October 27th, 2011
Published by: mooresb
Spinning A Yarn Which Weaves A Life by Leslie Hauck October 27th, 2011
of leftover pieces of black walnut from his shop. Using plans from an old Popular Mechanics magazine this "Wee Peggy" design also didn't work as well as it was beautiful. By this time I had taken my first spinning workshop and experienced the simultaneous frustration and thrill of learning this craft. Now, when I teach others I liken it to learning how to ride a bicycle: it looks simple and easy, but requires studied concentration and coordination, and then suddenly as if by magic one has gotten the hang of it. The next year my husband began to construct a birch, 1850 Welsh wheel by following detailed measurements and sketches he made from one in Halifax's Citadel Museum. This is my treasured wheel today and it works like a dream, like it is made of fresh-churned butter -- smooth and creamy. With a second workshop under my belt I began to hone the antique craft of spinning fibres into yarn. I worked with my two year-old daughter playing contentedly beside me for hours. She, now nineteen years later, is a spinner too.
Bending over steaming cups of tea, with winter whirling outside, my friend and I sat watching our three year-old boys playing. As my eyes roamed around her new apartment they came to rest upon a strange wooden object: an 18" length of dowel sticking into a 4" disk. It had the warm, orangey tone of aged wood that has been well-handled. I asked Rebecca what it was. She told me it was called a drop spindle. "What do you do with it?", I asked her. "Spin wool", she answered simply.
I have been asked how I came to spin fibres other than the traditional wool. It just seemed a natural progression: why not try to spin anything? I became interested in flax, from which linen is made, because it too was a traditional spinning fibre in early Nova Scotia, Canada, and Europe. Flax has a distinctive and earthy smell to it; I always put any fibre to my nose to complete the sensual experience. I procured more exotic fibres like yak, camel, alpaca, Chinese cashmere, mohair from goats, angora from rabbits, silks, and the silk-like ramie, an Asian plant used to make life jacket strapping because it is extremely strong when wet. And also not so exotic fibres from friends' dogs and cats.
In very short order she proceeded to show me how it worked and as I watched the magic of her hands working with the uncomplicated tool I experienced a feeling of excitement that made me blurt out, "I've got to do this!" I had never before seen someone spinning yarn, and I went home enthused to tell my husband about this amazing part of my day. Very conveniently he had a shop and tools and soon had created for me on his lathe a maple version of a drop spindle with beautiful turnings. Unfortunately, it did not work very well because the disk portion was too small. However, within the year he had, again with his own enthusiasm about my spinning, built me a spinning wheel out 1