Grumperina’s post last week declaring ‘I am not a sweater kitter‘ has had me thinking. Not that I don’t like knitting jumpers – I do. Not that I need to declare I don’t knit something else, like lace shawls. I think what I need to face up to, declare it bloglicly, and then accept it and move on is this:

I am not a spinner.

This does sadden me somewhat. I like the concept of spinning. I’d like to be able to churn out glorious homemade yarns. But to be really, really, really honest… I find it boring.

I ought to like spinning. After all, you’re making yarn and yarn is good for knitting, right? But if you spin the yarn for a project, it takes longer before you can get to the fun bit – the knitting. I think that sentence makes it pretty obvious what I am.

I am a knitter.

I like the intellectual challenge of making a pattern fit, or designing it from scratch. I enjoy watching a garment miraculously take shape in my hands. When I finish something, the satisfaction is in having applied knowledge to materials to make a usable object, not in the making of the materials themselves.

I also enjoy weaving, but it is a bit monotonous and a bit limiting if one wants to avoid sewing. And I enjoy crochet, but don’t have the same intuition with it that I have with knitting, and the patterns available are mostly pretty awful. I also like dyeing, but not for its own sake.

By learning to spin I’ve learned a heck of a lot about yarn that’s incredibly useful to knitting, so it’s hardly been a waste of time. I suspect I’ll keep dabbling, just as I do with all my other numerous hobbies. After all, I still have a wheel, several spindles and a big box of fleece. Can’t let them go to waste, can I?