Spinning Around

Still crummy weather, so no pictures of Gabe's sweater. But as I mentioned in my last post, I spun all the yarn for it. I began spinning all because of this:

Two years ago about this time of year, Jessica and I took spinning lessons. We wanted to learn how to spin fiber so that when we owned alpacas someday, we could spin all our own yarn from our own alpacas. Well, we don't have the alpacas yet, but we did learn how to spin and we got our own wheels (each from our respective sweeties—they're so nice!). Here's mine:

It's an Ashford Joy, doulble treadle, and I just adore it. It's great for traveling and the type of spinning I like to do. Jessica's wheel is a Joy too, but a single treadle.

So now we can spin yarn. I will say that once you learn how to spin, you don't look at yarn the same way. You really start to get a feel for the differences between all the fibers; why one felts, why another has sheen, why this one is so expensive, which ones stretch, and so on. And to clear up any misconceptions out there, you don't save that much money spinning your own yarn. In fact, sometimes it's more expensive. And it takes a LOT of time to spin a sweater's worth of yarn. However, it's so worth it—if nothing else than for the fact that you created something (sweater, hat, scarf) from nothing more then a pile of fluff!