When I agreed to move the family to the Falkland Islands for a year, I was keen that this should not be a simple transfer of our normal hectic UK life to an island 8,000 miles away. Instead we would make a definite effort to get out and make the most of our experience, trying new things when they were on offer. I knew before I came down here that crafting was a big thing and in particular wool/thread craft. It’s understandable as with around 175 sheep per person here, there’s a lot of wool to go round. So this week I started learning a new aspect to wool crafts – how to make the wool in the first place.
Obviously this is post the sheep and shearing bit. I haven’t managed to learn transfiguration down here to transform into a sheep and grow it myself. Nor do we have enough land or time to take on rearing a sheep and then learning how to shear it to get the fleece. I’ve skipped over all those stages, and also some other stages such as washing, carding and combing the wool to get rid of all the dirt from when the sheep was wearing it. This can take quite a bit of time to do by hand, I’m reliably informed. Fortunately it’s also done by machines and as a result I could go along to the Spinners and Weavers Guild on Monday night and skip straight to the spinning bit.
Spinning wheels are not something I come across regularly in the UK, except perhaps in museums of rural life etc. Quite a few people spin down here however and then use the wool to weave stunning blankets, shawls, scarves and other items. If you ever see anyone spinning, it’s one of those tasks that looks really quite straightforward. With some gentle motion of your foot, the wheel goes round, and the strands of clean, carded and combed fleece pass through your hands and are twisted as wool onto the bobbin.
It is of course far from being this straightforward. As I rapidly discovered, there is a real knack to spinning that comes only with practice. The wheel has a mind of its own and it’s necessary to find the rhythm of the wheel to keep it going the same way and not suddenly reversing direction and un-spinning your wool. Then, rather like playing the piano, or more realistically the organ, your hands need to be doing two different things whilst your foot works the treadle. In addition at least at initial stages, you need to keep an eye on the feed to the bobbin to make sure it’s not getting tangled up and not winding on properly. Even with an experienced spinner sitting beside me helping me out, this was difficult!
With much stopping and starting again, both to get the wheel going in the right direction and to untangle the feed to the bobbin, I did eventually managed to spin 50 grammes of wool onto a bobbin. Actually two bobbins, because once you’ve spun the wool once, it’s necessary to take two strands of spun wool and spin them together in the opposite direction to ply the wool. This makes it useable as it introduces a reverse twist to help cancel out the effects of the original twist from spinning. So no sooner had I managed to spin the wool one way, and get used to the wheel going in a clockwise direction, than I had to start the wheel going the other way to ply. Despite the wheel being desperate to go anticlockwise when spinning, it was naturally completely contrary and wanted to go clockwise when I was plying.
The end result was a skein of some rather lumpy wool. Or as I call it, “artisan wool”. It’s handmade – I’m sure I can persuade someone that this is worth paying a premium for. More realistically, it’s going to take quite a bit more learning before I can produce some evenly spun wool that might actually be usable for something. I’m told that a novice spinner is not allowed to progress to dyed wool until they’ve mastered spinning the natural “tops”. Since I don’t want to be beaten by a wheel and treadle, I’m going back until I learn this. I’m not entirely sure when spinning will come in useful back in the UK, but you never know. At least it’ll be a conversation starter at parties – did you know I can spin wool?
Five penguins and us 