I Fail Hard at Tour de Fleece

Yeah. That's what I did there. I spun the Sedona merino all to singles, then navajo-plied about half of it (and immediately started playing with it to the exclusion of all else), and I spun one of my eight ounces of the Plum Possum. One. And that's it. So I fail hard at Tour de Fleece.

I did, however, order some Tagua nut slices, and some whole ones as well. Tagua is also called "vegetable ivory", because while when fresh it is edible and has the consistancy of jello, when it dries it is very, VERY similar to ivory. It has a grain to it, it cuts easily if you know how to cut things, and it's really, really pretty. So I got those in today, dug the dremel out of some boxes, and went to town.

I ended up making two tatting shuttles out of two of the four slices I had ordered. They're both teardrop shaped, though one has channels reaching towards the tip of the shuttle, and one has channels going straight out to the sides, and the one with the channels going up keeps catching on the ring thread, like every stitch, so I'm scrapping that plan and chalking it up to a learning experience. Since that one's "spare" now anyway, I doodled a little bit with some henna on it, so we'll see if that takes at all. If this is something that works out, I may start making them fairly regularly, and putting them on etsy. If there's even a market for this kind of thing. Do people still buy tatting shuttles, even? I know I hadn't hardly touched mine since I started knitting.

Anyways, that's all the news for now. The Sedona yarn is destined to become a few of Hansi Singh's patterns (octopus, squid, garden snail, maybe Nessie), and if all turns out well, I should grab a few pics of a hand-carved, hand-hennaed tatting shuttle!