[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Skeins

If I'm a day late this week, it's because I spent much of Friday and 
Saturday happily spinning in the company of good women. I belong to the 
Kingston Handspinners and Weavers Guild, a collection of (mostly) 
strong-minded, down-to-earth, wonderfully commonsensical middle-aged women 
with a passion for fibre stuff. We have a large guild room full of looms 
and wheels and all sorts of wonderfully geeky auxiliary equipment, upstairs 
in a city-owned old limestone building, the Tett Centre. I love hanging out 
with the Guild, joyously groping fleeces, listening to the good talk about 
sleying the reed and tying up the harnesses, being taught new techniques, 
and getting my fingers good-naturedly slapped when I'm doing something 
wrong. They don't sugar-coat their salt, these ladies, and that's just fine 
with me.

We were working at the Tett because last week was a city festival, a 
celebration of Kingston's brief reign as the first capital of Canada. We'd 
brought in samples of our work and used them to decorate our room. We'd 
festooned the looms with fine woven stuff and dangled finished garments and 
skeins of handspun from the warping frames hung up on the wall; we'd set 
out fleece and silk cocoons and balls of cotton. We had looms set up for 
kids to try weaving. Outside, where I spent most of Friday, we had a 
sheep-to-shawl: at 1 PM, the shearer flourished her shears and set to strip 
her Romney ewe, and by 5:45, we had a finished shawl on the loom. I was one 
of the spinners -- my first time on a team.  The weather was beautiful, and 
as I sat and spun I took the moment and wrapped it in memory to put it away 
for a keeper.

But there was another keeper memory too. One of the senior spinners, 
Margaret, was drifting through the guild room on Saturday as I stood 
combing fleece on the drum carder. Next to the carder I'd set out a skein 
of my own, a tweedy two-ply of white and brown Romney lamb. I've only been 
spinning for a year now, and I'm still learning (and re-learning). I feel 
humble about my work, and I have every reason to be when I see the lovely 
stuff that the experienced spinners produce, yarns so soft and lustrous and 
fine that you don't want to knit them; you just want to hold them and look 
at them. Next to that, my stuff looks -- well, "rustic" if you want to be 
charitable.

Margaret idly picked up my skein and examined it, running the yarn between 
her fingertips, and put it down again. "Nice," she said. "Very nice." And I 
could tell by her voice that she meant it.

Now, this may sound like a minor moment, but it wasn't. I didn't think of 
my skein as nice, certainly not next to the gorgeous stuff the older 
spinners produced. No doubt if she'd been judging my yarn as a spinning 
teacher judges students' work, she'd have had all sort of criticisms to 
make. But she didn't, because she's been there and done that. Every time I 
wail over my own yarn, Margaret smiles and says, "You should have seen the 
stuff I spun when I started."

Every single hand-spinner remembers her or his first yarn, full of lumps 
and thin places, distressingly tight or weakly loose. Every single 
hand-spinner knows what it takes to get past that and spin 
not-so-nice-but-not-awful-either yarn -- we're talking hundreds of hours, 
here. And it keeps us humble.

We're humble because we know that elsewhere in the world, mere girls in 
Third World countries, without our advantages or decent diets or mere 
ordinary safety, are producing beautiful handspun yarns as they walk from 
the village to the fields. We're humble because we know that our 
foremothers were doing better than this by the time they were 10. There's 
nothing like these down-to-earth ancient arts to put a person in her place. 
Looking at a handwoven Kashmiri pashina shawl, we are in awe of these "less 
advanced" people. Less advanced, my foot. These guys are *good*.

But there's also pride -- the pride you feel when you cut the web off the 
loom and shake out its folds, knowing that while it's not up to that 
pashina shawl, it's still the work of your hands and it's good in your 
eyes. There's pride in having spun beautifully coloured rovings into a 
fine, balanced yarn, one that other pick up with admiration. There's that 
balance.

Maybe this is why it's such a good group; it's thoroughly grounded, and the 
work keeps us both humble and proud. Where there is humility (humiliation 
is another matter) there is also patience, compassion, and understanding; 
where there's this particular pride, there's also joy -- and joy for each 
other as well. When we pass new work around the room at our monthly 
meetings, there's always a soft ululation of appreciative pleasure.

And maybe this says something about the way God sees us, holding us as 
lovingly as one spinner holds another's skein, seeing as clearly and 
appreciatively as a weaver sees another weaver's shawl, even in its 
imperfection. No, of course the work's not perfect; if I want perfect yarn, 
I'll go to a yarn store. If I want weaving that doesn't look handwoven, 
I'll go buy yard goods. What matters here is the creation, the humble, 
delighted pride that the creator takes in making the thing and making it 
well. I'm not there yet, but Margaret tells me I will be.

Penelope was spinning in period costume on her antique wheel; she's only 
been spinning for about eight months. She had some two-ply skeins -- 
Shetland, I think she said -- piled in her hand-made basket by her wheel. I 
picked up a skein and turned it over in my hands, admiring the evenness, 
the lustre, the perfect ply, the creamy whiteness. "It's beautiful," I told 
her, and she smiled all over. It was. It was the work of her hands, and it 
was good in its creator's ways.