Interesting spinning article

http://tinyurl.com/cm2mh
( relevant picture from years ago )

It used to be I was such a weirdo for the things I did - now it's becoming trendy. It's a bit of an uncomfortable feeling, actually...

selenite says I'm keeping about a decade ahead of the crowds. Heh. Guess so. Also reminds me of when dragonfly stuff became suddenly and disconcertingly popular.

Why I don't want to knit for sale

I frequently get people who look at my work and want to encourage me to try to turn it into a business or work for sale. And generally people don't seem to get why I don't want to. I appreciate the compliment, that they think my work is that good. But they just don't get the logistics of it. Someone who doesn't do fiber arts doesn't understand the amount of time invested into the work.

So I finally have an example. I've done a couple of lace bags as gifts - this pattern
http://pics.livejournal.com/celticdragonfly/pic/00088yd6/g6

and have been asked to do some more sorta on commission. And was asked things like how long does it take me. Trouble is, I don't sit down and do it all uninterrupted, I have to do it around kids and life and stuff in bits and pieces.

Due to the simple shape of this project, I was actually able to have Karl time me on a small part of it last night, and extrapolate to the total time for the project. It came out to 7.5 hours. Now, that's assuming I didn't have any mistakes and have to frog it out and restart or tink back and redo some rows. I'm not perfect. I'm pretty good, but not perfect. So figure more like 8 hours of work. That's a lot of my time. And that's not even taking materials cost into account - another thing that people tend to underestimate.

And, when I'm working on that kind of project, it's frustrating that I have to stick with it, I can't go work on another project or something for ME. And yes, work can be like that, and if I was getting paid reasonable rates per hour then it would be worth dealing with it. But if not, why?

A swift surprise

So, there's this mystery package....

T'other day it arrived. I had a friends over, and we found it at the front door while I was walking them out. I just saw a triangular box with a yarn store type name on it, from Oregon. Well, I'd just ordered a couple of yarn purchases from two different stores, one of which was somewhere in the Pacific northwest, so I figured it was one of those, think no more about it, great, I'll open that in the morning when I'm ready to cast on.

Well. I went to open it. It was a long box for the amount of yarn, but I didn't think much about it, just figured whatever, that's what they had handy. Then I opened it and pulled out a wooden handle... what? Found the front of the box and opened up the little packing list thing.

Oh. Oh MY. This box contains a medium Swedish swift.

Is this for me? I didn't order a swift. I covet a swift, sure. Did someone send me one?

Did they possibly send it to me by mistake? And if so, do I have to send it back?