A tale of two skiens

I model for the life drawing class at the local community college. The students are starting to get bored drawing nude bodies about this time of the semester, so the teachers try to change things up a bit to hold their interest. This last Wednesday the teacher had me bring a costume and my spinning wheel, and we took the class outside under the trees. It was a beautiful day for it! I did some warm up 2 minute gesture poses, and then the teacher had me sit and actually spin yarn for the rest of the class time. Spinning involves small, repetitive motions, so it wasn't too hard for the students to draw the action. And I got to fill a bobbin full of white wool singles over the course of the afternoon.

I actually have several spinning wheels. The one I use for the drawing classes is my Ashford Traditional, because it looks the most like what people think a spinning wheel ought to look like. However, it is also the wheel that I lend to my daughter most of the time. We only have a few bobbins for it, so I figured I had better open this one back up before too long. So today I took the wheel back out with me to my local SCA (Medieval historical recreation) practice. I had a second lovely sunny afternoon to sit and spin, and filled up a second bobbin full of singles.

This evening I took both bobbins full of singles and put them on this Lazy Kate. Now, I don't know who Kate was, and why she was considered lazy, but this device to hold bobbins of yarn while you ply them together is a really useful little gadget!

To ply yarn, I feed the two singles from the bobbins back into the spinning wheel, this time turning the wheel in the opposite direction from my original spinning direction. When the two singles twist back on themselves it strengthens the resulting yarn, and if you do it right it makes a balanced yarn that won't kink up or untwist itself, or bias your stitches. That makes the yarn much nicer for knitting or crochet.

When I had a bobbin full of finished yarn I wound it off into a skein, using my weasel. I think it is technically called a clock reel, but when I was growing up my folks volunteered at a restored colonial farm house on the weekends. They had one of these, and the other volunteers called it a weasel. They said it was the basis for the nursery rhyme, "Pop goes the weasel', because after 40 turns around (or 100 yards) the device would make a clicking or popping sound. (The monkey in the rhyme would have been the child pestering the mother as she was working.) I've since been told this isn't true, but I love the story anyway.

All told, I got two beautiful skeins of two ply wool yarn, for a total of 262 yards. I'm going to have these with me on my table this weekend when I set up at Henny & Ev for their craft show on Friday and Saturday night. (http://www.hennyandevboutique.com/) If they don't find a home though, I'll hold on to them for the next time we've got a dye pot going. I like having a stash of hand spun white wool for playing in the colors.

Textile terms and phrases hiding in our language

Yes, in addition to being a textile arts geek, I'm also a word geek. And I love it when the two worlds collide! I've been poking around the internet the past few days, and stumbled across some cool things.

Do you know where the word 'rocket' comes from? From 'rocchetta', an Italian term for a 'little distaff'. Evidently the early 17th century experiments in rockets reminded folks of the cylindrical shape of a distaff loaded with fiber. So yes, our rocket ships to the moon are named after a spinning tool.

And the term 'dyed in the wool' means 'permanent or extreme in your views'. Where did that come from? Fabric can be dyed after it is woven, or yarn can be dyed, but the color can just lay on the surface then. However, if the wool is dyed before spinning ("dyed in the wool") the color goes all the way through the fibers, and is least likely to fade or change.

Here's another one: the country Brazil's name is "derived from the Portuguese and Spanish word brasil, the name of an East Indian tree with reddish-brown wood from which a red dye was extracted. The Portuguese found a New World tree related to the Old World brasil tree when they explored what is now called Brazil, and as a result they named the New World country after the Old World tree." So there is a whole country named after a red dye source. How cool is that?

'Subtle' is from the latin sub + tela, 'beneath the threads on a loom', meaning finely woven. 'Text' is from the past participle of 'texere', meaning 'to weave'.

Ooh... and cat lovers look here: http://www.word-origins.com/definition/tabby.html . "The tabby cat commemorates a textile manufacturing suburb of Baghdad. This was al-‘Attābīya, named after Prince Attāb, who lived there. The cloth made there was known as ‘attābī, and the term passed via Old French atabis and modern French tabis into English as tabby. This originally denoted a sort of rich silk taffeta (‘This day … put on … my false tabby waistcoat with gold lace’ noted Samuel Pepys in his diary for 13 October 1661), but since such cloth was originally usually striped, by the 1660s the word was being applied to brindled cats."

So...who has some other examples of fiber arts words and phrases embedded in our language?