Spinning Wheels

December 30, 2017December 30, 2017 / Lisa / 5 Comments

I’ve wanted to spin for years. Originally it was because I was fascinated by art forms that historically were necessities for life, and that seemed to be dying out. Like spinning, taking wool, and turning it into cloth.

That’s why I learned how to do bobbin lace, which I’ve posted about before. But as much as I enjoy making lace the slow way, lace isn’t essential to life.

We’re not preppers, but we like to be prepared. Partly that’s because of the way we used to live. Partly that’s because one of these days the great Pacific Northwest earthquake is going to hit.

So I should be able to spin. There’s material out there to forage if you don’t have handy sheep. You can spin fireweed, cattail, rabbit fur. Heck, you can spin dog hair. If the world fell apart, I could put warm doggie-smelling sweaters around my family.

If I could spin, that is.

Which I can’t.

Years ago, my husband built me an Ashford spinning wheel. I worked that wheel for months. But I just could not get the wool to draw onto the wheel. For something that was supposed to be rhythmic and soothing, all it did was make me cuss and throw things.

I finally gave up and told my husband I couldn’t figure it out and would never be a spinner. I think there were some tears involved.

That’s when he said the problem was the footman, a piece that connects the foot paddle to the drive wheel. He’d had problems with it when putting the kit together and used a hammer.

The bottom half isn’t supposed to look like that.

That was great news. It wasn’t me. A friend then gave me an Ashford castle wheel and I knew I was finally going to spin usable wool.

I had wool to practice on.

I had my dream project wool, in heather colors.

And nothing worked. The wheel eventually made its way to the attic, and the wheel my husband built made its way to a dark corner, where I’m sure it broods and thinks unkind thoughts about hammers.

For Christmas this year, my husband got me a spinning wheel maintenance kit, and pulled the castle wheel out of the attic. I pulled out the dusty books. Start Spinning, The Intentional Spinner (a holistic approach to making yarn), and Hands On Spinning. And of course, since those early days, there are now YouTube videos.

I also found the results of my first attempts. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but the wool on the bobbin, and the ball, can’t be used for much. Well, the kitten is now playing with them, so I guess they’re usable.

I spent today with beeswax and cloth, oiling the dry wood. I paged through the books, struggling to remember the language of spinning. The mother of all, the maidens, the flywheel, the tension springs and bobbins, the drive band and brake band. Just the ancient names make me itch to treadle that wheel and try again.

The con rod joint is broken so the treadle isn’t connected to the arm, but that will be fixed shortly

There’s even a very old folk song for the rhythm of the spinning wheel:

Merrily cheerily noiselessly whirring/ Spins the wheel, rings the wheel while the foot’s stirring/ Sprightly and lightly and merrily ringing/ Sounds the sweet voice of the young maiden singing.

And guess what I learned today? In going through the books, I finally figured out that my castle wheel is a double drive wheel. Which means when I struggled with it years ago, I had the drive band on wrong because I thought it was a single drive wheel. Honestly, I didn’t even know the difference.

The mother of all, with her upright maidens , tension knob, and the fly wheel in the middle

So maybe this time it will work.

In the meantime I’m going to practice treadling to the very old song and hope I might be able to create something for those I love.

And I’m going to daydream about the stories, the women down through time connected by wool and wheels.

Ants and Fiction

December 18, 2017 / Lisa / 6 Comments

I told my husband and friend last night about my attempt to save ants.

I read a book when I was around eight about these children who were shrunk down to ant size. The red ants were after them and the black ants were the children’s friends, taking the kids in and protecting them.

I spent a long time that summer out on the street curb smashing every red ant I could find in order to help those tiny kids survive.

After the story, my husband said something that perfectly sums up the child I was (and sometimes still am).

‘You really had no concept of ‘fiction’ did you?’

1st Grade and the hated Shirley Temple curls

Dogs and Rules

December 16, 2017December 16, 2017 / Lisa / 2 Comments

Hubert Horatio Humphrey was a dachshund mix with the classic body shape and size, but with scruffy gray fur. And this long silky white hair on top of his head that I’d part down the middle and comb.

Hubert chased cars. So dad took a small board and hung it from Hubert’s collar thinking it would bang the dog’s knees and keep him from chasing things. But Hubert figured out how to run with a weird hip-swinging gait in time with the board. It didn’t slow him down at all and eventually at an advanced age, he lost a race with a garbage truck.

Brandy. One of the few dogs who didn’t break rules. But knocked over Christmas trees.

Then there was Peppy Le Pew, a teacup poodle. He also didn’t like to stay in the yard but his thing was visiting. Our house had huge windows along the back of the house. Dad put chicken wire up around the outside of one of the windows. We could simply open the window and put Peppy out into his little yard, fenced six feet high.

Peppy climbed the chicken wire.

After all, aren’t rules made for breaking and boundaries made for crossing? Or at least challenging?

Vaila, who wasn’t supposed to be on the bed.

They are in writing, as long as you purposely break rules for a reason that improves the whole. If you understand the rules, you know how to revise them or ignore them as a specific story requires. But it’s something you have to be cautious of because readers have an expectation and if you don’t live up to that, they may simply move on.

The Longmire series by Craig Johnson comes immediately to mind. A typical dialog rule is that each speaker has a separate paragraph so it’s clear who’s speaking. But Johnson combines multiple speakers in one paragraph, sometimes with no dialog tag to help a reader follow the conversation. A lot of readers like this, obviously, but how many others have walked away? I know I did. That device took me out of the story.

It’s always a gamble to break a rule. It’s especially risky for a new author.

But hey, that’s also a rule that can be broken. If the story and characters are strong enough and vivid enough, even that rule about new writers can be ignored.

Then there was our dog, Sorka. Fences, windows, doors, cables, and crates were all boundaries to be broken. Rules that involved words like ‘sit’, ‘I said sit!’, ‘come’, ‘come back here right now’, ‘COME BACK HERE YOU F***ING DOG!’ were ignored. Breaking the record for how long a dog and its owners had to work with a canine behavioral therapist was something to strive for in her world. Two years, in case you’re wondering.