Spinning and handedness

Laurie has a really interesting discussion going on on her blog about which hand is which when spinning.
She tells me that I'm one of the lucky ones who started with the dominant hand as the orifice hand. Since I'm a self-taught spinner, I had no teacher to put me on the path, so I had a fifty/fifty chance of getting it right, I guess.
I started with a spindle, and used my right (dominant) hand as the one that did all the fiddly bits - setting the spindle in motion, controlling the twist, keeping the wilder swings from clonking the cat in the nose, etc. When I started spinning with the wheel, it seemed natural to keep on using my left hand to hold the fiber and my right hand to control the twist.
Laurie, who learned to spin the other way around, is experimenting with switching her hands. The comments are full of interesting takes on the whole idea - whether to switch or not, how to switch, and whether the benefit is worth the cost.
I'm fascinated!

And since Horatio and Serafina got such a nice response, here's another of my little folk. (Please excuse the crappy picture. It was my old camera, and my photography skills still need a lot of work...)
This is Willoughbie, my little halfling friend. He loves to travel, and always accompanies me to craft shows I'm vending at. (I've always priced him way too high, because I hate to part with him. I pretend I'm trying to sell him, but secretly I'm not...)

Halfway there...

When I decided to flog myself with this NaBloPoMo challenge, I thought I was nuts. And I was right...
This is really hard. I already had heaps of respect and admiration for Norma and Sandy and others who have been blogging 365 - now I know I should just fall down and worship at their feet. I'm slogging after 14 days - how the hell do you stay fresh and interesting for 365??? (And they do - that's the part that really gets me. I can't wait to see what they've written next.)
I had one of those days at work where my brains turned to pudding again. I work in retail, it's Saturday, and I'm in Customer Service. You can fill in the blanks. By 4:00 I wanted to just go sit in the corner and do the "be-ba-be-ba" lip-twiddle thing.
So, since I can't think of anything to say, I'll show you a picture of something I do. In my sidebar, I mention being a dollmaker. Here's a couple I made:
This is Horatio and his Great-Aunt Serafina. Notice she's wearing a hand-knitted stole. She insisted.

Trying to catch up a little...

I keep writing blogposts in my head, but not carrying through to the computer. So, in my head, my blog is full of rich and wonderful posts, oozing with pictures...
In real life, not so much.

So, I'm going to start with Mother's Day and work backwards until I get caught up.
First, of course, I had to load up the pictures that had accumulated. I don't know if Flickr was having problems, or if it was just me (and I suspect it was just me. It always seems to be just me...), but it took hours to get my pics up. The process kept freezing up - and some pictures were being uploaded multiple times, while others disappeared entirely. The last pic took over 3 hours - I finally gave up and went to bed, and it finished up sometime during the night.

So, Mother's Day....

My youngest daughter (the college student) surprised me with a stuffed animal - completely hand-sewn. I love him to distraction (and her, too!)


He makes me smile every time I look at him.

My oldest daughter (the college professor) sent me a huge care package of foodstuffs that aren't available up here in the Back of Beyond...


She actually had them individually wrapped in beautiful papers with lots and lots of ribbons, but that's one of the pictures that kept going astray. I gave up after 4 attempts (and at an hour per attempt, that was a serious time-suck...) I love her to distraction, too!

Madman is also excited about the food - he's very fond of curries, for example. Though not so much with the couscous. The only time I've tried to feed him couscous, he claimed it tasted like spider's eggs.
"And just when did you ever eat spider's eggs, in order to have a basis for comparison?", I asked.
"Well, never," he admitted, "but this is what I would imagine spider's eggs taste like."

There's a hole in that logic, somewhere.

Belated Introduction

So, in my excitement at finally breaking through the procrastination and starting a blog (it only took me two years...), I forgot to introduce myself.
I'm Gayle (aka mangofeet to various friends), living in extreme northern Vermont. Think cold. With lots of snow. Then imagine it even colder, and you might come close. We live in a pocket of zone 3, mostly surrounded by zone 4. We like wool up here.

I've been knitting since I was nine, so that's *mumblemumble* years. (Over 40, anyway... ) And the great thing about knitting is that even after all those years, I'm still learning new things.

I'm also a dollmaker - cloth dolls, though I used to do porcelain. Fairies are my favorite - just a sucker for those gossamer wings.


I make quilts - here's the most recent. It's for my new grandson:


We raise chickens:

and keep a big garden. (Sorry, no pics. It's under a couple of feet of snow right now...) We're trying to have more control over what we eat, and are very interested in sustainable agriculture. We're talking about raising rabbits for food and fiber. (As a spinner, I'm very interested in the fiber. As for the meat, part of me is saying "mmmm" while the other part is saying "but... but... cute little bunnieeees...." We'll have to wait and see on that one.)

And we have a little cat - so the blog is good to go...