I was first introduced to the Art of Spinning in Scotland. Staying with an amazing couple in Penicuik, they introduced me to a family friend that spun so much wool that the shelf lining the entire living room was full of spindles of beautifully spun fiber. literally hundreds of spindles. Over the course of an afternoon I got the crash course on how to prep the fiber;  washing, picking, carding and drafting. And then came the best part, the spinning. She loaned me a hand spindle "to learn on" while I stayed in Penicuik. Well....I learned that the art of spinning is quite a challenging one. And at the end of my day, 11pm would find me standing as high as I could possibly get on a chair or table or bed, the higher I could get, the less I had to stop my handspindle; I could let the yarn keep growing and growing. BUT I learned that it sure is disappointing when your yarn busts off at the mid-section  and then all the rest of it uncoils itself. Yes it is truly an art. So in leaving Scotland, I took something like 40 feet of yarn with me, only that forty feet took me almost a week to produce.

I really think that sometimes in life you're just supposed to learn things. And life will just keep pitching those opportunities at you until either A.) you accept or B.) you throw your arms up in the air and run like a bat out of hell. So a year later found me living at the the end of the road, deep in the heart of the Chugach Mountains. A winter care taker at the Eagle River Nature Center. Alaska is different in the winter. It is not like the summer where every place you look there are visitors. No, the people that survive the winter really want to be there, especially those that are willing to make the drive back into the valley in the depths of January. we would get the fire started early. At 10am they would come, a guild  of lovely ladies (and sometimes a fella or two) to spin wool. Bags of fiber in tow they would daintily position their wheels in a semi-circle around the fire.  For two hours, their hands would pull and turn. They welcomed me into their circle and taught me the beginning ropes to the wheel. Now I thought my hand spindle was impressive, but damn if the wheel didn't spin out yarn 50 times faster than my own hands could do it. And so it went, one weekend every month they came and each time I would learn something new.  "Someday" I told myself.

I got a phone call from my mom about 2 weeks ago. She had returned from an amazing trip into the mountains of Colorado. "I got you the best gift ever" but she wouldn't tell me. She left me hanging, I'd just have to see it the next time I came through Colorado. And circumstances played out, Colorado came sooner rather than later and I found myself there this last weekend. I walked into my old room and what sat in the corner? Well a spinning wheel of course. An antique wheel that fits me just perfectly. It's going to require a little doctors visit (I think there has got to be spinning wheel doctors, right?) I'm in love. another hobby. the going joke around these parts is that I need a "dork shed." Yes it is going to contain all my strange hobbies- growing mushrooms, microscopes, my baking experiments........ and now the spinning wheel. I think the dork shed is just going to have to be a yurt.