Thanks very much to each and every one of you for your kinds words about my poor old lady cat, who I would much rather remember as the mighty Inanna. We are all adapting, though from time to time, I admit I keep thinking I see her out of the corner of my eye (but then it turns out to just be dirty laundry or something). So let’s see if we can’t bring the mood up a little bit today.

I’m told that here in southern Ohio, it’s unlikely that the spring which has set in is only a cruel hoax, tempting us to shed the outerwear prematurely, weakening our resistance to the inevitable April blizzard. Spring, they tell me, is probably really here; the April blizzard doesn’t happen. So this means that the first flower of spring, here…

…is not going to be poking its way through frost and snow suddenly, and the buds on the trees are for real, and it is in fact time for me to put some thought into which shorts fit and which ones don’t. And break in my new sandals and rebuild a flip-flop callus. It was in the lower 80s Fahrenheit yesterday afternoon! So that’s when I took a few sunny-day pictures.

I couldn’t decide whether that one should be yarn porn or weather porn, so it’s a bit of both…

And this one’s the pure yarn porn. 640 yards, 2 ounces, a resupplied Chasing Rainbows merino/tussah.

But then, too, I’m clearing out a few things I’ve had lying around in my personal stash for what seems like aeons. I need to reorganize and it’s time for the every-few-months fiber rotation; nothing in my stash goes unmoved for long, because fiber that sits is where the moths can breed, and I’m not having that. So here’s some Ashland-Bay-looking multicolour wool top:

…which also got to go outside for the pretty day…

4 ounces, 2-ply, 400 yards, aka 1600 ypp, at 15 wpi, variegated.

Oh, and that reminds me, Melanie had asked:

Are all your Majacraft bobbins wood? Do they spin any differently than the plastic ones or do you just prefer the wood?

Nope — most of my Majacraft bobbins are the standard plastic ones. I do have some very very old ones that came with my used “Parts” Suzie, which I think is presently buried under a toppled sack of mill-ends (I did say I needed to bring order to the yarn room, right? Because I do) — and those very very old ones are wood ends with a PVC core, but I mostly don’t use them. The wood bobbins that have been seen so much lately around here are the lace bobbins. For most purposes, I actually prefer the plastic bobbins, but when it comes to really getting lacy, I use the lace flyer and that requires the small, fat-core wood bobbins.

And that in turn reminds me I failed to answer another question for Gert:

I have a question about the the high speed adapter. I noticed you have one on your majacraft. I was looking for one and find that there are not many people selling them. I emailed majacraft and they said they are phasing them out and selling the high speed whorl. My question is what do you think? Do they compare in speed? Should I get a high speed adapter?

My first reaction to this was simply NOOOOOOOOOOO!

If you like to have high flyer speeds, my vote is YES! Get a high speed adapter head, as quickly as you can, and that is an absolute disaster that they’ll discontinue it. From reviewing the specs on the high-speed whorl, no, it’s just not as fast as the accelerating head. I’d bet it’s less prone to slippage under certain circumstances, like with a Woolee Winder at super-top-speed, and I’d bet that most spinners just rarely want to spin as fast as I do; it can’t have been a huge seller, which is too bad. I should have bought two.