There Is Such a Thing As a Free Lunch

....not necessarily an actual lunch, though.


Much, much better.


A FREE SPINNING WHEEL.



Now, this delight is not mine to keep (at least not yet!) but it is mine to use for the next several months and play with and decide if I like to spin, or if I loathe it because I suck at it as truly and terribly as I suck at drop spindling.

Apparently my university used to teach both spinning and weaving way back in the dark ages (or the 70's depending on how you regard that particular decade) and the wheels and looms have been all but languishing in forgotten disregard ever since then. This past summer when the art department ran out of storage space they combed through their vaults and decided that the wheels and looms would be the first to go to free up additional space for more recently-used and therefore more-relevant items. However (and luckily for me!) one brave ceramics prof spoke up and promised storage space in her non-profit studio downtown..............so the looms and wheels were spared for at least a few months more.

Fast forward to last Friday, when I was meeting Kim (the Horticultural wonder) for our twice-weekly knitting meeting and she mentions to me how one of her student workers picked up some extra cash this summer helping the art department move out things from storage....and how some of those things were both wheels and looms.

The greedy gears in my head started a-clicking, and Tuesday I was in the art office chatting up the department secretary putting on my best face and offering to very kindly "rent" the wheel from them for a semester - putting it to good use and cleaning it up, etc. - hoping all the while that she would say that I could surely just borrow it and that no fees would be necessary. The very next day I received a confirmation call saying that I could certainly borrow the wheel - as long as I could bring myself to wait until next Monday at the earliest, as the ceramics prof was headed out of town and I wouldn't be able to arrange a pickup time with her until then.

Perfect!

In the meantime I've solicited a few suggestions as to what books I should be looking into first, have put roughly two dozen books on spinning on request to be sent to me here at work (I've already gotten 4, and read my way through part of a wonderful work last night - The Complete Spinning Book, by Candace Crockett) and am just as excited as anything to get started.

My hope is that in a few weeks if I'm really really nice I can find out about snagging a second wheel so that Kim (the Horticultural wonder) can have one at her house too and that she and I don't have to both practice on the same one - because as she's the one who had this incredible piece of knowledge in the first place and was kind enough to share it with me - she totally needs to get in on this fantastic piece of luck as well!

Dudes! A free spinning wheel!

Wouldn't it be fantastic if the wheel turns out to totally not suck, and they let us keep them for ever and ever and ever?