From Scratch

What skill would you like to learn?

You know, I’ve always wanted to learn how to play the piano. I can play the trumpet and know how to read music. I figure playing the piano is a lot like typing without looking at the keyboard, which, let me just say, freaked out a lot of my students. If I was typing something and they came up to my desk to talk to me, I’d continue typing but turn my head and look at them while they talked. It was my own personal circus act that always made their eyes bug out and their mouth drop open and the inevitable “how do you do that?!” come out. But I digress. And also, actual piano players say it’s not really like that. I do, however, have an actual piano in my house. It was my mother-in-law’s and it’s currently covered in a tarp waiting for my husband’s oldest niece to come take it home since it was promised to her many years ago.

Here’s what I would actually like to do one day though. I have some of the skills needed to do it, but other skills would have to be learned. I make fun things with yarn. In fact, my Timehop today showed me pictures from three years ago when I started working on a knit version of Queen Elizabeth II. I took yarn from this:

To this:

To this:

That’s a skill I have. To be fair, all I did was follow a pattern. Which, if we’re talking about skills I’d like to learn, one day I’d like to write my own knitting pattern. I can do it with crochet, but knitting is a bit more complicated.

What I’d really like to do though, is take a big pile of raw wool that has been freshly sheared off a sheep… or an alpaca. I actually do have a friend that owns an alpaca farm. But I’d like to take the big pile of fluff and process it—I don’t know how to do that, but I have a basic understanding of what’s involved. Then I’d like to spin it into yarn. I know how to do that. But I’m not any good at it yet. I even have a spinning wheel:

Fun fact…I bought this wheel from one of my online knitting friends who I did actually meet one time at one of our annual knitting camps. She was selling it so that she could save enough money to escape her mother. She had been living with her as an adult and the emotional abuse she was subjected to made it very difficult for her to leave. But she got determined and she secretly started stashing money to make her escape. I helped by buying this wheel. Which, she dismantled and mailed to me from her home before she left. I bought this and some yarn that she had custom hand-dyed for me. I’m grateful that I was able to help her. She did finally get out and moved to the other side of the country and became the best version of herself after finally being free from the abuse.

So I have the wheel for spinning the pile of processed fluff. I know how to use it, I’m just not good at it yet. After I spin the fiber into yarn, I want to dye it a fun color. I’m an ok dyer. Two summers ago I dyed orange yarn and made mini-skeins for my fellow knitting camp attendees. It was my contribution to our “swag bags” that we all received for attending. I chose orange because that year, camp was in Syracuse and orange is the mascot of the college there, in whatever capacity a color can be a mascot. I generally understand the methods for dyeing. That time I used the crockpot.

Finally, I want to take the fiber I processed, hand-spun, and hand-dyed and knit a sweater with it. Now that is a skill I definitely already have. These are some of my favorites:

So, I have some of the skills needed, I just need to freshen them up and learn a few new ones in order to create a finished project completely and totally from scratch. I think it would be so cool and worthy of all the bragging rights. When someone asks, “did you make that?” I can say, “yes I did. Even made the yarn myself”. That would just be epically awesome to be able to say that. Now let me go message my friend with the alpaca farm…