Ssshhh, genius at work

It has been hectic here at Fiberwizard central. Rather like a duck... it all looks calm and serene on the surface, but we're paddling like hell underneath !
Knitting for the holidays continues, fiber dyeing goes on every single day almost, I continue to see clients at my office, K keeps the fiber orders shipping out each day, and delightful guests have come and gone (more about that sometime soon)... all in all, it has been a fabulous month.

Once again tonight , as we did on thanksgiving weekend, we are running on generator power. (as in, the wind has knocked down power lines all over our area, and we'll be lucky if we have power within a few days)...
The winds are whipping around at about 70 mph, it sounds like a freight train roaring by - and the great cedars (30 feet plus) are holding on for dear life. so far, so good. The weather forecasters are saying that the worst of the storm will hit in about 6 hours...... worse than this? yikes. I figured that I had best do a post now, and be safe.
Perhaps now is a good time to slip back in time a couple of weeks, and show you some of what went on in the thanksgiving weekend here at wizard central.......
I was fortunate to have my genius brother Peter visit with us over the long thanksgiving weekend. And he had been working for three months on a design for a fiber-drying system for our wet wool. It all began with him puzzling over how amazingly long it took to dry the superwash that I hand dye. (we're talking 3-5 days depending on the humidity out here)

Tah dah!!! may I present, "otto" (so dubbed by K, after much contemplation...it needed a name after all !) Oh... you wanted to see the whole thing?.. nah, you have to scroll to the end to see that, this is just my "power button" (cool eh - I feel totally in control here :-)

So here is the pictoral view.. I just cannot resist showing you, as it is brilliant. My brother Peter designed the entire thing. It is a fiber drying system for my hand dyed fiber. It has eight racks, and can hold about 16 pounds of wet fiber.
I simply cannot wait to try it out - but alas, out garage is not yet quite finished, and the weather (well, some of you have read about what we 've been having here) the weather currently stinks. I must wait until it gets above about 50 degrees to give "Otto" a whirl - and hopefully that will be soon!

Here's the beginning - notice the gorgeous weather
the design was perfect - the weather was holding... yet suddenly it began to get dark and look like this:
it quickly became darker and darker outside....
do you think that deterred the genius (my brother Pete ?nayh.. 'course not. he kept on working through the dark and the rain..


and eventually he worked thru the snow as well.....

BUT... "otto" was finished...... tah dah!!
So the fans blown the air up through the holes, thru the shelves, and out the top ducts, thus drying the fiber in record time- prettty clever, eh?!

I cannot wait to try him out. K kept on walking around that monday calling my brother "otto-man" .. heh heh, I know, it's silly, yet true. We have a rather goofy sense of humor here, but it works for us.

Three cheers to my brother Peter - designer extrodinaire - persevering through rain and sleet and snow. (I guess it's a good thing that I fed him well that weekend eh? ! :-)



All that hard work has me totally tuckered out - phew..... time to rest now. - Emily