The Fate of

the Free World

Is At Stake

Just in case any of y'all are nervous about getting on an airplane anytime soon, I want you to know that before my little jaunt began last weekend, I made a ruthless assessment of those items known to present the greatest threat to public safety, namely:

Toilet articles greater than three ounces in size.

And not only did I assess these items based on the Official Bond-McGyver Danger Chart of Scariness, but I also secured them into acceptably small portions and encased them in the only terrorist-proof substance known to the FBI, the TSA and MIT that can protect us from chemical weapons, explosives, and mayhem of all kinds:


The quart-sized zip-lock clear plastic bag.








I bet you feel safer already.



And while toothpaste, mouthwash and shampoo in quantities greater than three ounces must be secured in checked luggage, the TSA finds it quite acceptable for plastic-encased, breast-shaped amounts of liquid greater than three ounces to be enclosed in gel-filled bras worn upon one's person.



This actually means that if you forget to put your highly hazardous saline eye drops in a quart-sized zip-lock bag, you may find yourself in serious trouble, but you could waltz right through the security checkpoint wearing a 42DD bra filled with plastic explosives, and the TSA people wouldn't ...





...well, I am sure they'd bat an eye. But you'd get on the plane just fine. And so could a couple of Fem-Bots.



And, while I cannot bring a cup of decent coffee or a bottle of water through security, either in my hands or in my carry-on bag, I am permitted a wide variety of items in my checked luggage, including, but not limited to, crowbars, yogurt, cattle prods, ice picks, peanut butter, cricket bats, Jell-O and throwing stars.



Go figure.



Fortunately, the items that can be packed into my checked luggage include these fibery things:














Fear not, the cropped-out cat snatching at the silk fiber (Seven) was not included in my checked luggage.




Clockwise from left: emerald-green coned silk; dyed silk waste fiber ready to be carded, Ashford mini-noddy, and two skeins of hand-dyed alpaca.



I probably could have brought the yarns through security just fine, but explaining the niddy-noddy and the silk fiber might have been a stretch, so it all went into checked luggage.




I will leave this as a teaser for today because I have a rather long and picture-heavy post coming up about my weekend at Apple Leef Farm.