The dark side came calling this weekend. Oddly enough, it sounded a lot like Lucy. (Incidentally, she's not kidding about "full service". How many yarn stores will let you walk in dripping wet and offer you a towel?) Lucy's smart about teaching people how to spin. Firstly, she realizes really quickly if her students can't distinguish left and right.
Secondly, after she teaches you how to use the spindle, she lets you have a go at the wheel. Hot damn, is that thing addictive. Thirdly, she has incredibly cool relatives who would distract you if you thought that spinning was hard.
I'm sure that spinning is a lot harder if you're trying to make non-crappy yarn. This is my first yarn, a fluffy worsted-ish weight wool.
A fair bit of the crappiness of that yarn comes from my desire to have a spinning wheel. See, the spinning wheel lets you make the fiber go round and round at the same time you're drawing out bits of it to turn into yarn. As I have an incredibly poor sense of my own limitations, I started trying to do this about five minutes into spinning on the spindle. (I'm pretty sure that Lucy didn't see my poor attempts at this, because I didn't hear her thump on the floor laughing.) My tentative conclusion is that this spindle is not designed for this, because if you spun the spindle with one hand and drew the wool with the other, you'd end up stretched out at arm's length incredibly quickly. As hard as I tried, there's no good way to spin from there. Perhaps if the spindle were heavy enough to spin on its own after you got it started, you could spin standing up... or buy a spinning wheel.
So, I've come full circle (har har). I want a wheel. In particular, I want a wheel that will actually fit in our apartment and that I won't want to get rid of in a few years. I'm looking around for one, but in the meantime I'm spinning away.
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