Bale up!

I’ve said it often enough, so you’d think I’d believe it by now - boodle has its own level. It is a living (and probably sentient) thing that resents being reduced, except by the natural attrition of finished objects.

I’ve spent the better part of the last couple of weeks weeding the stash. Odd balls, colour collections of odd balls, garment amounts in weights/colours I won’t use, novelty and other fun yarns, feltable yarns, and wool that, while the shine has not quite gone off it, has resisted attempts to be transformed into the wonderful item I envisaged for it – all have found good and welcoming homes. This was a considerable undertaking and the yarn went out in ripples and small waves.

Also, we are going away next week with an overseas visitor, also a fibre fiend. We are taking her to a couple of woollen mills and some independent fibre and yarn pushers. I was prepared to be extremely strong (particularly in the face of the stash enhancement aversion therapy just undergone) and had worded TOF up on the need for him to not enable me.

Is it fair, then, that a little problem of tenses in the English language landed me with an incoming tsunami?

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of TOF’s emailed him:

“I am having the black sheep shorn this weekend, would you like the wool for your girlfriend?”

Oooh, a black fleece, we thought, that would be lovely and immediately accepted the kind offer. I popped out and bought a 150 litre plastic bin to store it in.  I joked with TOF that it should come in 3 bags full.  Not so funny now!

This morning it became apparent that English is an imprecise and, frankly, bloody dangerous language. Here’s the last of a series of email between my benefactor and TOF.

“You seem to be somewhat a tad vague on the amount of wool.........You know those wool bails, well, it is one of them filled with 11 sheeps wool plus a separate yellow pellet bag, which contains the white rams wool. The wool bail is not compressed so it able to be squeezed, but still, it is quite heavy and quite large.”

Tonight, instead of going to a movie as planned (in a real cinema with snuggle seats, as opposed to the lecture theatre we usually see films in), we wrangled a bale and a bit of raw, smelly, glorious fleece.