It’s pushing 100 degrees Fahrenheit here again today, still with essentially no rain. It’s officially being called a “moderate drought” now, and it’s pretty much for sure there’ll be negative effects on crops — and they’ve said “corn” out loud, which is terrible. What if the sweet corn is all mealy? Talk about a summer disaster!

Apart from my own selfish woes, it is really sad to see, with fields of stunted crop and brown expanses of basically no hay and sad-looking pasture animals. We’re down something like 6.5 inches on how much rain we normally would have gotten in the past 6 weeks. Those of you in rainy, even floody, places, feel free to send your rainy thoughts to the Ohio Valley.

On the other hand, the really good news is Cardzilla’s new motor should be in tomorrow (thank you, Bob at Lebanon Electric Motor). I opted to buy a new, identical motor, and see about having the gearbox on the old one repaired and keeping that one around as a spare. I hate not having spares! You’d think I’d know by now. And I do; but that doesn’t mean, apparently, that I always provision appropriately.

As soon as the motor is in and Cardzilla’s back up to snuff, I’m going to be thrilled to be getting back to blending. Since I’ve been dyeing silk like a madwoman, I’ve been generating a ton of silk seconds (where the final weight is too little, or it just got too beat up in the rinse or something else causes it to fail quality control). Normally I use these in blending, but I’d piled up rather more of them than I really meant to over the past couple of weeks, so I decided to spin up a few of them for example purposes and sale. In retrospect, I should have taken “before and after” photos, too! So I probably will for the remainder. Here’s a teaser “before” shot:

Once those dry, I’ll show you how came out — they’re laceweight singles, and they’re really pretty.

Oh, have I mentioned that Kaylee is getting big?

And ever more inclined to stick her face directly into the camera lens. This occurred while I was trying to take a one-handed “fixing a plying problem” shot, of course. Kaylee felt strongly that she was more important. That’s why she’s glaring, and her eyes appear normal size.

I haven’t forgotten about the plying series! I’m just working on the “common problems” photos, which is tricky! See:

After a while, it can be hard to force problems to occur when you’ve gotten so used to avoiding ’em! That’s the start of uneven wind-on. I need to really overexaggerate this somehow; that’s just not dramatic enough at all.

Lastly, my cuticles are all messed up. Too much sticking them in acidic exhausted dyebath to carefully remove silk, I fear. To look at my fingers, you’d think it was the dead of winter!