The resin top-whorl spindle from Point of View Farm was the first of my Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival purchases to arrive. OK, I’ll confess. I started spinning before I finished the day’s editing. Watched a video or two, and set to it. I traded some paper flowers from my wedding for a pound of processed wool from a friend’s sheep.
The first length of singles was, well, beginner’s work. There’s no point in saying anything else about it. It’s lumpy. I tried again after dinner, and this time, I watched the video on the Schacht website. I don’t think it was necessarily any better than the others; it may be that it was a “third time charm” thing. I got that I had to keep the drafting triangle UNtwisted, and let the twist flow into the yarn by itself. Some of the lengths of yarn on the second twist are exactly what I want.
The spinning got lumpy again towards the end of the evening, and the outer wraps on the second hank are much more uneven than the inner wraps.
That said, I got it. I had a flash of the magic that happens when a couple of inches of fleece turn into yarn all by themselves, almost. There’s a connection to one of the most ancient of technologies, something that changed the course of humanity. I’ve always had a finger on that pulse with knitting and crocheting, in as much as those arts turn lengths of fiber into something useful. Spinning takes that backward one step closer to original learning.
Who the heck figured this out?
