First of all - I've again managed to not mention Talk Like A Pirate Day on this blog in time, and it has whooshed past, like dates (and deadlines!) tend to do. And that even though my Pirate Roberts hat pattern has been featured in a blogpost on the Interweave Press site - together with a bunch of other pirate-themed patterns. So if you are feeling pirate-y, or know someone who is in touch with their inner buccaneer and would care for such a knit, check out the link (there's also a free pattern for tiny colourful parrots)!

In other news, I'm busy (what's new, though) preparing for the next fair, which is in Weikersheim. That included sorting the new spindle whorls, and that led to my finally upgrading my sorting/storage boxes for a bit more space to pile up the whorls, and preventing them from mixing when the box is tilted.

(The mixing was previously prevented by stuffing the lid with paper, but that, obviously, cuts down on storage space...)

Having the whorls pre-sorted into 2 g wide slots is an enormous help for me - and it is so much fun to whip out one of these boxes at a fair when a customer is asking for a specific weight or weight range, and offer the whole selection.

I still tend to weigh the whorls again before sending them out for a shop order, trying to get as close to the gram weight requested as possible - but that's just my personal obsession with getting it as perfect as I can.

It's also interesting to see that I seem to have a preference for a certain weight range each time I make whorls, and that weight range does change from batch to batch. This time, it seems to have been at 16-22 g of whorl weight, which is not bad, though I could have used a few really heavy ones too.

Finally there's more restocking - such as restocking distaffs, and distaff DIY kits as well. Bands have already been cut...

...and now they need to be hemmed on one end, and then mounted onto the distaff stick, or packed up with the rest of the bits for the DIY sets. Nice work for podcast catch-up!