I was so dumbfounded by the Patonyle=discontinued saga, I forgot to photograph what I did purchase:

When I compared the scrap of brown I had brought to help with yarn identification to the brown in the store, I found it was a much more chocolatey brown than the one in the shop, which was a very red brown. But then, I did get the yarn at the Australian Country Spinners shop, where it could simply have been a wrong batch. This coffee coloured version goes okay with it, though. Mind you, I had better weave it up fast in case I haven’t got enough. Who knows. It might end up ‘discontinued’ too, and it’ll be a lot harder to find outside S’bitlightonyarn stores.

On Friday I decided if I did a few hours work on Sunday I could make time to take the spinning wheel down to the Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria. I rang first, and it turned out their spinning teacher was there. So I took the wheel in and got the ladies there all in a stir.

You see, they hadn’t seen anything like it before. (It’s called a Hebridean wheel, my friend told me later.) First one, then another, attempted to spin on it, but with limited success. As this went on, their suggested price kept dropping. They put on a new band, tweaked this and that, and concluded it needed a really good clean up.

I’d found a website with instructions on how to clean up a wheel (Keep Spinning – Smooth Running) so I decided to do that on Sunday. But to know if I’d been successful, I’d need some fleece to spin.

So the teacher led me into the back room, which was full of bags of greasy fleece. When I realised they didn’t break the bags up – you had to buy an entire bag – I baulked at that. Though the fleece came in gorgeous chocolate browns, the thought of working my way through that much of it was intimidating. I was expecting to buy one of the small bags of pretty stuff that had already been cleaned, dyed and carded.

But, the nice ladies said, it’s easier to spin in the grease.

So I bought both:

A small bag of the pretty stuff.

A large (but small compared to the rest) half kilo bag of greasy Polwarth.

On Sunday I pulled the wheel apart as much as I could work out how to, cleaned off the dust, lightly waxed the wood, oiled the shafts and put it all back together again. Then I attempted to spin.

And I provided the beau with much amusment as I cursed and laughed for the next hour. Either the thread spun too tightly and wouldn’t pull onto the spool, or there wasn’t enough twist and it kept breaking. I googled the problem and found this had to do with the tension of the drive band. Trouble is, the way this wheel is designed doesn’t seem to allow for precision tension setting. But that could just be me.

So I filled out the form for spinning lessons at the Guild and sent it off. And then I de-stressed with some knitting:

Another baby wash glove, this time designed by me to fit the husband of the girl I made the last ones for.