On Spinning A Yarn

And here is my well used appliance. Used endlessly this summer. With great enjoyment. Now you might be questioning as to whether I am referring to the pot of struggling plant or the curious object sat beside it with the hook on its head. And yes, it is this object which has given me hours of pleasure of late, not the pot.

And from this pile of mucky fleece, which came off our flock of sheep:

With these tools:

I made these: 

Which are 'rolags'.

Applied to the object previously spoken about, which I shall now refer to as a 'Drop Spindle' possibly because for a lot of time one is having to retrieve it from off the floor, balls of yarn were made, then skeined.

  

Then washed and stretched and dried: 

And voila!

Yarn!

But.....it takes a humungous amount of time to get the fleece into this state of being. So far, I have managed to yarn-up one and half fleeces, with seven and half still to go. Now winter is nearly here, other projects are resurrecting themselves, one of them being to keep on with my writing, and that alone takes up hours of the day. so the 'fleece into yarn' project looked like being put on the back burner, only it was a shame to waste the fleeces......

Hubs intervened. 'Go buy one' he said. 

And today it arrived. Packaged and partly assembled. 'An hour' said the blurb in regards to the assembling, six it actually took me. 

But look:

Oh yummy. A new appliance. Been on YouTube all evening looking at how to get yarn from this machine. I pedal it, the wheel turns, I feed it with rolags (rolled wool), it gobbles the wool up, twists it around and around itself, and I get yarn. Easy!

Mmmmmm. Perhaps not! Ah well, yet another opportunity to have a go at learning patience!

Things I have learnt today: That I wish men would ask women to write the 'How To Use' pamphlets, only the male mind assumes far to much by way of knowledge about nuts and things, which some of us women have trouble understanding. Therefore, to persevere as far as one can, and then collapse in a heap on the settee. But not to give up, because a short break might refresh one's enthusiasm for trying to read the gobbledegook in the 'How to assemble' pamphlet. Either that, or go make one's partner a cup of tea in the hopes that he might take over!