Purrls

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

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

7 Comments:

  • At 12:43 PM, Blogger Miss13 said…

    what an absolute dick.
    You were way better behaved than I would have....

     
  • At 4:28 PM, Blogger erin said…

    Wow, if he really wanted to teach you something he sure went about it the wrong way. Certainly a stupid thing to do for someone who theoretically is trying to sell you something. What a dick.

     
  • At 7:39 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    I would have loved to have gone to MI! Remember guys don't know everything even if they think they do.

     
  • At 5:08 AM, Blogger lucia said…

    There's a man who isn't going to sell his product!

    I agree with you on handspinning. If you get the look you want, that's fine.

     
  • At 7:31 AM, Blogger knittykat said…

    Aw, thanks guys. That made me feel a lot better!

    I couldn't afford his product anyway; $789!!!

    I could buy 3 wheels for that :-) Or a whole load of hand spindles ;-)

     
  • At 11:27 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Laura here! That guy sounds like a kook. Some people just can't appreciate variation in life!

     
  • At 6:16 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    He must have been one of the authors from Lucia's knitting nazi book. NEVER do it that way!

     

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