• Back in the day, there were no dedicated places to talk about spindles. If you discussed them on the spinning lists, wheel spinners would complain that they weren’t interested. It seemed that we needed our own place to discuss them, so that we could share the excitement of the new spindles we’d found. And back then, there were a lot of new spindle makers and new designs. I decided to start a list just for us. I’d have people send me their posts and I would manually put them together into a post that I emailed to the folks that were interested. Responses would show up in the next day’s post. It was work, but it was fun. Eventually, I found some software that would create the posts for me and used that for awhile. Then someone on the list offered a place on their own server, so we tried that. Then companies came out with email groups. They kept getting bought out by Yahoo, so eventually we wound up there. I never liked Yahoo. I hated dealing with it, but it was convenient for folks, so we stayed.

    I have noticed that people are not using email as much as before. A lot of that traffic went to social media and sites like Ravelry. Participation on the list dropped off. I had a monthly reminder for people to talk about their projects, but that didn’t seem to help. And I didn’t spend as much time as before participating. I talked about closing the list last year, but people wanted to keep it going awhile longer. After almost a year of no traffic, I closed it this week. Thank you to all that participated! I hope you continue to spin and enjoy your spindles.

  • I have been knitting a lot. I haven’t been spinning much. It’s one of those weird things I go through. I had this plan to knit some of the patterns in In the Footsteps of Sheep I have the wool cleaned and combed. I even started spinning a bit of it. But there it sits. I normally like traditional patterns. Right now, I am on a Churchmouse patterns kick. I’m not sure I’ll be buying any other patterns. They just seem to fit and I never have problems with the pattern. Normally, I like basic wool. Now I’m knitting with odd stuff. I’m doing my second sweater from Avalanche. It’s a wool/alpaca chainette yarn. It’s a bit odd but I just love the sweater.

    It’s not a great picture, but it’s better than no picture at all. I have another Classic Elite yarn up for the next project. I’m doing the Easy Folded Poncho in Telluride. That’s an alpaca/linen blend with those donegal tweed pieces. It’s interesting stuff. I am looking for more weird yarns to do the Simple Tee for the summer. I figure I need a couple of light winter/fall sweaters and a couple of light summer/spring tees. I still need to sew some skirts. I’ve had one ready to go for months, but still need to hem it. Will see if I can manage that this weekend. I am still working on the shawl, about halfway through it and I have a pair of socks on the needles. I like that Kroy sock yarn. I just am not adventurous right now. I have a sock pattern that works. I find that I don’t like wearing the fancy socks as much as the plain ones. (This could be bad for that handspun sock project!) So I am just knitting what works and using the same yarn for them. I don’t want to have to rewrite the pattern.

    I still don’t have a picture of Lon wearing his nice cabled sweater. He really loves it. He’d like a thicker collar so I may try and work on that this weekend. It did turn out nice.