A new spin

photo by Susan Wood

 My head has been spinning lately and I think I’ve come up with a plan. In the early 1970s I was a yarn spinner and Robert and I published a little booklet called Spinning with a Drop Spindle. It was the beginning of our fiber arts press, Thresh Publications. We expanded and published books by other fiber artists. Here is a link to one of them.
Used copies of our little Spinning with a Drop Spindle are still selling today on Amazon. Some of the copies go for pretty high prices. I am surprised.

 I decided I could reprint the booklet and sell it myself. I’ve been very busy. I re-typeset the text and pulled out all the illustrations and cleaned them up. I assigned the reprint a new ISBN number. I put the book together in Microsoft Publisher and ran off a dummy copy yesterday. I began looking around for some cover paper stock but I can’t find the old curry color we used for the original booklet. We printed thousands and thousands of them. I've got some new swatches.

 I can’t quite decide what color the new reprint should be.

I went searching for an old photo of me spinning on our porch in Santa Rosa. That involved digging through the hundreds of photos I have stashed away. A dear kind person gave me a gift box for ScanCafe last year and I had put off gathering photos to fill the box. I was on a roll and I finally sorted out a lot of old photos to send off for scanning.

 I learned something that everyone needs to know. If you have any of your pictures in those albums with striped wax strips to hold them in place, pull them out NOW. Those albums ruin photographs. Here are some photos that would not peel off the waxy backing – they tore and are ruined. I’m sick about it.

Lists

I have a to-do list. Yesterday, some important items were taken care of by Tom and his working partner, Jerry.


Fix propane pipe leak.
Level stove.
Put window-wash stuff in the car.
Pound down nails on back porch.
Seal main waste (sewer) pipe.
Fix powder room toilet paper roll holder.
Mail quilted diaper-changing pad to Emerson.
Finish my Word for the year banner.

I was feeling very unhappy and discouraged about the roof leak last week, but learned it can be monitored and taken care of.


This week there were new leaks – under the house.

When Tom and Jerry were sealing gaps in the insulation a while back they smelled propane gas. They did the soap test and found a leak in the pipe. (I wonder how long that has been leaking? My propane bill has been outlandish this winter.) Yesterday T & J bought new pipe parts – elbow, union, 2 nipples, and sealer. I left the house to get my hair cut while they were underneath sawing and pounding. When I returned home we tested the stove burners, the water heater, the clothes dryer, and the furnace – they all came back on.

While T & J were wandering around under the house they saw water (or worse) seeping out of the main sewer waste pipe. They fixed that leak with some sort of sealer.

The toilet paper roll holder in the powder room has been wobbly since it was put in by my dear brother-in-law and my son. Every so often the holder has come apart when someone pulls sheets off the roll. It was startling. Now, thanks to Jerry the holder is firmly in place.

My stove top wasn’t level, and when I cooked an egg in a fry pan it always slid to the back of the pan. Tom leveled the range yesterday afternoon and my eggs should cook in the center of my pan from now on.

On their way out the back door, they pounded down the nails on the porch deck so I won’t trip.

And, they put the window-wash stuff in my car before they left. (I could have done that myself, but I was not sure which pipe to fill under the hood. Now I know.)

I’m starting a new list.