This is my dad. Peter Lynn. Big P. Pa.
In this picture he is patiently fixing a mess that I made. I was plying the singles on this bobbin with the tension too high on my Lazy Kate, I reached a bit where I'd spun the yarn too thin, it snapped, I lost the end. I went searching for the end, and pulled off a bunch of loops that weren't the end, which coiled up on themselves because I'd over-spun enough to 3-ply. I got frustrated. Dad made us dinner, then after dinner he took over searching for my lost end. I'd all but given up this bobbin as lost, but he saved all but about 1 metre of it for me!
This is exactly the sort of thing for which he has endless patience. However, give him a bit of computer based technology and he has the patience of a demented gnat. If it doesn't do exactly what he wants it to do, exactly when he wants it to, then that bit of tech has a high chance of finding itself propelled at significant velocity into the nearest solid wall.
Crafting with dad
We are a crafty family. We all like to work with our hands. Grandma did embroidery, crochet, and knitting. Dads brother was a joiner. My sister makes hand-made cards, and home baked cakes for every school and church event. I knit, crochet a little bit, do beadwork, and spin. Dad carves things out of wood, makes his own knives, and makes jewelry.
Living together means we both spend a lot of time watching each other work, figuring out what we can do that might be useful to the other. Now there's not a lot in the way of fibre crafted items that can be useful for woodworking, other than a nice warm hat and scarf for the days when dad is collecting his materials:
However, there are lots of wooden items that are immensely useful for knitting and spinning purposes! I think dad might have set himself the challenge of making all of them!
Travelling Spinners
I can't remember where we saw it first, but somehow we found out that on the first Saturday in February there would be a group of spinners at the Rising Sun Country Park. Although we also had a booking for a family meal that afternoon in celebration of dads birthday, we decided that we had time to pop in and chat to the spinners for an hour before going for lunch. My friend Krissy, who I've known since we were 13, but who now lives just across Hillsborough Park from me in Sheffield, and is also a crafty type (knitting and weaving), was up north visiting her own family at the time, so she joined us for our trip to meet the spinners.
Dad immediately got talking with one of the spinners who also does woodworking herself, finding out all that he could about how to go about making things useful for spinners. He had already made me a lovely little light bottom-whorl spindle, which I took with me and used to spin up some locally produced fleece that had been provided for people to play with. I also got talking to some of the girls, and explained why I was up in the Northeast, and that I missed my spinning wheel down in Sheffield. Immediately I was offered the loan of several "spare" spinning wheels! Some of these people had multiple wheels, so many that they can't possibly use them all! Unsurprisingly it turned out that most of the group were on Ravelry, and that they have a group on the forums too. Stephen calls Ravelry the "Knitting Illuminati". He thinks it's funny how I always manage to find other "Illuminati" members with out secret yarny handshake where ever we travel! I think it's brilliant, it gives us a safe way to exchange contact details with people who are basically complete strangers, and that's exactly what we did.
As a result, a couple of weeks later I found myself happily working away in my dad's front room on this:
This is either a Haldane Hebridean, or a Haldane Lewis spinning wheel. I can't find enough detail in any of the online descriptions to tell the difference, and many people seem to use the name Hebridean by default. Regardless of the exact model, I love it! It was loaned to me by a lady named Sue, who also dyes her own fibre, and has a stunning collection of drop spindles that she kindly let dad and I examine, and told us anything that we wanted to know about. I love it so much in fact that dad bought it for me last week, because Sue was planning on selling it anyway. I'm determined to pay dad back for this, but he's being stubborn about letting me!
In the background of that photo you can see a large cardboard box. Inside that box is the brand new shiny red lathe that dad bought for himself. He is hoping to be able to make bobbins for both of my spinning wheels, and perhaps even for other people who have difficulty in finding affordable bobbins to fit their wheels. Unfortunately he hasn't been able to get out to play with his new toy as much as he would have liked, because he sets it up in the Summer house, which is, errm, not well insulated to say the least! and the weather has been too cold, and because his chemo makes his fingers tingly when he gets cold, he finds that his dexterity is adversely affected. He has been able to get some work done on it though, and in the meantime he has also learned how to get YouTube on his TV, and has watched every video you can imagine on making spindles and bobbins!
When it's too cold to work in the summer house, or in the shed, you'll find dad doing this:
I'm sure that Trish would have disapproved of the production of wood shavings and sawdust in the house, but as you can see, dad spreads a large drop-cloth all around, and we hoover up afterwards! We're not turning the house into a big shed!
In that photo he's working on making me a sunflower swift:
I already have one of these that Stephen bought for me, but that one lives in Sheffield, and it's currently on loan to a friend anyway. This one is for use when I'm up north, and the base will also be multi-functional.
Here you see the same base in use as a Lazy Kate. This is actually only partly finished, but even without the finishing touches it still made plying these singles much easier than my improvised method of a shoebox with knitting needles stuck through it!
This is that same yarn plied, and wound onto a gorgeous little niddy noddy that dad made for me. This particular niddy noddy forms 40 inch skeins, and dad has even carved 40" into the wood so that I never forget and need to work that out again, as well as stamping this with his own mark, so that everybody knows it was made by him.
Currently I'm hand-winding centre-pull balls of yarn using a nostepine that dad made for me, but he is even working on the possibility of a winding device after seeing one in action during a recent visit to Ring-a-Rosie's!
All The Things
So, what do we currently have that dad has made for me?
- Large drop spindle
- Small drop spindle
- Nostepine
- Niddy Noddy
- Sunflower Swift
- Lazy Kate (not a self-descriptive term!)
What is he also in the process of making?
- Blocking frame for scarves
- Bobbins for the Haldane Wheel
- Bobbins for the Herring Wheel
- More drop spindles
- Yarn winding device
Do I have anything else in mind for him to make?
- Small, very basic weaving loom/large weaving frame
Last time I was back in Sheffield, talking to some friends, one of them jokingly accused me of being a slave-driver, that clearly I'm not visiting him in order to care for him during his treatment, but instead I'm forcing him out in the cold with just a pair of cheap gloves with holes in them, in order to make stuff for me! I pointed out that it's even worse than he thinks, because dad also makes me breakfast in bed every morning when I'm up there! Seriously though, all of these things are what dad wants to do. In the same way that I would be miserable without my knitting, he would be miserable if he wasn't creating things too. He's never happier than when he's engineering something to make someone's life easier. Also, he cut the holes in those gloves himself in an effort to be able to work outside when it's cold without losing too much dexterity!
Enabling
Because dad is all about being happy, making other people happy, and crafting all the things, he's a massive enabler when it comes to my yarn stash! Over the course of the last 4 and a half months I have managed to create a new stash that lives at dad's house. Obviously it is nowhere close to rivaling my home stash, but it has none-the-less become significant in size:
Pretty much regardless of what the doctors say, I think dad has to live forever, because I've got nowhere to put all of this if I ever have to bring it home!
He also let's me borrow his car so that I can continue to visit the Travelling Spinners when they meet at different venues all over Northumbria on the first Saturday of each month. I've had a brilliant time whenever I've gone along so far!
Basically, what I'm saying is:
I have the best dad in the world!!!
