Spinning and stories

Ok, everyone, hold onto something because a whirlwind of posting, including FO pictures will come in the next few days.

First some spinning... if you know me even a little bit, you know I have this need to match colors in my clothing... in the summer I knitted the Icarus shawl, which I love to use not only as a shawl, but as a scarf too. It is natural then that I need some purple gloves, right?

To knit purple gloves, I need purple yarn, right? (yes, of course in my very healthy (i.e.: constantly growing) stash there is purple yarn, but... as I started to spin a few months ago, the question of using the handspuns is always in the back of my head. I am not proficent enough to spin a sweater worth of yarn, but what to do with lesser amounts, especially if it is my favourite mixture of silk and merino. Then I remembered that knitting the knucks always took up surprisingly small amount of yarn, less than 50 gramms could make a whole pair... Oh, I do have some purple rowing, don't I? Dive into the fiber stash (wich is as rapidly expanding as the yarn stash, in fact since it is much younger, and still in the "growing phase" even faster), and spinning a lot while visiting my father with my boy over the fall break resulted in this:
220 meters of 65 gramms. Still need to set the twist, but you get the idea...

And speaking of spinning... I already told you how I recently found out my grandmother's spinning, now I've heard an other story from my aunt...

Back then in the early fifties, my grandma thaught the daughter of a shepherder family to spin. To thank/pay her they gave the fleece of a few sheep... My aunt still remembers how they washed it, took it to somewhere to card it, then over long winter evening my grandma spun and knit it up, then they sold the knitted items, and that extra money helped them through some really difficult times. Isnt' that a lovely story? Why didn't I know it before?

And then, it is also a proof what I though earlier. It is in my blod.

Sometimes I do wonder what would my grandma think now if she would see me with my spindle?