Thursday, May 26, 2011

Ready, set, spin!



This blossom fell off when I was deadheading, so I brought it in and put it on HP's table for him to enjoy close up.

Yes, we know about the lilies of the field, or at any rate the irises of my front yard, and how they don't toil nor spin, though I think the gospel writer might not have been one of the better botanists on the subject of whether plants, which never stop working from seed to compost are not in fact toiling, but I digress.

Because at the lovely Fiber Art and Yarn shop in Cape May, as you may have noticed, I treated myself to a lovely bag of wool top, ready to spin, feels like a cloud, and smells like the friendliest of clean sheep. Duncan approved of this, rolling and drooling like a mad thing all over it until I rescued it. He was born in a field, a feral kitten to feral parents, and I wonder if he had any sheep friends as a kitten.




Anyway, I discovered, all ready to spin, having finished the socks I had down at CM with me, that I had totally forgotten how to spin on the hand spindle. After a few pretty hopeless attempts which did yield some sort of yarn, which will go fine in the current tapestry, but were not what I had in mind, I found a video on YouTube and Megan made it all clear again.

So tomorrow, regardless of the lilies or the irises, I will spin and spin. I love the movement of the hand spindle, and the contemplative frame of mind that happens when you spin, and how you feel as if you're part of a massively long chain of people who've done this for so many centuries. Most of them better than I'm doing it, but they were at it longer.

So this is my early summer spinning, to go with my early summer knitting, and my early summer weaving, and my early summer development of more Unseen Presences, for which see my Beautifulmetaphor blog, this is going in an interesting direction since I posted that. Speaking of new directions, I think I have found and fixed the glerk that was making it hard to leave comments. At any rate I hope my fix worked. You will get a popup thing to write in now, and let's hope you can comment if you would like to.

3 comments:

  1. Testing, testing, this is a comment!!! what a great blog this is....signed Boud....

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  2. sitting with my own feral baby in the crook of my elbow as i read this...thank you for championing the hard work of garden dwellers! and thank goodness for youtube lessons. just last week i used it to learn how to 'neti'

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  3. That is the most amazingly coloured iris Liz. What a delight to have in the garden.

    Minimss

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