MAIDENS AND FLYERS
I’ve had plenty of obsessions over the years, from macramé to rock climbing. New skills take over my brain at regular intervals, leaving me little room or desire to think of anything else. But the urge to spin wool blindsided me with its intensity and connected me to a past I’d never considered.
For years, I’d refused to spin, saying I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to try to understand how those pretty wheels worked. They looked so deceptively intricate with their dark wooden flyers and carved gears. The sound of the treadle seduced me with its rhythmic thump. But I didn’t have another free minute, and spinning was just another time suck. I was busy enough with a full-time job, writing, and knitting.
Then I touched a wheel, unable to resist my friends’ encouragement any longer. Like Sleeping Beauty, I fell into a trance, except my eyes stayed open—and the fiber flew.
Of course, when first I sat down to try spinning at my friend Janine’s wheel, I massacred it. The fiber kept spinning into great, undraftable clumps, or drifting into fine whispers of twist, floating apart in my hands. The more I tried to grab it, the more it slipped away from me. I barely resisted the urge to stomp my feet and throw a tantrum. A fiber craft! One that I couldn’t learn! Oh, I was steamed.
Again and again, I snared the leader with the hook, drew it out, and tried my very best to hold the fiber as Janine had said, like it was a baby bird, though I was pretty sure an actual fledgling would have needed some birdie CPR by that point.
With Janine’s encouragement, I kept turning the wheel. My feet moved. I drew my arm back. Then, suddenly, something fell into place. I looked at my left hand and saw an amazing sight: loose fiber turning into yarn. Finally I held the fiber loosely enough. I’m surprised I didn’t hear the bing as the light bulb went on over my head, but Janine saw it happen, and she pointed it out: That point, just past my fingertips by a few millimeters, that was where the magic was. It didn’t happen at the wheel, or where the yarn entered the orifice to wind around the bobbin. The wheel itself, a thing that looks like it should do all the work, doesn’t. Your hand does the work, as it draws back and plays against the tension the wheel provides while it inserts twist into those loose fibers.
In a way, it felt better than knitting. In knitting I created a concrete something. In spinning, I was creating a presomething. Yarn, not yet knitted, held an almost infinite number of possibilities.
Oh, I was born to spin.
I wasn’t some wunderkind spinner—my yarns were lumpy and, well…homespun looking. But within an hour of learning, I was making decent yarn and, within a day, I was beyond hooked. I loved the speed with which the finished product came from my fingers and whirled around the bobbin. In a short amount of time, I could go from owning a pile of fluff to owning gorgeous one-of-a-kind yarn.
I needed my own wheel. I had to have one of my own. But the next fiber festival was all the way across the country: Maryland Sheep and Wool. I understood it was ridiculous to fly that far when I could just do some research and probably find one I liked locally. But a festival would display all of the different makes and models. I’d get to try whichever one struck my fancy. I’d have choice.
Travel so far to feed a new obsession? Who would do that?
My breathing shallow, I closed my eyes and clicked the Buy button for the airplane ticket.
Once at the festival, I scooped up armful after armful of unspun fiber. Nothing was safe from me: Rambouillet, Corriedale, Targhee, Cormo, I wanted it all, and I wanted it in every color of the rainbow. How could I guess what my first handspun sweater should be made from if I hadn’t tried spinning it? I bought sweater quantities of everything, just to be safe.
And then I found the wheel of my heart, an Ashford Joy. I bought it on the spot. I was blowing through money like it was water, but I felt such a need to spin that it was almost a physical urge, like hunger or sleep. I didn’t understand where the need came from; I just fed it.
In order to fly home with my bounty, I put the fiber into a large plastic tub and sealed it with duct tape. I thought it was a great idea. I’d just check the behemoth, and my loot would meet me on the baggage carousel at the other end.
Then the airline representative said, baggage sticker in his hand, “Can you open that for me, please?”
“What?” I asked in horror. I couldn’t open it. There was no way. I’d used all the tape. I’d had to sit on it to get it closed.
“I just need to do a visual check, since I can’t see what’s in it.”
