Handweavers' Spinners' and Dyers' Guild of Western Australia

Maki Habib and Ann Miller of the Handweavers’ Spinners’ and Dyers’ Guild of Western Australia, Inc., teach spinning to five visually-impaired people at the Institute for the Blind each week, and the students have all have learned to spin and knit under their instruction. Like many beginners, they believed their first handspun was “strong enough to raise the Titanic” and needed reminders to “caress, not clench” the fibers. One student has developed the refrain “toe, toe, toe” to help her concentrate on treadling. The class prefers to spin alpaca, which, for them, seems to be easier to spin than wool. One student expressed how the “soothing, soporific act of spinning releases endorphins” for her.

Buy Handmade!

We've added an icon to the sidebar--the "I took the handmade pledge" icon. It is part of the "Buy Handmade" campaign--a non-profit effort to encourage shoppers to support artisans by buying their handmade products. How exciting to see making things by hand promoted and encouraged.

Crossthreads Fiber Works Guild

In conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Festival in South Dakota, a Fleece to Shawl contest was held this July. The Crossthreads Fiber Works Guild competed against a guild forming in the North Country Watertown area. The use of locally grown natural fiber was encouraged and examples of the raw fiber were on display with the team. Prior to the event, the fleece could be washed and dyed but unprocessed further—in other words, not teased, carded, or picked. Fulling instructions for the shawls were included when they were picked up for judging. Teamwork, design, quality and uniformity of spun yarns formed part of the award criteria.

Checking posts

Keeping up with our blog posts is as easy as subscribing if you are so inclined. If you’re not very familiar with this technology, don’t worry - this post should be able to help walk you through the process. Using a feed is a quick and easy way of keeping up to date with your favorite websites. Not all websites offer a feed but many, especially those that change frequently like news sites and blogs, offer this service to their visitors. By having a feed visitors can check which of their favorite sites have been updated recently without having to look at each site individually. Syndication isn't just available for use on computers, you can also subscribe from PDAs and mobile phones.

In the office we subscribe to various blogs and websites using Sage to aggregate our feeds. We downloaded it for free at Mozilla's site. Sage reads both Atom and RSS when used with Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is a web browser also available for free download. But you don’t need Firefox and Sage to use this clever technology. There are lots of aggregators (feed readers) available to use for free. Google and Yahoo offer them, among many others.

Depending on which aggregator you use, you may be able to just click our feed link, in the sidebar - or here - to add the feed to your program. However, some aggregators will require you to copy and paste the URL of the feed (http://www.spinnersconnection.com/atom.xml or http://www.spinnersconnection.com/RSS.xml) into the program. Sage offers a third option, auto discovery, where you need only click on a magnifying glass icon and it will find the available feeds on the website being viewed.