Cotton Pickin Spinning

Back in the 90's, Joan Ruane came to San Diego to teach cotton and flax spinning. She's a great teacher and a wonderful woman. (My youngest son was in 2nd grade at the time, and adored Joan. He thought she was actually another grandmother that we had just forgotten to tell him about.) Hopefully, Joan will send me a copy of the picture I took with her camera of her and Sam,who is now almost 19 years old and 6'6". :-)


The guild brought Joan back to San Diego in February for a program on cotton - an afternoon workshop on spinning cotton with a tahkli spindle, and then a one day workshop on preparing cotton and spinning it on a wheel. I didn't sign up for the full day workshop, since I had taken that when she was here before, but I really enjoy her and did take the tahkli workshop as a refresher. I had a marvelous time, and even bought one of her spindles. I already had a tahkli at home, but hers are so incredibly well balanced that I couldn't resist adding one to my collection.
The picture above shows some of the other participants in the class, and that's Joan standing (black top and white scarf) helping someone.

This picture shows what I've spun so far (natural green organic cotton), and next to the spindle is my little support gizmo. For those of us with unlevel laps, these are handy. You sit with it between your legs, which gives you a support bowl for the spindle that won't fall off your lap.


The timing was auspicious, too. I ended up coming down with another deep chest cold, darned it all. Not good, but... I did get some nice spinning time in.

In the meantime, I had a grocery sack of cotton that was homegrown by my friend Jan Frazee. Another activity while I watched the Olympics and coughed was picking seeds out of the cotton. In my hand is the cotton from a boll, you can see a seed exposed that I'm about to pick out. To the left is a nice pile of fluff and above is a little pile of seeds. This is definitely the slow way to do the task, but does work well as a tv watching activity.


In other news, I'm finally ready to start weaving again. The loom has been warped for a while, but I needed a few things in place and finally got myself to start moving on it. I found the brackets I used to hang weights off the back for live weight tension and got it all set up. Found another shuttle to use for a lighter weft for hems, and most importantly of all, reviewed my notes so I could refresh my mind on what I was planning to do, oh so long ago. Better late than never, eh?!