The spinning class tonight was full of rock stars. I am deeply humbled by this shared love and passion for all that is fibre. Whle I watched each student find their own rhythm, I thought about how not so long ago it was when I took the same journey. Amazing. Now I can’t imagine a life without being surrounded by mega fluffs of free floating fibre.
And to come home and find this in my inbox…..well, I’d call this a near perfect day. Thanks Gabi.
Circle Craft 4 weeks and counting.
Some people are just born to knit (and model). Am I lucky or what? This is Sarah’s first project and she totally rocked it.
Art yarn has so many possibilities and seeing other people hit the creative gives me more pleasure than you can imagine.
Julie gravitated to the tomato yarn and already had an idea (without ever having knit a stitch before). Another first project, fabulous model and my love of teaching is growing by leaps and bounds.
Gratuitous shot on the way to Whistler. Passing Mountain.
When I am taking it!
I manage to somehow complicate my life at impossible levels. This time I actually feel bad because I took someone else along for the ride. Toni, my apologies…that is 8 hours of your life you will never get back. I am taking a workshop with Lexi of PluckFluff fame. She is innovative in her spinning and has written 2 books on the subject. I thought I might be able to learn something, or two things or even more and signed up for the course. Being a master of scheduling, I will only be able to make it for one of the two days, so Toni is my body double for day two. As such, we decided to get together to do our advance homework for the course…..
We had to make felt nubs. Here is our jumbled pile of fleece.
Now the recommended technique for this is to roll through your hands into a ball and then throw in hot water in the washing machine…Toni had some success, but my little pork sausage fingers were not up to the task so pointy needles were involved…
For a little felt experiment, we didnt’ do too badly. Here are my licorice allsorts.
Here are what I can only consider sea eggs….
Now these three things freak me out and look like weird tumors. I’m not quite sure what to do with these. However, I think it’s important to show that not everything “works out”.
We gave up after this load of felting and decided to practice spinning on the donated box wheel that we were given for the course. We were also very pleased at having fixed it and I was especially thrilled at having successfully navigating a hardware store….no cleaned up pretty Home Hardware, or Canadian Tire, an “actual” hardware store with bins of nails and other sharp things….
Nothing comes that easily. As we spun in reverse to ply, the –please forgive me—forking machine behaved quite badly and literally fell apart….UNACCEPTABLE! And all of this after shortly getting off the phone with Pearl and letting her know that since I was bringing 2 machines that I would be happy to share the wheels with the workshop organizer….
She’s steady, she’s sturdy, tricky and a she devil, without a doubt. Now thank God for Toni…between the two of us….we made a whole brain, but it took until the end of the day, we spent quite a bit of time trying to build a brake, which would solve our problem of the bobbin flying off.
And then miracle of miracles….
I’d only been staring at it for two days and adjusting it for “aesthetic reasons”. What a dumb ass.
Now that we could get on with our lives and to the job of spinning….Here is the grand result of an entire day…
Bad, overspinning….
Getting better. Superwash merino batt entitled “Fall” in wonderful hues of orange, grey and lavender plied with copper metallic thread and beautiful coils. Okay, back in the saddle, mission accomplished and tally hoe….If I spend another day like that, I will truly lose what is left of my mind.