R is for Roving

Even before I started spinning, at every fiber festival I went to I was bewitched by the rainbow fluff all around me. I maintain that, for a knitter, resistance is futile: you will be aspinnilated. If you're a sensualist at heart — and I have yet to meet a knitter who is not — sooner or later you will end up with this


in your house, and you will tell your husband "I need it for spinning," and no one will ever let on that it's the other way around.

For someone like me, going to a fiber festival, roving in search of roving, if you will, is something like a confirmed alcoholic's excursion to a wine-tasting: "I'll have one of those, and another one of those, and, oh, just a nip of that, please."





And, of course, vendors have become some of my favorite pushers people.



Really, I think fiber vendors are the nicest folks you'll meet anywhere. It must be all the wool fumes they breathe.

The ultimate sensual experience for a spinner is of course the bunny crack, softness on the paw, roving roving, as it were.


Sheep or llama or even alpaca fiber has to be prepared before it's ready to spin, but you can, if you choose, spin angora directly from the bunny, who will sit there quite happily, looking rather like a movie star under the ministrations of a fine hairdresser.

Whatever the animal, I prefer to wait until it's been fleeced, so to speak, in a good way, of course, and dyed, whether by me or by one of those lovely vendors. Ah, to see and feel a roseate cloud or a blue mist sliding through my fingers.

If you will excuse me, I think I'll go spin now.