How I Got Into Spinning

As a child I used to watch my grandmother and my aunt crochet all manner of things as they sat on the couch and socialized.  I often tried to immitate them, though I never quite caught on to how to make anything but a chain, so chain I did.  I chained entire balls of yarn because that is the only stitch I knew at the time.  Twenty years later, one of my friends showed me how to crochet a blanket using what I call the granny square method.  Once I figured it out I was hooked (no pun intended) once again.  I worked on my first blanket for months, and when I finally finished I was so proud of my-self.  I had learned an important lesson about myself: I could make useful things with yarn!

After that I became a little obsessed with all things crochet.  I bought books and practiced different stitches and learned how to read patterns.  It was only five or six years ago that another friend taught me the basics of crocheting hats.  I made bunches of hats.  It was fun trying different yarns and making different kinds of hats.  I made hats nice enough that I started making them as gifts.  Those went over so well, that I soon started working on a hat and scarf collection in hopes that one day I would have enough for a craft fair booth.

In the mean time I had gone to my first fiber festival with the friend that taught me how to make hats.  It was there that I discovered roving and hand made yarns.  There were demonstrations of sheep shearing and spinning, and many many displays of hand dyed roving and yarn.  A whole new world had opened before me.  It had never before occured to me that I could get yarn from somewhere besides a hobby shop, or a craft department.  

But then I found out how much it costs to own a thing like a spinning wheel.  Even the most basic wheel was well out of my price range, so sadly, I knew that spinning was not in my immediate future.  (I had learned much later that a thing called a drop spindle exists and was actually a precursor to the spinning wheel)

Luckily for me I lived with a person that listened when I talked about the things that make me happy and one christmas I got a spinning wheel as a gift.  It was an old used ashford wheel and was actually an extra wheel that a spinning teacher used to teach her students on.  I was given a brief lesson in the mechanics of spinning and given a book and a bit of roving and away I went.

In the beginging it was a struggle.  I couldn't get the hang of pinching the fiber with the right amount of twist and fought constantly just to keep the wheel going the right direction.  My first yarn was thick and lumpy and ugly, but I didn't care.  I wanted to keep spinning just to see if I could make an even and thin yarn - something I could make into a hat or a scarf.

The learning process was slow and finding time to practice wasn't exactly a priority, but my spinning did improve, slowly but surely.  I am finally at a place where I can consistanly make a decent yarn and am thrilled at the possiblilties of colors and patterns that have opened up for me.  I am quite proud to tell people that I make things that you could never find in a store, and I do it from scratch.