I didn’t think before speaking, and the words tumbled from my mouth. “I can’t open it. It’ll explode!”
It was as if everything else in the terminal stopped. Everything went into slow motion. Heads swiveled and the representative looked up at me and took a step backward.
I leaped forward, further terrifying the poor man, and launched into DEFCON 1 Crazed Spinner speak: “You can’t open it, I didn’t mean to say that, it’s just fiber. You know, pre-yarn? I’m going to spin it all when I get home. I have this dream of making my own handspun sweater, from scratch, like some I saw this weekend, and some is dyed already but some is natural, and maybe I’ll dye it. I haven’t decided. But if we open it, it will never, ever, ever close again, and who’s going to help me get all that fiber back in there? You? No, I don’t think so.” I put my head down on the counter and wailed, “I don’t have any more tape.”
I must have been the man’s first insane spinner because in his hurry to move me along, he merely slapped the baggage label on the bin and gave me my boarding pass.
I wasn’t done with the Baltimore airport, though. I didn’t check my new beloved Ashford Joy; instead, I carried it on in its clever backpack. As it passed through the X-ray machine, the person running the scanner paled. He glanced up at me and then back at the screen.
“I, um, need to send that back through again.”
“Okay,” I said.
He let out a long, low whistle and then said, “Hey, Steve, you gotta get a look at this.” It took a little talking to get it through, but by now I was becoming adept at Crazy Spinner Speak. They let me pass, confusion still in their eyes.
In the terminal, waiting to board our plane, I couldn’t wait. I took my new beauty from its case and attached a leader. I unpacked the bit of fiber (purple merino and silk) that I’d put in the front pocket of the bag just in case. I gave it a good oiling.
People started to stare.
I didn’t care. I began to spin.
I got a few comments from passersby, most of them along the lines of “Whoa.” One woman snapped, “I can’t believe they let you back here with that. Shouldn’t be allowed.”
I ignored the comment, but it made me nervous, and I noticed a turbaned security officer had picked me up on his radar. I watched him pace back and forth, frowning at me. He got closer and closer. Was he mentally reviewing his handbook? Where was the Giant Wooden Spinning Thing section? Could it be a weapon? Did he have a responsibility to do something about this?
Finally, he approached. I didn’t stop spinning, but my heart beat faster, and I lost control of the fiber. It drifted to bits, and I had to look down at the wheel, using the orifice hook to pull the yarn back out again. The woman who had snapped at me watched with anticipation.
“You’re spinning,” he said. He had an accent. He still scowled.
“Yes,” I said. If he took it from me, would I get it back? Or would they destroy it? I couldn’t let that happen. If I picked it up by its handle and sprinted for the gate, would he give chase? He looked like he’d move slowly, and, after all, I’d already threatened airport security with an explosion and gotten away with it, what was one more security infraction?
“I used to spin,” he said, the scowl giving way to something softer. “It’s what my people did. At home. I used a charka. Do you know what that is?”
I nodded, so surprised I could barely speak. “Cotton?”
He smiled and sighed, bending his knees to come into a low squat next to the wheel. We were eye to eye. “Yes, cotton. It’s lovely. Peaceful. I wish I could do it now, but I don’t have one. Why do you spin?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. “Because I have to. I’m not sure why.”
“It’s what your people did?”
My eyes widened as I realized for the first time, yes, he was right. It was what my people did. My father grew up riding his uncle’s horses on the ranch, herding sheep and cattle. My mother was raised in New Zealand, the daughter of a sheep farmer. One of my first clear memories is of being in a New Zealand shearing barn, sliding down the wool chute, and landing in piles of freshly shorn fiber. I own a handspun wool blanket that was woven by my great-grandmother.
I come from wool people, from spinners and knitters. They are my heritage, and I was claiming it. I realized that’s why the hunger felt so natural, why the urge was so keen.
The grin could have split my face in two. My new friend and I talked spinning until they called my flight. The offended woman who had snapped at me stopped staring and pouted into a book.
I should have known that, for me, spinning was inevitable.
It’s what my people did.