A box for her Jewels

When Kitty Daddy brought home the bat house kit for Bug, he also brought a kit to make a small treasure chest for Bean. Mama did the gluing and nailing, but Bean tackled the painting all by herself. She ended up painting each side a different color, so we needed pictures to show off everything, including Little Miss Ham's many moods:




I suspect that she is destined for The Theatre (said in a haughty British accent). She is definitely our little performer. She is always singing and yesterday, she danced the entire way to the grocery store and back.

We have decided that the box is to be a jewelry box and we are planning to take her dollar from Grandma to the dollar store after Farmers' Market tomorrow to see if we can buy some new jewelry. Once things are more put away, I have some fabric somewhere that would make a perfect jewelry box lining for it. You know, to protect her precious plastic jewelry. ;o)

Since the end of the month sneaked in amongst the moving chaos, I will slip in the August Spin My Spindle update:

Spin My Spindle August 2008
Activity:	Spinning
Fiber:	Targhee
Spindle:	Schacht
Amount:	18 grams

A pretty quiet month by recent standards, but it still represents a fair amount of spinning. The targhee singles are quite thin, so even a gram is a bit of spinning. I did a gram here and there over the first few days of moving, but before long, my arms were so tired from hauling that I put my spindle down.

The upside of the break was that I ended up doing a lot of reading about spinning instead. I am about halfway through Color in Spinning by Deb Menz (a local, no less!) and having wonderful fantasies about setting up a dye studio [Aside: Don't get excited...it is SO FAR down on my to do list, it may never see light of day!] and spent much of the driving time delivering loads between Fitchburg and Stoughton looking at colors in the landscape and thinking how I could translate that into handspun yarn. I also read through Color Works, also by Deb Menz and have put it on my wish list of books to own. It is shorter and more general than the spinning book, but a nice overview of colors in crafts and has some handy tools for describing color in the back. I have also been reading the Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning. I had this one out from the library shortly after buying my first spindle and couldn't make a dent in it. Now I am nearly halfway through and enjoying it immensely. Being a drop spindler, I feel I should confess that I have been skimming through the parts that are wheel-specific and more technical. If I ever decide to tackle a spinning wheel, I will definitely re-read this book!