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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Spinning!

I go to knit night at a local coffee shop on Thursdays. And every Thursday there is usually someone spinning. Naturally I've been eyeing everyone spin with that look in my eye. Toni knew that look and asked me if I wanted to borrow her wheel. HELL YEA I DO!!! She gave me a quick lesson and told me to take it home to practice.



She did say to keep the wheel in a place where the kids couldn't get to it. OK Toni, I'll try but please remember that these are the same kids that play with garbage and use the eyeliner to draw dragons.

Every night after the darlings went to bed, I took out the wheel. I would spin and spin and then spin some more. Ray even got into it and had to check it out to see if he could figure out how it worked. He told me about it but quite frankly I was to busy trying to not let too much roving be spun at once to listen to a word he said.




I succeeded in spinning that gorgeous yarn you see there. And quite frankly it wasn't as relaxing and peaceful as everyone makes spinning out to be. There were a lot of swears involved. My thumb and forefinger got the spinners ache (my own personal made up term). And I had to concentrate on this bit of spinning a lot. I had entire conversations in my head about how much roving I needed to pull out and how thin I needed to make it so the resulting yarn would not be too thick or too thin.

Eventually I did get the hang of it. The spinners ache went away and the conversations stopped. A pleasant surprise was how soft my hands were. Lanolin from the wool worked its way onto my hands and made them buttery soft.

I did return the wheel back to Toni and as much fun as I had with spinning I decided not to pursue it. I'm sure that I'll want pick it up when the kids are a bit older and not prone to get into my stuff.

2 comments:

smariek said...

Sounds like fun even though I don't really understand the process of spinning or what roving is. I will have to look that up someday to see what that's all about. But it looks like something relaxing like working at a pottery wheel.

junior_goddess said...

"I had entire conversations in my head..."

Did you let that crazy woman out AGAIN?

;-)

I want to know what you are going to make with your handspun.