a movie
            
            • go see Laurie R. King with my Mom at Mysterious Galaxy
              
              • write some thank you notes!

Woo-hoo!

(Oh, and Heidi asked what I was planning to do with the yarns...I'm going to slap a label on 'em and see if anyone wants to buy 'em. I'm not sure about pricing though, so please chime in if you have any advice about that, or the eBay thing, or the wool washing, or...anything really. I may be crap about responding to comments but I love hearing what people think)