Combing and Reading

This morning I took my tea coffee out to the deck to do a little wool prep.  I had both tea and coffee this morning and honestly, that was so long ago...

On to wool prep.

I took my big bag of fibre,  the combs and a book out to the deck and I sat down and loaded the combs and combed away.

Each batch of fibre is getting at least four times through the combs to get everything nice and airy like the first time I was combing.  The results of that are shown below and my big bag of ready to spin fibre is slowly growing.

My combs are not the generously sized ones, but are mini combs.  Each batch is fairly small so it doesn't go fast.  There is part of me that wishes I had invested in larger combs when I bought these, but honestly, I have had these for at least 7 years and this is the first time I am really using them.  These will do quite well enough.  I can process about 2 hours with these combs before I have to stop because my hands are giving me that old funky feeling.  Larger combs might mean fewer loads on the combs to get the job done but with a larger combs extra weight, I could do it for less time.  I think it evens out in the end.  

I'm really loving what I am producing right now and am looking forward to spinning it.

As I do the combing, I am listening to an audio book.  A good friend told our email group about a writer he highly admired on that writer's passing.  I had never heard of him before though he wrote very much in the genre of John LeCarre and writers that I loved like Robert Ludlum and Helen MacInnes.  He was writing at the same time as them and it just seems odd that I missed him, but I did.  It's kind of nice though, because now when I most need it, I have a new to me and very good writer to listen to.  His name was Anthony Price and if you are interested, I highly recommend Other Paths to Glory.  It was very highly recommended to me and though it was not his first novel, the best seemed like a good place to start and see if I would enjoy his work. And I do.  I am reading another novel now called The Old Vengeful, also by Price.  Again, very good.  If you like the thinking man's thriller genre as I do.  He wrote some 18 novels so lots to read there.

I kind of like this routine of knit a bit in the morning, then grab a coffee and go out to do some combing.  If the weather holds, I think I will do more.