The Lost Art of Spinning

If you google spinning these days, you are led to a bunch of sites on bicycle spinning.  If you don't want to search through them all, you can put in "spinning yarn", but the other day when my business advisor did, what came up was "spinning yarns" as in story telling.

Betty is the one that told me to "celebrate the snake" (see earlier blog).  Now she is all excited about the idea of having a special event where we spin yarn and spin yarns.  Actually, that sounds fun to me too, since I have been enamored by  story telling, long before I began spinning yarn.

Why not?  Who would come?  Should we have a bonfire?  Could I spin in the dark?  Probably.  I bet it would not be too hard around here to find some old farmers that could spin some good yarns.

I have been spinning some of Zorra's fleece recently.  It is very fine and many colors but maybe a bit flat.  She has no Cotswold blood in her so no Cotswold luster, but oh so soft.  I will probably use it to knit some baby sweaters since there are babies in my life again.

No one signed up for the after school knitting workshop so I guess I will have a lot of extra time this winter.  I have some knitting projects lined up and I want to spin, spin, spin, and see how many skeins of yarn I can spin by the end of the year.

This may be the time to  buy a good production wheel.  I have five spinning wheels in the collection here but none have good tensioning and smooth control for spinning a lot of even yarn.  I have been looking for a long time and I think I am finally deciding what I am looking for in a wheel.  There are many on the market now.  Some old traditional wheels and a bunch of new fangled ones.  They go from around $200 to well over a thousand dollars.  I found one I liked at the last fiber festival I went to for $1050.00 but I am hoping that I can find one I like as well for around $600.00.  Think I will borrow my neighbor's wheel for a couple of days and then take a trip over to Charlottesville to try some others.

Of all the things you can do with fleece, I think spinning is one of my favorite.  Very relaxing.  Knitting is relaxing if you are not knitting a mega row repeat with many colors, but somehow I don't often find myself knitting as simply as I could.  There are many techniques one can use while spinning as well, but I have not yet gotten that bug.  I think I could spin yarn and spin yarns at the same time.

I wonder if my friend, Candy, could spin her amazing novelty yarn and spin yarns at the same time.
Probably.