I am the Product of my Parentage, and it is fabulous!

One day, a day like many, many others, I went for a walk around town.  I'd gotten tired of hanging out with my roommates  in the house.  There are others, but they aren't as photogenic, so there you go.  This walk started out much like any other; it was a hot, dry day, and I don't remember for sure, but at that point I don't think I had a lot of running water (and by not a lot I mean a trickle that ran for a few hours/day).

     As I was walking along, admiring the colors of the plants and birds, the general Krohn Conservatory-ness that is my town, I noticed one tree in particular.  This tree didn't have a lot of leaves, but it had a number of odd green balls, a couple of which were opening to show something suspiciously fluffy and white!  Do you know what it was?

    A walk or two later, maybe a week, I passed the same tree, and what do you know, but there were more of these balls opening, and white fluffballs abounded.  I collected several clumps, and on the course of my walk, picked the seed-type things from the fluff, and started playing with the fibers that remained- before long, I had my first 4" of home-made, freshly picked cotton string!

     Well, that was just too exciting, so a while later, on another walk, I collected approximately a softball's worth of cotton, and spend 5 hours with a couple of movies, de-seeding my winnings.

     But, what to do with the fiber.  Some intervening experimentation with lesser quantities proved that manually spinning worked, but was rather uncomfortable, time consuming, and very, very lumpy.  But I haven't seen any spinning wheels here, and I believed it a bit above my skills to build...not to mention the fact that I'm running out of room in my house, and it isn't exactly a multi-purpose device, unless you have one that also houses VHS tapes...which still wouldn't do me much good, since as a developing country, Panama seems to have skipped from live performance to DVD.  Preliminary google searches for drop spindles were disheartening, as they called for specially made components, or at good quality 'common' things that would be easy enough to get in the US, but here in the Campo, not so much.  

Spindle, Thread, and COTTON

But then, my luck changed with a youtube video of a drop spindle made of a pencil, a piece of cardboard, and a screwhook.  I still had to adapt it a bit, but ended up with my very own, very non-aesthetically pleasing-yet-essentially-functional Drop Spindle!  And with that, here are a couple pictures of my de-seeded cotton, and spindle.  :-D

Pencil, tuna lid, random jewelry finding, and Homemade Cotton Thread!

Other recent achievements: Lighting and cooking chicken on my grill, and making it successfully through 5 of 6 classes at my Friday Primaria.  6th graders are still being difficult.  Still trying to figure out what to do with them...so, anybody have tips on how to maintain energy, interest, and enthusiasm in the last class of the day (12:15-1PM)?  1 student in particular is of the repeat-everything-I-say and not-listening-and-then-complain-of-not-understanding-instruction variety.  While I have you attention, any tips for a joint pre-k + kinder class would be welcome.  Or 1-5th grades too.. ;-)

Que tengan buen día! (Have a great day!)