The wood is light and hard, shiny too [...] I heard somewhere that
these bobbins were made from boxwood. Is that even reasonable? And what is
boxwood anyway?
Boxwood is a bush, so, yes, it would be *eminently* reasonable to make bobbins from the wood, provided you could find blanks which were thick/long enough. Wood "harvested" from bushes (and, also, from fruit trees) tends to be more "compacted" (fewer pores, smaller pores, more weight for the size) than wood from big trees.
The older the bush, the more "compacted" the wood, and the better the chance to find branches sizeable enough to provide bobbin-blanks.
There's (or so I'm told <g>) a difference between "boxwood" and "English boxwood"; the latter grows bigger, and lives longer (the English boxwood at W&L is over 100yrs old; when some drunken louts of students destroyed a couple, the "flap" went on for months <g>); the first grows *faster*, so is more likely to be planted in the suburbs. I can testify to the "grows faster" aspect; I'm told (DH's in charge of "things outside) that we have *both* varieties in our own yard, and the "English boxwood" doesn't do *squat*, in the screening department :)
Is Arachne down, or are we simply torpid due to bad weather? There's not been a message on either lace or chat in the past 4 hours..
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Tamara P Duvall
Lexington, Virginia, USA
Formerly of Warsaw, Poland
http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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