Spindling again

Friday was the AH class, and in the teeth of a certain amount of twining I was bound and determined to do spindle spinning as the topic for the day. So I rousted out a selection of our own personal spindles and dusted down the box of teaching ones.

The DSM and I have done the spindles guided tour a few times now, and find that it works well. Once you start talking seriously about the different types of spindles, what you like, what you don't like, points to look for when choosing one yourself, and the importance of trying them out to see if you like one another, we are seeing that people are becoming interested - before, to them, a spindle was a spindle was a spindle. Start discussing the differences, what weight to use, little things like balance and hook tweaking, and you can get a good discussion going.

Most people who claim not to like spindling are those who have only encountered evil unbalanced boat anchors. I had a near-beginner on Friday who had one of those. Dear merciful heaven was it evil! She was a re-enactor and therefore had to use a bottom whorl, fair enough. But her bottom whorl would barely twirl, staggering around twice to each mighty flick of the fingers. She was so frustrated with it. I had known that she was coming, and taken my few with me, but they were too light for her to use with the rather thicker yarn that she was producing. Fortunately, I had a centre-whorl - the kind you see described sometimes as a "wool akha" with me which we could pretend was a bottom whorl, and with that, she got on famously. After the event, another class member suddenly pulled out a rather lovely bottom whorl to show me that performed beautifully, so all in all, that went ok.

Other class members had a good go, as well, and several of them, to their great surprise, enjoyed the experience. Were even heard to say that my rather heavy Louet teaching spindles were the best spindles they had ever tried and well, they might just buy themselves one. Could I be creating some new addicts here? I do hope so!



I'm not entirely sure what was going on here. But I managed to catch the repeat performance on video as well....



(Assuming this works, I haven't done video links with Flickr before.)

The, yesterday was Guild, another really good meeting. Fiona Morris came, and I always enjoy her talks and courses. At one point, interested intensified to the point of a competitive cast-on bout spontaneously taking place, and the conversation grew more and more esoteric. And to think that all we were doing was considering what to do with a few pointy sticks......

All good fun for the kiddies!