Thank you, Rochelle, for all your hard work in procuring prompts for all the Fictioneers each week, and a special thank you to your dear sweet hubby for today’s lovely inspiration! 

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Want to know more about the process behind Friday Fictioneers?  Then just click on Rochelle’s name above to be taken to her web page. 

PHOTO PROMPT © Jan W. Fields

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Looking at the Virginal she tried to imagine the romance of time and place for such an instrument.

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Placing her finger on the corner of the coffin-shaped spinet she closed her eyes. In her mind she played the Virginal’s flat stringy music, imagined tightly laced corsets under silk gowns topped with stiff lace collars, makeup laced with lead for the whitest complexion that was the rage of the time. Smelt the air of a ballroom full of rarely washed bodies gaily dancing, and above all the mirth there hung a musk of heavily perfumed body odor.

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“Nope!” she whispered.

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Words:  100

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Elizabethan Renaissance Virginal Music

This is a three-minute vignette with a longish pause midway.

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NOTE:  Since first laying eyes on these near piano instruments I had always imagined they were designed to be smaller, less expensive and portable piano.  Obviously, I was wrong, and have been set right this morning.  It would seem that the piano came much later because Bartolomeo Cristofori, of Florence, wanted an instrument with a dynamic nuance of sound and began designing  the “gravicembalo col piano e forte”.  This was basically a spinet hack to add hammers to strike, not pluck, the strings.  For all his hard work this was not the sound he wanted nor did it readily catch on.  To read more about the turn of events that led to the present day piano CLICK —> HERE

PS:  My efforts were nearly moot when our power went out and erased all my hard work.  The only thing that saved me was the fact that I had written the piece in Word and had previously previewed the piece here on WordPress before the blackout… this saved my links!   However, it scrambled the code and threw everything to the far right.  I got that fixed but my paragraph spacings  are forfeit.  Hence, the floating periods.

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For some really great takes on the prompt this morning just click on the little blue frog!

So I turned them into lemonade.

What I wanted was little half inch checkers to go with my wee pinwheel blocks.  As you see, I messed up on the math and made them a wee bit too small.

Blocks this small take more time and excellent pinning to come out right.  And yes, there’s that silly math problem to work out too.  Rather than pick them all apart, they are simply too small for that, or just toss them, that would be wasteful, I chose to make something I’ve really wanted/needed for some time!

A pin cushion and thread catcher set.  The blocks are still junk, I couldn’t even make the checkerboard come out (!!!)  but they work well enough for this application.  😉

Pin cushion with wonky non-checkerboard top

And thread catcher. 

The fat bit on the back of the tread catcher, behind the pin cushion, is a little rice stuffing to weight it in place when I move the pin cushion.

My last sewing pins were on one of those magnetic donuts to hold them in place.  Over time they collected dust, tarnished and became magnetized themselves.  Sticking to themselves was frustrating, but tarnished pins leaving marks in your lovely fabric was infuriating!

I paid good money for wonderful, new ,very fine, glass head pins, and now they have a decent (if a bit wonky) home.  And the bonus thread catcher means no more loose threads traveling about the house on my sock clad feet or in Buddy’s fur!

Ah, that’s better!

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And for today’s magic trick…

I turn this into something else I need.

Please Stay tuned.

I never thought to see the day!

~ ~ It’s time to ~ ~

Thank you to all my old and new friends here on the Farmlet!