Spinning Around

There are a few things in life that one must experience for oneself. The inexplicable joy of giving birth to a child. The odd sensation that the moment you wake up from surgery was the same moment you went to sleep. The satisfaction of seeing your first computer program run. The moment of clarity when you suddenly understand database inner joins. And the stunned, laughter-provoking, totally unexplainable hilarity of having spun your first skein of yarn.

Such have been some of the experiences in my life that I find memorable, and I am still wiping away the tears of laughter that were provoked the moment I hung my 170 yard skein of homespun Moorit Shetland to dry.

By my calculations, it took approximately 16 hours and 34 minutes of my life to produce this yarn. When I first started spinning it on my single-treadle Lendrum wheel about 3 weeks ago, I was a rank beginner. Oh sure, I have two perfectly formed cat toys made of obviously unuseable experimental spinning produce, but they don’t count—they were practice. The Shetland roving was my first “real” spinning, the thing I knew would become a yarn of great beauty, the yarn destined for a beret for my 19-year-old son . I learned many things, as it turns out, while spinning this fiberatic masterpiece.

It took me some time to realize that it is easier to draft the fiber if you don’t hold it too tightly. Drafting is the process of thinning out the fiber so that only the amount that you want to spin at one time is available to the twist. At first I kept a death grip on the fiber, thinking that if I let up one little bit, the fiber-- along with my hand and arm-- would be sucked into the Orifice (a crucial part of the Mother Of All, I wonder who named the parts of a spinning wheel), creating a non-viable form of spun fiber. Then I discovered that if I held the fiber gently, a few of the individual fibers could escape at a time, making drafting oh so much more pleasant. But I still had a lot to learn.

In the first one or eight hours of spinning, I would constantly see my “yarn” break. I would patiently thread it back through the orifice, rejoin the fiber and continue. I casually mentioned this in conversation to Sam one day, trying to pretend it was a funny little thing that I could get over and it was no big deal. I tried very hard not to let on how enlightened I became when she told me that I probably wasn’t putting enough twist into the fiber, and that maybe I should increase my spin ratio. Aha! I remembered somehow that I could do that by putting that rubber stretchy thingy that ran the wheel down from the Big Ring to the Medium Ring. And so I did; and so my yarn stopped breaking, except for the odd moment when Ginger would jump on it while attempting to make it clear that She was the One who needed attention, not some dead hair from an unknown sheep.

It should be obvious that all of these corrections where being made while one ply of shetland yarn was being put on the bobbin. Therefore, the first half of the first bobbin was full of interesting little artifacts. Two or three inches of unspun clump would be followed by several inches of sliver-thin overspun. Little balls of fiber would cling onto the side of fairly nicely spun yarn, as if along for the ride. It wasn’t until I got to the second bobbin of yarn that I began to produce fairly consistent yarn-- because the Moment of Miracles Occurred. All this time, I had been spinning by holding my left hand in front of my right, and drafting by pulling backwards on the unspun fiber with my right hand. Then, just like Salk discovered Penicillin, just like the boy in the cave who discovered Cheese, I discovered that what I really should be doing is pulling the fiber *forward* with my left hand, out of my right hand, whose job was to keep the fiber from coming too fast. Boy howdy, what a difference that made!!

Well, I tell ya. I got all that Shetland fiber spun up on two bobbins and was ready to ply this into the Yarn Of Wonder. I don’t have a plying shuttle, so I used my regular one and spun backwards. It took me several yards to figure out that a “tensioned Lazy Kate” did not actually do all the work for you. Well, duh. It is called a “lazy” Kate, for pete’s sake. I actually had to control the amount of twist on the plying by intervening between the Lazy Kate and the wheel. As I watched the yards go by, I was impressed. Through my fingers was running real, beautiful, 2-ply Shetland yarn!! But wait! I started coming upon the parts that were done Before the Revelations. Some of it started to look (to be charitable) like boucle, some like woolen spun, some like a woolen with a binder of thread. I started to laugh. Every time I came upon a different look, I laughed harder. I finally finished plying and wound it onto my niddy-noddy to make a skein. I washed this very interesting spawn of spinning, evoking a wonderful sheepy smell, and hung it to dry. The more I look at it, the more I laugh. I can’t think of anything that has given me more pleasure in a very long time.