I'm recently back from Gulf Wars, which was a lot of fun. I took a class on flax prep which mostly confirmed that I do understand the basics of the process, but I didn't take advantage of the main opportunity, which was to try it myself. On the third hand, it did give me an interesting opportunity to see one improvised method of making a flax break which looked very useful ...for when we have a bigger house. I do not want to buy a workbench just so I can fill it with baseboard "teeth", mostly because then I still have to store it.

I was very pleased that Caoilfhionn won the first-given (and therefore maybe biggest?) prize at the Open A&S for the goldwork squirrels I commissioned for her. Yay! And now I will have award winning squirrels!

I also talked to Nikolena briefly at lunch as we were packing up to go, and she told me that she's planning to bring all her silk gear with her to Lilies, which is why I'm now changing my opinion of the war from near-complete lack of interest to Want! I appear to have (pun intended) gotten the bug. Alas. I don't have a particular interest in Lilies, but I do very much want to do more silk reeling with Nikolena. Even more intriguing, a silk worker from the Midrealm is being Laureled at Pennsic and she and Michael Cook will be doing a silk reeling demo in front of the vigil, which also significantly ups my interest in going to Pennsic.

Actually, I'm pretty seriously considering trying to raise worms. It turns out that it's possible to buy Silkworm Chow as well as eggs and such, which gets me past my major objection, which is that I don't have a food supply on hand.

Google has found me a site that will sell me 1 ton (minimum) of cocoons for $9,000. That might be a wee bit excessive unless I decide that my real ambition is to remake the Northshield pavilion in silk. Doing the math, that ends up being about a million cocoons, assuming we're talking metric tons. I bet if we emptied the garage there would be space...

More seriously, I am probably going to make an order from Treenway soon, because right now I have a bag with about 25 cocoons and that's just not enough to really bother setting the whole kit up for. I just have to figure out how many I actually want. And it sounds like Giulia might also be interested, so bulk pricing is possible-to-likely.