And boy, is this trivial to anyone but me <g>
I started spinning with a homemade drop spindle, this month, 20 years
ago, in Heidelberg, Germany. Alas, I don't remember the date.
I had come across a tiny booklet in a needlework catalog, and ordered
it. It gave instructions to make spindles out of a wide variety of
materials. A little experimenting turned a piece of dowel, a wooden
wheel off one of the boys' toy cars, and some salt dough into a spindle
that didn't pass the test of time (salt dough does NOT like being
dropped over and over) but which did the trick until I convinced myself
this was for real and ordered a wheel. An American living in Germany
ordering a New Zealand wheel from a Canadian company...no wonder they
call that wheel the Traveller :) It arrived on Bastille Day, believe it
or not (July 14th), in 1986, just to add another touch of
internationality. The wheel has also lived in Massachusetts, Texas,
Michigan, and three other places in Germany, crossing the Atlantic four
times.
The wool was super coarse, carded batts in the most yuck colors--but
they matched my furniture at the time. A sort of rust brown and a
caramel brown. I don't know what sort of wool it was, but it was very
scratchy, a carpet breed I would guess.
I made a crocheted granny-square pillow top, and a weftfaced woven
pillow top, woven on a kid's plastic rigid heddle loom using bedspread
cotton for warp--without a clue about any of it. Both were later
destroyed by a kitten we adopted--perfect color to be prey, I guess :)
I still have a couple balls of the stuff. I use it for leads on my
spinning bobbins, works great for that.
Later I was lucky enough to find an ad for a spinning store, and started
ordering raw wool. They sent some lovely fleeces, then I got to hear of
Cyril Lieschke in Australia and started ordering from him. And came
across Rachel Brown's _The Weaving, Spinning, and Dyeing Book_ at the US
Army library in Heidelberg, which was my bible.
It's really pretty amazing how much wool I packed into that first year
of spinning :) Like the weaving I did on my first floor loom in its
first year. I always do go off the deep end when I pick up a new
interest. But fiber has remained the center of my life ever since...
And I can confidently say it's the main force that has shaped my life
today. I don't think I'd be on a farm, raising sheep and goats, raising
most of our food, and trying to live as sustainably and
self-sufficiently as we can today, if it weren't for seeing that little
booklet in a needlework catalog 20 years ago. And to think I wanted to
be a nuclear physicist when I was in high school! <g>
What interesting stories and anniversaries about fiber do other folks
have to share?
Holly
who needs a break from working on a website
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