The wheels keep on turning...

While it is in many ways a blessing to learn a skill as a child that you go on to use throughout life, sometimes it's only in passing on skills to others that you really appreciate them - going back to basics can make you realise how far you've come since you started (and how much farther you have to go yourself)

The visit of a friend to collect a spinning wheel she'd purchased meant that I spent Saturday afternoon last weekend teaching her to use said wheel. She picked it up well (as much through her own ability as my teaching I suspect!) but, as the week went on and the weekend approached, I started to realise that 1) it had been several months since I touched my own wheel, and 2) it had been even longer since I taught someone to spin.

Happily for my own wheel, this first realisation meant that my fingers and feet started itching to get spinning, and on Friday night it was plucked from it's hiding hole to work its way through 100g of grey Ronaldsay:

This is such a lovely fibre, I can't recommend it highly enough - easy spinning (I bought mine as a carded roving so no preparation was needed), and makes a lovely soft yarn. The yarn I ended up with is approx 3-ply weight, aka light-fingering, and will probably be a pair of gloves.

And the spinner just starting to find her treadling feet? She ended up with her own skein of yarn too, and I can see a lot more being spun in the future!