Spindle spinning, or, gee my arms are tired!

I promised DillyDallyKnitter that I would teach her to hand spin yarn on a spindle the next time we got together for our Thursday night knitting group. That was supposed to be last Thursday, but at 7:00, when knitting starts, I was sitting at my desk in my office, 45 minutes away, working. So I didn't exactly make it. To make up for my absence (which, DillyDally told me, caused endless tears among those who were supposed to be learning to drop spindle but were not) I thought I had better give a really excellent lesson this Thursday, so I actually got a drop spindle out to make sure that I could even still do it- which is a great start to an excellent lesson.

I had to dig my drop spindle out from under loads of stuff- it was waaaaay at the back of a closet buried under hand combs, an unloved (completely) charkha and lots of bits of fiber and yarn and swatches. But I got it. Then I needed something to spin (ok, I have loads of stuff to spin, I needed something to spin that I wouldn't care if I ruined it), so I rooted in the closet some more and came up with an old zip lock bag of sort of scratchy fiber pieces in three random colorways, none of which went together very well. They didn't clash horribly, though, either- and hey, I'm not picky (not that picky, anyway...) so off I went to spin.

Three hours and two tired arms later, I was just about done with a full spindle of "singles," ready to be twisted together into yarn. And no, that little amount of single that you see on the spindle is not all of the fiber from the first photo. Just some.



Here is the finished product- enough (just enough, probably) to make a sweater for a squirrel, if it were a small squirrel. A little more spinning, though, and I will have enough to make myself a really pretty (hopefully- you never really know what it will look like until you start knitting!) pair of fingerless gloves.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention- I am happy to report that my laptop keyboard will be receiveng a new "W" shortly. Interestingly, according to the technician at Dell, they cannot possibly ship such a small part as a single plastic clip from the back of a single keyboard key (just the clip that holds they key on was broken), so they are sending me an entire new laptop keyboard, which I may install at my liesure (or just rip the "W" key off of and jam it onto my old keyboard). Hmmm....