STRANGER THAN FICTION - Blog post from the past

It was well over 30 years ago, we arrived at a couple's apartment for a cookout. We were greeted with a shout to, "Come on in." We stepped into the living room and Sachel, ("Say-shell") was there on her living room floor sorting through spools of thread. In a pile of unwound sewing thread, surrounded by all of her sewing items, and her hubby was nowhere to be seen, but the odor of a lit charcoal grill was wafting through the open windows. She didn't even look up, she just held up a large wooden spool of thread that she was UNRAVELING and stated, "Save your wooden spools, someday they will be very valuable, plastic is taking over."

To explain our lifestyle at that time, and our mindset would take all day. Lets just call it an alternate lifestyle. We were in the process of defining what we believed and who we were and why we existed, and filtering everything through the media reports and the "establishment." On our search for significance in these strange times, we experimented with several popular trends, and made idiots of ourselves in some instances, but worrying about plastic taking over wooden spools simply didn't sound like a communist plot, or a conspiracy theory, or an underground cause, so I brushed off her comment, but like most conversations back then, she got obsessed on the topic. The evening went like this...new music from Santana, good food, and an entire evening discussing the consequences of future generations when plastic takes over the universe. We were glad to return home to our little NORMAL, whatever that was.

I said all this to say this - yep, Sachel was right, plastic took over.

Now wooden spools are so rare, you can order them from craft supply stores, buy them in bulk on eBay (Why do people start the bidding higher than $.99? I'd bid if they didn't already name their lowest price. gee whiz, 10 wooden spools for $5.99), but I just want about 6.

I remembered a project I used to do in CampFire girls when I was 8. We had a wooden spool - with 4 little nails in the top, and some yarn, and yes, we made i-cords



Kind of a Chinese Finger Trap, or a French Knit Braid, but it is simply an I-cord. I recently found an apparatis that serves as a spool, called a French Knitter, or an I-Cord Knitting Spool, it is very cute, and nicely painted. I would like to have 5 or 6 of these because the kids that hang around our trailer are really into little crafts after school. I'm trying to send them home with different things about once a week. This week we did polymer clay molds and made some backpack decor to hang on their school bags. CUTE!