Oh heck

It's Friday already and I haven't found anything useful to rant about this week.

Not a great deal going on around here. In lieu of much knitting or gardening (too hot) I've been winding yarn. I have a swift and one of those little Royal hand-crank ball winders, so I can turn cones and skeins and hanks and whatall into tidy little centre-pull yarncakes.

It is not an exciting activity, any more than going out and digging a large hole in the ground is exciting, but it is tremendously satisfying. I haven't quite wound up my whole stash yet, but it's been interesting reacquainting myself with some of it. There's quite a bit I bought while I was in Scotland -- odd mill ends of jumperweight Shetland, mostly -- including a whole cone of Shetland in a colour called 'mallard' which is both somewhat darker and bluer than most mallards I ever met, but no matter.

There's also a half-hogshead's worth of leaf-green worsted weight wool that was stashed among my grandmother's things. During the final emptying out of her storage units, Maman sent me home with some boxes of 'needlework stuff' among which were two large metal boxes. You know those tins that fancy cookies come in, around Christmas time? Boxes like those, only much larger, perhaps 14x14" and about 8" deep.

Lor', I am nothing but approximations today. Approximations without pictures, even. I'm sorry.

Anyway.

One of those metal boxes had the aforementioned green yarn in it. It looks like my grandmother started something and then got annoyed with it, pulled it out, and balled it up for later. Those balls being messy (the sort of thing you do when you're annoyed with a project and want to rip it out and put away the yarn), and I being curious, I pulled the yarn out and wound it up with the ballwinder.

It's still in good shape -- no dry rot, and no moth damage thanks to my grandmother's religious use of mothballs. It's not a squishy cuddly I-want-to-roll-in-it yarn, but the sort of wool that, if properly cared for, will make a garment for the ages.

No idea what that that garment would be or even if I'm the person to make it. But there it is. Pure potentiality.