Did you have a good holiday?

One thing I'm grateful for...  when I get sick, it generally waits until a weekend. 

So yeah, I was sick over the long weekend.  I still had to go to work on Monday, but at least there was no one else there to infect.  I was also able to focus on things that did not take a lot of brain power.

Finally got over the ick, but it took a couple more days before the annoying tickle in my throat finally went away.

During that time?  Did nothing.  Didn't knit, didn't spin, barely read anything.  Barely ate anything.  Mostly I slept. 

After finally feeling better, I have been working more on the beaded cap for my sister.

Still don't have any pictures on this computer to post.  I'll try to remember to do that tomorrow.

I have done 3 tests now.  One on wire, and I don't think that wire will work.  I'm afraid it will put too much stress on the edges of the antique beads.

One on fireline, which is a spun from gel polyeurathane.  (It's made kind of like cotton candy, where in the case of candy, sugar is heated up and spun out at great speeds creating "threads".  Gel spun polyeurathane is created the same way.  Heated, and then "spun" into threads.  But it's almost like extrusion because it can be done so that the resulting line is a consistent thickness.)  This one is so far my favorite because it has beautiful drape and flows like the beads were on silk.

I have one test on silk, but the silk thread is so thick that in places the beads are nearly stiff because the thread had to go through so many times. 

I'm going to do one more test on silk to test for drape again.  I might even take apart the silk test and redo it with finer silk thread.

I also spent more time studying the pictures of the original cap and discovered that while my threading method works very well, it's not the way the original was threaded.  So I need to redo my threading patterns and start over.  Again.  On the upside, one of my biggest worries about my threading method was that it was still going to put too much pressure on the edges of the beads.  The original method will alleviate that worry.

Next weekend I need to take the cat back to the vet for his booster shots and I am hoping to go out to one of the parks and take a walk with my camera.  We'll see what the weather is like.

Yesterday I decided not to go out because I managed to kill 4 small appliances in less than an hour and I didn't want to do anymore damage that was going to cost lots of money to fix.