Sunday, June 24, 2012

hot weather spinning, angora and improvements

How hot is too hot to spin? As the years go by, I am starting to think....
maybe never.
(leaving out extremes, of course, I am just talking about average summers as we have known them, not as they appear to be morphing)
Anyway, now days, most folks have central heat and air, so summer spinning is really not a question of comfort. But if you are like me, and don't have such modern amenities, you may have discovered cool places to sit and spin, maybe with your feet in the water. Or maybe you have figured out a way to use a very small fan pointed just at your face so that it doesn't blow the fiber around. If you are really jonesing to spin, you could always wear one of those cooling neck wraps...which got me to thinking about knitting something for that purpose....has anyone ever done that? What is inside those neck wraps, anyway, that keeps them cold but not dripping?
Old fashioned shade is a pretty nice thing, too. Here you can be pretty comfortable if you are elevated above the chiggers and oriented in such a way that catches the breezes coming down the holler.
Which brings me to the bunnies.
Summer is always a time you have to be extra concerned about the Angora rabbits, making sure they have plenty of water, and shade, and breezes to be comfortable till their favorite season arrives. And because I check on them so often in the summer, it makes me want to spin angora, which is kinda crazy and perverse since it is one of the very warmest fibers, many times warmer than wool.
So that is what I am spinning right now, and I as I spin, I am still turning over in my head different possible ways of prefelting singles of angora before you ply it with wool......

Oh, and about my shoulder, it is better! It turns out that in order to give it the rest it needed, I needed a shoulder brace that actually fit, and guess what worked the best? An old fashioned 6 inch wide ace bandage. I watched a couple of videos on youtube on how to wrap your shoulder, and figured out that the problem with wrapping it without assistance is just the getting it started part. So, I sewed an upper arm sized tube in one end, slipped it on and voila, very easy to finish the wrap yourself. Wrapping it while I worked, then applying the ice, then rest and the herbal anti-inflamatories have done wonders. Interestingly, so has kayaking, which you wouldn't think, but I think it loosens the arm up some.
The third element that has helped me on the road to healing is transitioning over to natural anti-inflammatories: white willow bark and curamin, they seem to help increase circulation in a way that the over the counter nsaid s don't... upward and onward!

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