Spinning Rant

Over the weekend I went to the Michigan Fiber Festival with my mom, which was in general loads of fun. We petted sheep, saw alpacas and bunnies, watched a goat get sheared, ate corndogs, and enjoyed petting all the lovely wonderful fiber.

There was also a man who had some very neat handmade electric wheels. He was letting people try them with some fiber he had there. So he handed it to me and I was starting to do it, thinking "Hey, that looks pretty cool!" when all of a sudden he grabbed it away from me. "No no no you're doing it ALL wrong! You have to hold it HERE and HERE or else you will have UNEVEN YARN!!!"

Now my perspective is, if I wanted perfectly even yarn, I would go to the LYS and buy some Cascade. I want to spin in order to make something unusual and interesting. Interesting to me involves bumps and slubs and thick & thin spots.

I was kind of ticked that this guy was so quick to judge and tell me I was doing it wrong. Perhaps I wasn't doing it strictly by the spinning rules but I was getting the effect I wanted. You can pay a pretty penny for some very unusual yarn, Colinette Point Five comes to mind. It's thick & thin, uneven, bumpy, slubby. And it's lovely and $26 a skein. So what if I were to spin something like that? I would consider it an accomplishment and would be proud of it, but I was stung by the man's words.

I'm trying to figure out if there is a good reason not to have "interesting" yarn, or if it is just like the Old Guard of the knitting establishment, who think everyone should be knitting cobweb-fine lace shawls that fit through a wedding ring. Those people I can just ignore, but since I am so new at spinning I don't know if I'm just doing something entirely wrong.

At any rate, I thought that guy was kind of a jerk. He even cut the part I spun off of his little sample skein and handed to me and told me to hide it. Um, geez dude, even if something I'm doing isn't perfect, I'm not going to hide it in shame. :-P