Spinning in nature

One thing I love about the cottage is that even though we've made little changes, it still feels a lot like a time capsule from 1975.  The dark fake-wood paneled walls, the original dark-wood framed single-pane windows, the books published in that decade with pictures of men and women in bell-bottom suits on the cover, the records that capture the era... if you lived it yourself, you know what I mean.  And spinning yarn there, surrounded by giant picture windows overlooking trees and water, just fits right in with the decade's back to nature, back to our roots aesthetic.

Plying the 'Forager' colours last weekend felt very fitting.  While I worked, Pete put on our ironic-favourite Travelers album which celebrates Canada's centennial and Expo '67 in Montreal.

It was clouding over outside, which always deepens the green of the tall hemlocks and pines that surround the cottage, and the greens and purples building up under my hands seemed like a perfect match.

Of course, nothing ever is perfect, really.  I had spun these singles to be very very thin, and I had hoped the lean nature of the resulting yarn would fit onto one spool.  Usually I have to stop three-quarters of the way through, break the yarn, wind it all off into a ball, and start over with the remains, cursing myself for not yet figuring out how to use the bigger spool Pete bought for me a few years ago.

This time, I just kept moving the yarn up and down the hooks, hoping for the best, and accidentally winding a lot of yarn in the gap between spool and frame.  In the end I had to take the whole thing off and wind it from a post on the bottom of the wheel.

Still, I was making yarn, which is by definition very earthy and natural!  And when I finally finished getting as much of it as possible into one ball (I had to ditch a bunch at the end, when the last few feet of purple went all knotty and entangled and wouldn't cooperate with me at all) I took it outside onto the beautiful deck overlooking our little patch of forest, to photograph.

Whereupon I was descended-upon by persistent mosquitoes.

Go nature!

And, go windows with screens in them!  Next time: indoor photography. Yeesh.