Richard Caldicott

This tickled me!

to try and answer some of the questions people have asked:

1) i am as bewildered about how i’ve managed this as you all are. i’ve comfortably done a light fingering/heavy lace 3ply before, but this is uhhh. new.

2) the fibre is a 25% penduncle silk/75% superfine merino commercial mix, and it’s extremely soft and extremely fine and extremely easy to draft, which i think helps with the fine-ness. i’m spinning on a small whorl, treadling pretty fast, and with basically no tension on the bobbin because otherwise it snaps the thread.

(relatedly, as someone who habitually spins pretty fine: when i bump into people who struggle with it, the issue is very often that they have their tension up way too high.)

3) this is what the singles look like (with the 3ply on the far left for comparison):

to my eye, they look like they should be plying up thicker, but! i guess not!

bonus picture of the yarn so far, which really does not capture the colour (green-grey-cream) of the subtle lustre of it well at all:

The rescue posted that this little family has been spotted several times since the introduction and they seem to be doing great 🥹

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.

I'm sorry but I am so morally disoriented by the concept of 'fake cheese' that I have trouble focusing on any other aspect of your message. What is fake cheese?? You say that like it's a perfectly understandable and emotionally neutral combination of words. I feel like I've just been handed a koan.

Then you add the phrase “tiny weenies" like it's the logical next step rather than a new psychological event. From my (very French) perspective the sentence "fake cheese to dip tiny weenies in" sounds like such a unique cultural artefact in itself, like a linguistic diorama to be displayed in a vitrine. This is not meant as a negative judgment of you or your country! just my earnest ethnographic confusion as I try to grapple with the concept of "tiny weenies" from a place of "fake cheese" trauma...

I had no idea fondue was seen this way in the US—I thought we (as a species) had a collective working definition of it, a sort of global consensus like the commutative property of addition, so the idea that in some corners of the world "fondue" means “fake cheese to dip tiny weenies in” has made me remember that you can just flay language off reality like skin. There's also a non-zero chance for this phrase to have activated a sleeper agent in Lausanne and authorised targeted elimination under the Académie Française’s emergency powers.

A Vancouver Coastal sea wolf (Canis lupus crassodon) on Goose Island, British Columbia, Canada

abandoned thermal power plant | Hungary