Wooly, right here, all day

Tuesday is the second annual Seattle Mariners Stitch ‘n Pitch, and while Peggy and I do not love baseball (unless its Red Sox baseball and if Seattle was playing Boston we would SO be there) we do love movies with baseball themes, such as The Rookie, Mr. Baseball, Field of Dreams, Major League (both), A League of Their Own, Frequency (oh yes it DOES), Fever Pitch (go Sox!) and, of course, Bull Durham, perhaps our favorite baseball movie ever. When Nuke LaLoosh was strumming his guitar and singing 'Try a Little Tenderness', his bungled lyrics were: “Young girls, they do get wooly” and Crash Davis corrected him: “WEARY! Young girls get WEARY. Nobody gets ‘WOOLY’.”

Well, we disagree.

Wooly, right here, all day.

This is ‘Rebecca’s wall of wool’. It spans about 11' by 3.5'. There’s little cotton in there, a few hanks of Clip and some thin cotton to tie off my handspun hanks. Cotton: not our thing. Peggy has a handsome stash, but nothing like this because 1: she didn’t work in a yarn store for 8 years and B. she has far more self-control than I. Plus, if you must count it, III: she’s the ‘good twin’. Heh.

So, with all this store-bought wool ‘in stash’, we had no intention of getting into spinning. Our answer to that was always ‘No’. Actually, it was ‘HELL no.’ It was that way for years until we saw our first Betty Roberts spinning wheel, at which point we had to have one. Each. (Note to Caroline: Twins don’t share everything. Get over it.)

Peggy

On the left is her first Betty wheel, found at a yard sale in 2005 and made from Old Growth Fir in 1983. Peggy took it to Betty for repairs, and while she had it Betty came up with a re-design to be lighter and faster. On the right you see the result, the new version in Chinese Elm which Peggy just picked up from Betty in June. She's contemplating a third. More on that later.

Rebecca

My little wheel (by comparison) is a double wheel/double drive in Russian Olive which I purchased in 2005. It’s fast and easy to spin on and I love it. We’ll talk more about our wheels in other posts, but in the meantime if you’d like to see more of them check out the link on the sidebar called Spinning Wheels made by Betty Roberts. Do read the messages, which go into great detail about the different styles, and don’t worry about becoming obsessed. Everybody does.

My view while spinning.

Since spinning involves a lot more accoutrement than knitting
and it wouldn't all fit in either of our little compacts,
we HAD to have a way to haul it all to spin-ins and vacations:

The Mazdaratti

SWEET