Come live with me and be my Lendrum

...and we will all the pleasures prove. It's here! It got here on Wednesday, 11/04/07, so it shares my father's birthday. I am totally in love with it, which is just as well - buying the most expensive item of your life, then waiting four months for it to arrive, is nervewracking. I'd never even seen a spinning wheel 'in the flesh' before. Would it cooperate with my cackhanded efforts? Would it turn into a three-foot wooden reproach, lurking in the living room, festooned with woolly tangles and mocking my recklessness in the pursuit of craft? Nah.

It's amazing. It's so much fun the rest of my life is threatening to disappear into a whirling vortex of wheel. Every stage of the process is so pretty. The things that happen to colours when you spin them with other colours are beautiful and always surprising. The camera has of course run out of batteries, so the parade of ever-less-lumpen skeins will have to wait. The wheel makes roving disappear really fast when you're used to a spindle. I'll have to get dying again.