Speaking of the magnetic properties of water and other things

 But first the winnowed storage area 

Quite a bit of this stuff is Gary's. I've always left this door unlocked so neighbors can borrow and return tools rather than buying them. So other tools have migrated here to join mine, for the same use.

Sunday morning on the  antfree deck.

Everything's booming now and there's been rain, always a help. It's such a pleasure to just sit, look, listen, breathe.

About lucets, here's a gallery of what occurred to me just now and what happened after that. Here's the grabber just innocently hanging about.

Look at the working end

Too big for yarn, why not rags

A rag rope, wobbly first try. There are a couple of slight drawbacks, one being the grabber is designed to hold on, not let loops slip off, and another is the unwieldy length of it.  Also the size of it, which is why I tore cotton strips rather than wrangle yarn. And you need a hole to start the yarn through, so I had to improvise there. Other than that, Mrs Lincoln.

But all in all, I think this was a good adaptation. And the process, slipping loops over, is like spool knitting, except that you turn the tool a one-eighty to create each new loop.  

Now I need a real lucet. But meanwhile I made a cardboard one to try 

Notice I put the hole in the wrong place. Then I made another one higher up, and that worked better.

I need a wooden lucet, to keep the tension steady. You can see the irregular loops where the cardboard kept buckling, didn't hold tight enough. But it was okay to learn on. And with a polished wood tool, the yarn will slip over the horns better and feed through the hole smoothly.

I learned a lot from these two experiments.

Happy day everyone, learn something. I think the results are less important than the fun of trying something like this braid -making, where you're developing skills.  You're doing what people did in medieval times.