And with that deadly dull picture, so begins this, my 150th post here.  One thing’s for sure – when I started the very first post on July 14th 2011, I had no idea at all we’d end up with 794 page views on our busiest day so far, have 624 comments, 318 email followers, and visitors from all over the planet.  Literally.  Today’s so far have come from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Ireland, Philippines, Sweden, Guatemala, Japan, Viet Nam, Greece, South Korea, Netherlands, Tunisia, India, Spain, Iceland and Pakistan.

Anyhow.

With this being the 150th post, I hoped to write something terribly profound or incredibly interesting, maybe even both, but alas we’ve been somewhat overtaken by events here of late and I’ve been up past my ears in chores since before Christmas.  What with a major re-vamp of my office and the sorting-out of the Elnas cluttering it up, Elsie’s major shake-up of The Sewing Room, and all manner of other lesser things accomplished, I was quite looking forward to spending some time on the puter yesterday or today by way of a little light relief.  But then the weather changed.

It finally stopped raining.  The fog cleared.  The sky brightened.  Heck, the sun almost came out!  So yesterday we made a start on the two big stacks of round timber which we scrounged during the course of last year, and by the time the chickens were thinking of going to bed yesterday, we were halfway through it.  And we’d axed up what we cut.

Today it was even more like Spring.  13°C this afternoon, to be precise.  On January 3rd.!  We even had a solitary honey bee buzzing around, presumably in a state of confusion.  Jolly nice it was too to be chainsawing and stacking logs without our jackets on, but I’m getting really worried about the rhubarb.  If we don’t get a proper hard frost for a few weeks before much longer, it’s not going to have any proper flavour, which bodes ill indeed for my favourite jam (after damson).  But whatever, two days work and we’ve saved about £140 on this winter’s heating bill.  And been entertained by Boris the resident blackbird’s attempts to woo the very pretty young lady blackbird from over the fence at the back, who seems to be playing hard to get.

Ah yes.  Spool pins.

Whilst scratting about the other day, I found a couple of packs of brand new modern copy spool pins which are now surplus to requirements, so if you have need of one, whether threaded or tapered fit, you’ll now find them listed in Elsie’s Bargain Basement.

Finally for now, two cautions about spool pins and vintage Singers.  One is that the taper-fit type do indeed just tap into place with a judicious whack from a hammer, but if you’re not used to doing stuff like that and you’re fitting one in the bed position on a 201 (i.e. for the spool you wind your bobbin off), be sure to stand a magazine or a bit of card up against the column so that your hammer can’t possibly clout the paintwork on the way down.

And do make sure that you’re going to fit that nice shiny new spool pin in the right place.  If you’re not sure whether that hole’s for a spool pin or for oiling, check out your book of words.  If you don’t have a book of words, hit the interweb, look at lots of pictures of your particular model … and hope that they haven’t all got the spool pins in the wrong place!