My Chat Room!

Welcome to my chat room! ha! Well, should be my Chatter Room actually... This is my sweet Woolamina (aka Mina), my first ever sheep.

What does Mina have to do with a chat room you ask? The first time I had Mina sheared many years ago, people told me to just throw her beautiful fleece in the garbage???? Gasp. As usual, I did not follow directions and set out to learn to spin her fiber into beautiful things.

And along came a spinning wheel.... A very old spinning wheel that gave me fits while I tried to learn to spin on it. It took a month of constant practice (and lots of bad word saying) and I was ready to quit. BUT, since I already had my beautiful Mina, that would not do.

One day it finally clicked (after trying out a brand new wheel I borrowed). And I was off and spinning. In the beginning I tried to oil and polish this little wheel in hopes of reducing the noises it produced. It stubbornly held on to its chatter.

The it came to me- this little flax wheel from Russia, most likely over 100 years old, had seen many miles of spinning, many miles of travel to get to me. The many hands that touched this wheel had each left a story behind for the wheel to tell.

It is simply constructed, maybe from materials that were already available to the maker-maybe he did not have a lot of money to create a fancier wheel. Did he create this little wheel for his wife? Child? How many people became part of this wheel through a groove worn on each side of the flyer where so much fiber travelled from spinner's hand to bobbin? Where has this wheel travelled? Farm to farm to spin while someone wove fabric for clothes? Family gathering to family gathering? How many people helped create the permanent foot print worn gently into the treadle?

So my little wheel may be 'noisy' to some, but I like to call it the chatter of a wheel with a million stories to tell. A soothing chat at the end of a long day, a companion for nights of no sleep and a place to spin 'the bad out of me' when necessary.

Peace is being surrounded by quiet- with the chatter of a spining wheel. Becoming a part of the karma that is the soul of a very old, happy spinning wheel.