Oops. I bought a spinning wheel.

I'm pretty sure that I had a conversation somewhat like this with Erin last year when she got her spinning wheel. Although mostly I was just silently mocking her in my head, ha!

Erin: I got a spinning wheel.
Kim: That's nice. THINKING: OMG, why did she want a spinning wheel???
Erin: It's great!
Kim: Uh-huh. THINKING: Why would I want to spin yarn? So little time to knit already!
Erin: It's a lot of fun!
Kim: Hmmmm. THINKING: As if I would ever consider getting a spinning wheel!

Then I saw that there was a spinning class at a local fiber festival. Why not at least try it so that I could stop thinking about how spinning seems to be strangely addictive for everyone who tries it?

It was fun, although a bit chaotic - 2 hours isn't enough time to get you very far in spinning, especially when there are too few wheels to go around.

Then someone on ravelry posted about a two day workshop in September at the Appalachian Center for Craft. I've always wanted to take a class there and 2 days seems like a reasonable amount of time to cover spinning basics. So I signed up.

Then I started thinking about how, if I was going to take a class, maybe I should get my own wheel so I could learn how to spin on the wheel I was planning on using.

Did you notice the subtle shift there? From "hey, I'll try this out and probably hate it but at least I can say I did it" to "Hm, maybe I need my own spinning wheel"?

And then I found the perfect wheel for a newbie who wants to try things out without a super serious commitment: the Schacht Ladybug. I hesitated to order a wheel online. There's a fairly active spinning group here in Nashville and Leah volunteered to bring wheels to try out to their next meeting. Always better to try a spinning wheel in person, right? But I couldn't help myself. After a flurry of emails, I found a brand new Ladybug in stock at Copper Moose. (BTW, they were very nice to deal with and I highly recommend them. Special thanks to ravelry user athena139 for pointing me in their direction.)

It seemed like an eternity of stalking the UPS website, waiting for box to arrive. Of course, it didn't help that two pounds of corriedale roving arrived on Monday, a free bonus from Copper Moose. Tuesday was awful, I kept checking the UPS website for delivery info. When we got home on Tuesday, the box was sitting on the front porch and I promptly... went off to Tuesday knitting night :) I only stayed until 7 though, so I could come home and play with the wheel.

Tim gave me a hand with assembly (easy peasy) and I was up and practicing. "Oh," I thought, "I'll just treadle for a while." Three hours later, after a brief break for dinner (also assembled by Tim) I had plenty of treadling practice and a partial bobbin of something that is definitely not usable yarn. But I'm getting the hang of it. There were even entire 3-5 second stretches where I felt that I understood how to draft!

Today's lesson: Spinning: it's a vortex that will suck you in even if you try to avoid it. Or possibly more accurately: Kim is weak willed when it comes to hobbies, especially ones that involve (shiver) complicated equipment.

Photos tomorrow. I took pictures last night, but I didn't stop spinning long enough to upload them :)

Comments

[Leah]

Erin's wheel came from a hyperlink war we were having over sock yarn. We were each enabling each other. I upped the ante and said "Hey, Erin, why don't you come to spin on Saturday and I will bring a wheel and let you see if you like it." Hehehe (evil wicked grin) and a wheel later, Erin is spinning and even talking about another wheel in her future.

Now here is Kim. I loved reading your blog post about this. I thought exactly the same thing several years ago...."I don't have time to knit all the things I want to knit, why would I want to spin???" Hmm. The rest is history. I can't wait to see your wheel on Saturday.

Congratulations!
Leah

[Erin]

HAhaHahahahahahahahha!! Here's the thing - I *knew* this would happen!! Doesn't take much, does it?? I can't wait to see your yarn.

Hilllarious.

[LDSVenus]

Yeah, it doesn't take much to get sucked into spinning ;P. I see that you were like me, eating? yeah in a min, I'm spinning ;P. hehe But it really is only natural to spin if you knit, how cool is it to make something from "almost" scratch? (when you learn how to turn the fleece into roving you can call it "from scratch", unless you're a purist and then you have to raise your own fiber animal too :P.)