It’s coming around again, as it has probably for time immemorial — the thing where someone who doesn’t knit discovers that there are people who do knit, and some of them are apparently under the age of 90, and then the next thing we know, someone is writing articles or spouting this line on TV […]

In retrospect, as recovery starts to happen, I think maybe the t-shirts should have read I SURVIVED SOCK SUMMIT 2009 or maybe SOCK SUMMIT ATE MY BRAIN or something along those lines. Pulling photos off the camera, it looks like I…. hardly took any. Which, when I think back, isn’t that surprising. I managed to […]

UPDATED 17 July 2017! I originally wrote this in 2008, but have updated it annually ever since. At this time of year, we seem to always have a huge crop of new spinners and would-be spinners looking for information about getting started. So I thought I’d take a morning and pull together an overall post […]

Updated as of 11 February 2015, to reflect the latest wheels on the market and latest pricing. Choosing your first spinning wheel is somewhat like choosing your first car. There’s a level on which it doesn’t really matter exactly what it is, because it’s going to do the trick to get you started, and odds […]

1. What is spinning from the fold? The short answer is this: you take a not-very-long length of spinnable fiber, and instead of presenting it end-first to be spun, fold it over. Instead of drawing fiber off the end of your supply, it now comes from the folded part in the middle. Linda Diak from […]

So I have this project that I actually input on Ravelry. It’s a shawl. I started it almost a year ago and had thought I’d finish it by SOAR last year, but… well, didn’t. So let’s just step through things a bit here. 3 July 2007: 4 July 2007: 5 July 2007: 6 July 2007: […]

When I said the next post up in the sock yarn series would talk about colour, Sara playfully asked: colour?? colour? Of what do you speak? Are you *that* close to Canada that u’s have infiltrated?? There are quite a few ways to address this, such as reminding Sara that I’ve never known her to […]

The manchild’s cough kept waking his parents up all night, and his room is at the far corner of the house away from ours. Even before we fully woke up, I think we realized he wasn’t going to school that day. And then, of course, one quick look out the window suggested that, even if […]

Socks are a great way to use your handspun yarn, and a great way to push your boundaries in spinning and acquire new skills. A pair of socks isn’t a huge and unwieldy project, and the commitment to knit them isn’t tremendous — but they’re varied and versatile. There is no one canonical way to […]

The long-awaited Pagoda Shawl is finally done! Let’s recap the story. At some point early this year, Pippi gifted me with some fiber in her Pagoda colourway. And of course, that prompts me to say, “Check out what Shannon did with that fiber also!” Here’s how mine spun up: I spent a while pondering what […]