Jesus Take the Wheel

Spinning is hard, y'all.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of taking Nora's Intro to Wheel Spinning class at the shop. Nora really went the extra mile for me, fixing up my mother's wheel back into a usable condition. I ended up taking the class on a shop wheel, and after several false starts, I ended up with 25 yards of this:

Nora, and then later, Steven, said it was really good for the first try. I don't know. It was a lot of fun, and I look forward to practicing more.

Is spinning the new knitting? And other short musings on fiber arts

Is everyone spinning but me? I see spinning everywhere lately. Cosy is teaching classes. Every time I go into Natural Stitches, they have more new drop spindles and roving. Knitty Gritty has aired multiple episodes about it.

Is this the trendy new thing, or the natural evolution of the knitting craze, as knitters and crocheters take a greater interest in where their materials come from and want more control over the final product?

The irony in this is that I have no strong interest in spinning, and yet I have access to a plethora of materials. My mother has an art degree and her minor concentration was fiber arts. She mainly focused on weaving and felt work, but she has a spinning wheel, a few drop spindles, a hand carder, a carding machine, huge rubbermaid storage containers of roving, plus many more containers of yarn that she spun herself and never used. She went back to ceramics, so all this stuff is just sitting in storage and I could borrow it at the drop of a hat. The question is, do I want to go down that road and get into what I would consider an entirely new hobby?

In semi-related fiber musings, have I been living under a rock in terms of the level of vitriol and hate towards crochet? I've always been aware of the subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) bias against it: I worked at the Knit and Bead, not the Knit and Crochet and Bead, and we had only one employee who could crochet worth a darn. One day, a regular knitting customer came in to select a project for her daughter-in-law. The customer announced "She crochets but I love her dearly anyway" and we all laughed and then looked at some beautiful hand-carved crochet hooks. So I was aware of the red-headed stepchild thing, but my goodness, have you all ever seen anything at the level of this outburst when Knitting Daily dared to feature one blog entry about crochet? Sweet merciful crap, people. And I'm told that this is tame in comparison to other boards!