Haha, this picture is silly, but I couldn’t resist the temptation for taking a few pictures outside in our nearly balmy February conditions.

Here is a slightly less silly one:

So, this is officially my fourth finished handspun.  I’ve been knitting for almost sixteen years, and until sometime last year I’d always rolled my eyes at the thought of learning to spin.  My internal monologue went something like this: “There is already yarn.  The yarn is good.  The yarn is very, very good and there is so much to knit with it.  So very, very much to knit with it that I could never ever ever not be knitting the things and instead making the yarn. ”

And then, I drank the Kool-Aid.

After agonizing over the investment of a new wheel (a relatively simple piece of technology that somehow retails for around $600), and the amazingly high resale value of used wheels on Ebay, I found a very second-hand Louet from a local fellow who was upgrading and needed the additional studio space.  Several YouTube instructional videos later, I was on my way to spinning some uber clunky yarn and scrounging ravelry for projects requiring very little yardage.

I’m still in the shallow end of the learning curve, as you can see from the wildly uneven owl-inspired goodness above, but guess what?  I don’t care!  Its fun!  You can make yarn!  Out of like this stuff that grown on sheep!  Even if it’s jacked-up-crazy yarn, you can still make stuff out of it!  It’s squooshy and you can smoosh your face in it and smell the wooly goodness of the world, and in that moment you are sharing a kinship with an imaginary woman standing outside her croft on some wind-swept moor four hundred years ago.

The last part might just be me though.