As the Kiwi Spins

I was going to title this entry "Plying My Trade," but, as it turns out, it's a very good thing that spinning isn't my trade, or surely I'd starve. Although I've had my Ashford Kiwi spinning wheel for over a year now, the real impetus to get going with the spinning practice has come from these two fleeces I've got on the way: one from a sweet little alpaca named Abbey and another from a Finn ewe named Dolly. Both are yearlings.

So, I started off with some Jacob roving I'd purchased from a LYS (along with one spinning lesson). The roving is lovely, although the Jacob is a bit coarse compared to the Merino I've been knitting with lately. The resulting two-ply is lumpy-bumpy, as we're all told that first attempts will be. Do people really keep this stuff around? I'm wondering if we speak reverently of first spinning products just because otherwise we'd all quit.


To be absolutely honest, this isn't my very first attempt. There was a misadventure with a beautiful hand-dyed roving in superwash Merino that ended up somewhere on the far side of lumpy-bumpy. Conclusion: Superwash is too slippery for beginners. Also, several hours with the Corriedale top sent along with my wheel from the vendor ended in various versions of disaster. Let's just say that hands-on learning is important, but so is instruction of some kind -- at least some background reading.

I wouldn't call spinning meditative yet, at least for me. But a glimmer of things improving keeps me slogging on. My cousin Dave observed last year, on seeing the then-new spinning wheel in our dining room, that I was embarking on a very sentimental project. Sentimental it may be, but apparently the kind of sentimentality that proves to take its own flavor of dogged determination.