Spinning - Pay No Attention To That Spinning Wheel In the Center Of The Room . . . .

I love to spin

But life has been busy and spinning has felt like a luxury that I can’t yet afford.  Not in terms of money, but in terms of time. 

But I love to spin.

So I am slowly easing it back into my life.  A little bit sneakily (is that a word?).  It is just kind of growing in its presence in the house – quietly – unobtrusively – until one day it will just be there – all set – ready for me to just sit down and spin.

It started with the space.

I don’t have a dedicated space in the house to spin in – it has always been just trying to fit the wheel into an open space in the living room when I wanted to spin, and then picking up the wheel and hiding it away until I was ready to spin again.  So I started to clear a space in my room.  I moved stuff against walls and put my supplies and rovings and projects on shelves on top of the dog crates (remember – we sleep in a room with 5 dogs (6 before Sparky passed). 

And I moved Linda Lou in.

Now the rocker is not the best spinning stool – but for now it is working.

Then I set her up – tightening up the fishing line on the brake – and found my bobbins that still had those dribs and drabs of yarn on them – and I sat down and plied them together.

I kinda like what I got.  Not sure what I will do with it, but I will let you know when I figure it out.

Plying that yarn made me realize that I was out of practice.  I needed my next bit of spinning to be practice – to be something to get me back to where I felt confident in my ability to actually spin a consistent tight yarn.  The problem is that I sooooo love all of my rovings, I did not want to risk screwing any of them up at this stage in my spinning.  But then I remembered.

I bought a big bag of “seconds” roving on Sunday morning at Rhinebeck this year.

You know, those pieces left over after weighing out the 4 ounce balls of roving, or those pieces that got wet and might be a little felted – or a lot felted.  Just the odds and ends. 

I kinda got a lot because I thought this could be good to teach the boys to spin with.  The roving was colorful which would be fun for them too.

So I pulled out the bag of rovings over the weekend, spread them and – and then handed them to Vash.

Who put them into nice piles by color. 

Then I picked one color pile and started to pre-draft those odds and ends to get them ready to spin.

It was not all that easy.

There is a method.  You start with a fairly felted piece of roving.  Then you take that piece and pull it open.  That frees the fibers.  Then you start pre-drafting those newly freed fibers into a long thin piece of roving, which you then wind into a bird’s nest. 

I made a basket of bird nest pre-drafted roving.

That’s all I got done this week.  But that was the most I have done on my spinning in months.

And I just snuck it in.  Wove it into my days.  Little bits at a time.

Sometimes that is just how it has to be. 

So here is where I will show you what I have done – when I have done something else.  Some weeks there may be nothing to show you.  But then again – spinning has that way of pulling me back to it.  It is very zen.  It is my peaceful happy place – feeling the fiber move through my fingers to the rhythm of the wheel to the time measured by my feet on the pedal.  Thoughts become very centered – just watching the flow of fiber through your fingers.  Everything else moves away and you are in the center – and the dancing swirl of humanity grows further away as your mind concentrates on the flow of the fiber into the orifice to the turn of the wheel. 

I love spinning.