No Illustration Friday post this week, unfortunately. I’ve been wrestling with the sketch for my last Peter Pan illustration.
About a month ago, a lovely elderly lady named Miss Emily gave me an antique spinning wheel. I’ve wanted a spinning wheel for a long time, but they’re very expensive and I didn’t expect to own one until the distant foggy future. But thanks to Miss Emily’s generosity, I’m now the proud owner of a spinning wheel!
This wheel came from Kentucky and was probably built in the 1850′s, which means it survived the Civil War, both the World Wars, and all the other wars in between. At some point it was probably left outdoors or stored in a barn, because bird droppings had eaten away at the grooves in the wheel. It was also missing a footman. But with the help of Ginger at Hanks Yarn Shop, my dad fixed the wheel and now it’s spinning beautifully.
Here’s my first attempt at spinning. My wheel doesn’t actually have a spindle– apparently that infamous pointy object is found on much older wheels. Probably it was done away with because girls kept falling over into hundred-year snoozes. Instead, my wheel has a sort of cradle called the Mother of All, which suspends the flyer and the bobbin between two pegs called the Maidens. (I love those names.)
In the groove between the bobbin and the flyer I found a knot of ancient grimy wool, left over from the last time someone spun at the wheel. I took a bit of the grimy wool and spun it into my yarn.
My first knitting project using my handspun yarn is Fetching, a pair of fingerless mitts for Miss Emily. As you can tell, my yarn is sort of lumpy…
…But it works!
[...] 27, 2010 by roguedoe Columbine Cameo Egg ♥ Etsy Miss Emily, the 90 year-old lady who gave me my spinning wheel, has been creating beautiful ornaments from hand-blown eggs for decades. She taught me the basics [...]
Hmmm, buy fiber from the store, then spending so much time to spin it into yarn and months more to make a sweater. somethings wrong with this picture. But I suppose nothing more than buying flour to make cookies rather than grinding it yourself. But still, buying fiber is so….. mundane….. So, I had a random and crazy idea! You could start collecting dryer lint!! no… hear me out!! Once you had enough, you could spin a kind of cool, multicolored, multifiber, secondhand yarn! I think it would be a cool experiment to try and kind of recycle-y. (I collected dryer lint for a while to try and make homemade paper out of, [which you can also do, and it looks really cool! but I didn't do my research and so I botched it] and the weird thing is, in my household, the vast majority of it is purple! even though we don’t wear that much red or blue.) Of course whatever you made out of the yarn could probably never be washed, because the fibers would all react differently to washing. but just thought I’d throw it out there!
Your creativity never ceases to astound me.
I do want to try hand dyeing. My grandmother has a bag of twenty year-old wool from their sheep that I’m planning to spin next. The wool is also tangled and grimed with twenty year-old gunk, so I’m going to have to wash it and card it before I can spin it…
Oddly enough, weaving has never been a skill I’ve really coveted learning.
Do you have to use wool for spinning and knitting? or could you, for example, card and spin the bag of cotton balls in the bathroom and get cotton yarn? or if you want to be back to the past about it, go pick some cotton, from the nearest… ummm…. cotton plantation? and spin that? I am wondering, because some people are allergic to wool…
Some people. ;-P Meaning you. Well, there really wouldn’t be any point in spinning a bag of cotton balls, because I wouldn’t get enough yarn to do much of anything with. I tried when I was little. No success.
As to picking my own cotton– same thing. I’d have to pick a LOT of cotton bolls, which are full of seeds and grow in these prickly husks. There’s a reason cotton picking used to be slave labour…
Much easier: you can buy different kinds of fiber ready to spin. The green yarn in the photo is a blend of sheep and alpaca wool. I’m sure they sell rolls of cotton fiber.
WOW!! This is so cool! Did you try hand dying yet? I have done that once, I came out with this lovely mustard colored yarn after a day over a boiling pot. (it was brown when it was wet) then I never did anything with it. (it took me forever to get the dye off my hands) Typical. I suppose. for me. But you should look up the various herbs and plants you can use for dyeing, some of them even grow wild in Florida! It’s pretty cool!
know you are gonna have so much fun spinning and knitting. Next step, an actual loom!! then you can weave cloth!!!
Lauren