Diane’s eyes went wide. “That was amazing.”
“Okay, Ish,” Brill said, “you’re on midwatch tonight and then afternoon tomorrow, right?”
I was so
“Hit the tablet on spec two tonight. Pay attention to the sections on water purification and distillation—those were the questions you did the worst on. I’ll work with you tomorrow afternoon and we’ll see where we are after that.” Her tablet bipped and she headed out. “Time to get back to work.”
Diane and I were off duty, so we sat there for a while. “You were amazing,” she said.
I shrugged. “I guess I picked up more than I thought.”
“You decided not to go for the spec one? I thought Brill said she thought you could pass it.”
“She was being overly optimistic. I’ve been wading through the material, but I really don’t have the math background to understand a lot of what I read. I picked up pieces based on the context, but that’s one of the reasons I got so frustrated. I’d been studying for over a month and I just could not get my arms around it.”
“You seemed to have picked up enough, though.”
“Maybe.”
She looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Okay.” I grinned. “Yes, I seem to have picked up a lot. The theory and background I could follow in the lessons. It was when they got into the explanatory math and science that I got lost.”
“Well, you got a month of watches to get it together. You can almost pass it now. You’re going to out rate me soon!”
We split up then and I stuck my head in the galley to see Pip and Sarah. “Would you guys have a few ticks around 14:00 to get together in deck berthing?” I asked.
“Yup,” Pip said. “Is this about your little project?”
“Yeah, I need to line up one more player, but if you two can be there, I think we can get a jump on Dunsany.”
“I’ll be there,” Sarah said with a smile.
I waved and went off in search of Sean.
When Pip and Sarah got to the berthing area they found Sean and me waiting at the table. I had given Sean a little warning about moving slowly around Sarah until she got to know him. I spent only a few ticks with introductions and by then Pip was getting anxious.
“Oh, for the love of the holy handmaidens of harridan,” he said. “You’ve been driving me crazy, now out with it. What is this big plan of yours?”
“Well, we’ve got a lot of yarn…”
“Yeah, that much I know,” he said.
Sean’s eyes got bigger. “How much is a lot?”
“Twenty kilos,” Pip said.
“Sweet mother of mohair,” Sean channeled Pip. “A hundred skeins?”
“Yeah, we took your advice back on St. Cloud and picked them up pretty cheap.” I nodded in the direction of Pip’s locker. “Would you care to do the honors?” I asked him.
He palmed the lock and opened the locker showing all the skeins stacked in there. I thought Sean looked like a kid in a candy shop when he saw them.
“Show him the other one,” I suggested.
Pip opened the other locker as well.
“That looks like a lot of yarn,” Sarah offered shyly.
“Yeah,” Pip said. “You should have seen me trying to find enough room to stow it all. I thought I was going to have to beg pantry space from Cookie.”
I reached in, pulled out a couple of the skeins, and put them on the table in front of Sean. “Okay, Spiderman. What kind of webs can you spin out of this?”
He fingered the threads of one of the skeins. “Are they all this same weight?” he asked idly as he examined it.
“Yup,” Pip said. “Only thing that is different is the color.”
“This is a nice utility-weight yarn. We could make almost anything out of it except maybe baby clothes. What’d you have in mind, Ish?”
“I know you’re making afghans from yours,” I told him. “How’s that going?”
“Pretty well, actually. I’ve almost finished my third one. I’ve had enough practice so that I can do one a week now. I should have four to sell when we get into Dunsany. Maybe five.”
“Can we see a finished one?” Pip asked.
Sean went to his bunk, pulled a brightly colored blanket down, and spread it on the table. Sarah ran her hand across it. “This is lovely,” she said. “My aunt used to do this kind of work when I was a girl.”
Even Pip seemed impressed. “How much yarn did this take?”
“Four skeins for this one.”
“How much will you ask for it?” I asked him.
“I’ll ask for two hundred creds, but I’ll take one twenty-five,” he said.
Pip asked, “You think you’ll get it?”
Sean nodded. “Oh, yeah. Look around the flea next time and you’ll see a lot of this kind of work and some of it in the three hundred to five hundred cred price range depending on size, pattern, and workmanship.”
Pip looked at me then and nodded once. “Okay, Ish. I’m hooked. Tell me the punch line.”
“We have yarn and I have to confess, I don’t think yarn is going to sell on Dunsany. We’ll move a few of them, but it’s a textiles planet. They already have cotton and linen. It’s also not terribly cold so the extra warmth of wool yarn doesn’t carry a lot of benefit.”
“We’re taking container loads of wool!” Pip protested.
“Yeah, but probably to be turned into wool cloth and shipped off planet with the rest of the textile exports.”
“Okay,” Pip said, “so what’s your idea?”
“If we turn it into something that can sell at a higher price point than the raw yarn, then we have an opportunity to take a hundred creds of yarn and make a really good return.”
Sean spoke up then. “What are you thinking of making? Afghans take a lot of time and yarn.”
“What about shawls?” I asked.
Pip looked confused, Sarah thoughtful, and Sean started grinning.
“Do you have a pattern for an open-weave triangular-shaped shawl?” I asked Sean.
He scrambled from the table and headed for his locker. While he rummaged around, Pip asked, “Shawl?”
“It’s a kind of wrap that women wear around their shoulders like a cape.” I told him.
“I know what a shawl is. But you’re thinking of making them?”
I shook my head. “Not me—them.” I pointed to Sean and Sarah.
“Got it!” Sean said and brought back a picture of a woman wearing exactly the kind of shawl I had in mind.
“Perfect,” I told him. “How much yarn to make one of these?”
He consulted the text printed on the back. “Three hundred grams in rough numbers.” He picked up the skein from the table and checked the tag on it. “This kind of yarn, too, medium weight worsted. This is the most commonly used weight of yarn so you picked well.”
“So, a skein and a half per shawl?” I asked.
“Roughly,” he said. “Depends on how the pattern goes; certainly two skeins will do it with a lot of the second one left over.”
“And how much do you think we could sell them for?” I asked him.
“Depends on a lot of things, but anything from fifty to a hundred creds. I should think.”
Pip sat up at that. “Two creds worth of yarn becomes fifty?”
