{"id":153,"date":"2017-05-18T14:59:49","date_gmt":"2017-05-18T14:59:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/?p=153"},"modified":"2017-05-18T17:47:06","modified_gmt":"2017-05-18T17:47:06","slug":"walking-and-spinning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/?p=153","title":{"rendered":"travelling and spinning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some months ago I was given a brown paper feed bag of sightly anonymous \u00a0white wool from France, apart from being quite yellow and quite full of vegetable matter I knew nothing about it. I decided that it would be my general purpose wool to \u00a0use for my dyeing samples and also my idea would be to spin enough to knit myself a jumper from it. I’ve been washing basins of it instead of cleaning the whole lot in one go, and when I’ve had a moment I card enough to keep me happily spinning.<\/p>\n

I’m spinning finely \u00a0and then plying it which will give me a reasonable weight to knit up as Fair Isle, which is the plan once \u00a0I get around to do some more dyeing.<\/p>\n

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Finished 2 ply washed and skeined wool alongside freshly spun singles on a very full spindle with the unscoured raw yellow coloured fleece. The spindle holds about 200 metres of yarn.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It’s taking some time to prepare and spin, but I’m in no hurry, I spin when I am able, it’s not a full time occupation for me, which brings me to the title. I’m happy to spin anywhere I can and I usually have a bag of rolags and a spindle in my bag wherever I go. It’s fascinating, for me, to watch people watching me whenever I’m on the bus or the train. I don’t need a lot of space, admittedly a little slower when I am sitting down instead of standing up, but every draft is another few feet of yarn and it soon adds up. There are lots \u00a0of surreptitious glances and even the odd photograph taken \u00a0by a phone, if only they realised that I would be more than happy to talk to them about the process. Drop spinning to me, even after a few years, is almost magical and the idea that a handful of loose fibres transforms into a \u00a0coherent thread is a wonderful thing. When I give my talks on fleece to pleats, I always get a moment of silence when the audience realise what is happening, which is only \u00a0further emphasized when I \u00a0tell them that it was way all yarn was made until at least 1250, and on some countries the spinning wheel is still a fairly recent introduction. The idea that you can walk \u00a0and spin at the same is perhaps the point where most people see how \u00a0a stick and a whorl could actually \u00a0 be capable of producing miles and miles of thread.<\/p>\n

So back to my bus journey of a few days ago, I got off \u00a0a mile or so away from \u00a0home and walked back spinning as I went, in fact walked back happily spinning, a few people looked and some cars slowed down but perhaps I’m already enough of an oddity , \u00a0no comments at all. It did make me realise, that drop spinning on the \u00a0go is a perfectly good way of spinning, yes the thread broke once or twice, but thee spindle was easily caught without damage and the thread re-joined. It was a dry day, and a little windy and the spindle did catch the breeze, but it worked so well that I think that perhaps \u00a0whenever I go walking in the future I won’t want to miss out on creating \u00a0yards of yarn.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some months ago I was given a brown paper feed bag of sightly anonymous \u00a0white wool from France, apart from being quite yellow and quite full of vegetable matter I knew nothing about it. I decided that it would be my general purpose wool to \u00a0use for my dyeing samples and also my idea would … Continue reading “travelling and spinning”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[19],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168,"href":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulhenrykilts.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}