and the beat goes on..

Great progress has been made and some of the stress has diminished. For now, anyway ;)

It totally helped that it did NOT rain today! Oh, and our visit with old friends LaNita and Penny in Santa Fe was wonderful. It couldn't be anything else though. We love them. LaNita was there for a show of her new line of copper fountains and .. she GAVE ME ONE! WOW.. I''l photograph it when I decide where it will live.

I that wasn't enough, another friend sent me one of his paintings. I don't deserve their generousity, but I am very, very honored.

Back to the making of stuff at my house... After Denny built the (WONDERFUL) table for my beater, I realized with real dismay that it had been thrown off and that I was going to have to do a little grinding in again to make it efficient once more. It's running great again, but I may have to hit Mark Lander up for a new grinding plate sooner than later.

I kept layering the pulp on my "walls" and I finished up 3 more batches of pulp. One of abaca, one of sisal (above left, before beating) and another batch comprised of bits of fibers lefteover from one process or another. It ended up being cattails, green jute, abaca, cotton, and lawn grass. about half of it was "half stuff", half beaten fibers that sometimes crawl up around the drum in the beater and hide there. I usually pull that out and set it aside for just a moment like this. The pulp looks as though it will be a very pretty green, but the samples are still quite wet as of this entry.

I've pulled another 100 samples or so in the last week. I pull them right out of the beater vat (see above, right) varying stages so that I can decide if I want to keep letting it beat.


On Sunday, I dyed several batches of orange raffia with some dyes I bought on sale from American Science and Surplus. They chose the colors, but the colors were perfect:garnet, brown and green. The process couldn't have been easier (drop it all in the pot once the water was hot and simmer 30+ minutes). I even threw some of the "drippings" from the pan into some cotton pulp--and that worked quite nicely too!


I'm fading all of a sudden. But.. I want to mention that my friend, Crystal, has listed some roving over at Esty...

There. I mentioned it ;)