Happy knitter.

Long day, but good. I just walked in the door 10 minutes ago, having driven straight from work to an auction an hour away. At first, when I got there, mom thought I'd be disappointed because all the yarn was rug yarn, and they sold it early outside in the rain, but all in all, I did well. For $85, I got:

-a box of icord makers (I think there are 6 of them)
-2 tabletop looms, 1 simple, 1 compound (I think. I really know nothing about weaving. Guess it's time to learn.)
-a box of odd purse handles and weird plastic items
-a jar of cool old white buttons
-a five foot tall yarn winder of some sort. I'm not sure exactly what it's for, but I'm sure I can use it to measure yardage of recycled yarn at the very least

and....wait for it....drum roll.....

-a 1920s hand crank circular sock knitting machine.

Yep, I got it. That's why I drove an hour. And I got it for $75. These things sell on ebay for several hundred dollars each. I could have probably gotten it even cheaper, but I chose to go the route of high opening bid so no one would bid against me, and it worked. All the parts are there, including the original wooden shipping box, and the instruction booklet which contains a whole stack of correspondence between the original owner and the manufacturer, for whom she was consignment knitting socks/hose between 1925 and 1928. This is way cool.

I'm going to try to set it up sometime this weekend. It has a fair bit of rust, so it needs some work, but there's a woman in Ohio who restores these, and I met her last year at the Wool Gathering in Yellow Springs, so I have her info somewhere. One of the carriages (I think the ribber) is virtually untouched though, so I should be able to test it out soon.

My one disappointment is that I didn't bid up the treadle spinning wheel higher. The woman who bought it got it for about $35.00. I don't have great aspirations of spinning yet, but I know some people who do, and that would have been a fantastic beginner wheel.

And I could have had a fantastic floor model compound loom for about $80. I'm sure those things retail for at least $600 or so. But I had no clue how to work one, and we weren't sure it would fit in mom and dad's SUV-thing. Not to mention, where the hell would I put that? But it was quite cool.

Now, to bed. I'm working a half day tomorrow to get ready for sis's shower on Saturday, and I have lots of stuff to get done before she gets here tomorrow afternoon.

The joys of box lots

Some time ago, automat76 expressed an interest in collecting religious artwork. Specifically versions of The Last Supper, and holographic art in particular.

So imagine my surprise when I was digging through what I thought was just a box lot of picture frames and purse handles to find these at the bottom.

( Behold! )

Wow. The weird thing, is that she already has a much larger framed copy of the first one, in a frame with a light. The second two are something referred to on the back of them as "3-D Lentographs." They're really impressive in their depth. Really.

So now, she has been inducted into the weird thing my family likes to call the "auction gift." :-)