Spindle-Making: not as easy as you might think!

There's a lot of tutorials out there on how to make a drop spindle with a dowel and a toy wheel. But I wanted to make the whorls myself. I just like making things difficult, apparently.

But ....

Two whorls, plus a chopstick shaft!

it wasn't as hard as I thought. Unfortunately, when teaching in a group setting and trying to re-create some of the finds from Ribe, it's a lot harder to achieve something balanced.

At Inter-College War this year, I taught a Spindle-Making class. We had a great deal of fun, and though there wasn't a formal second session where I taught people how to spin (the schedule got mucked up last-minute and I ended up sitting down one-on-one with people when the second session should have been) I think everyone enjoyed it. Below, I'm teaching a new friend how to spin with her spindle. We spent quite a bit of time together just chatting about fiber, fabric, spinning, sewing... anything you can think of involving fluff and stuff!

Finished whorls drying on the windowsill... :)

There's a few great shots of me from this year, which I'm quite happy about. First, you can see I've figured out veils! Mostly! It stayed on all day with minimal adjustment, which I totally count as a win. I also started getting used to wearing a wimple, which is a bit difficult for me as I really do not like things touching the front of my neck. At all. It made it much easier to pin the veil on, so I was willing to live with it. I'll just never have that perfect under-chin wimple going on.

I promise, the good gentle on the right hasn't got her over-dress on
 because she'd just finished attending the lampwork glass beads lesson!

I'm also wearing a new dress! The purple one below my surcote, which was worn primarily for warmth as the wind was FREEZING! Half its hem is done up with safety pins, so I really should get to finishing it... :) The surcote is very much a medieval-oid one rather than anything accurate. I realized only after finishing it that it's a boiled wool knit, not a woven fabric. Ah, well, it's still warm and it's not exactly easy to tell that it's really a knit fabric. One of the gores is in backwards, though, so I should probably fix that.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the grey surcote to a point where I could wear it. I did however get most of the body done, and I'm about half-done with the hem as I write this. I haven't worked on it beyond a few stitches in the hem since coming back, as my SO gave me his cold and it's really knocked me for a loop. I've spent the last week and a half sleeping and moaning about how much my nose hurts.

Semester starts back up next week (oh dear, please help) so blogging will be infrequent, and hopefully I'll make some progress on my thesis despite not officially working on it this semester.