WWSIP 2012

You may or may not have realised, but yesterday, Saturday 15th of September was "World Wide Spin in Public" day.

Its a yearly event that has been around for a while, so people say.

The aim is to educate the public on the craft of spinning, its history and its place in our community today. A demonstration of sorts.

Most people have never seen someone spinning before.

Sadly a lot of children do not even realise a sheep grows wool that can be processed into yarn for woolen garments.

Some have never seen a sheep, nor seen someone knitting before either. Even here in NZ where we have such a vast amount of sheep!

Times have changed.

Yet spinning, knitting, crochetting, weaving and felting are today surprisingly popular crafts and the fibre craft community is large and steadily growing. Just look at the Ravelry community of two thousand members world wide and think that must be the tip of the iceberg as by far not every fibre craft person is a member there, has a computer or technological fascilities like that to connect with the international community. 

I've recently started a Spinning group in our local town. We only count 5 members as its beginning stages yet.

World Wide Spin in Public day seemed a good opportunity to get some PR done and perhaps find some people interested in joining in with us.

Thus we set out with a small display and our wheels and plonked ourselves in the local public library for a couple of hours.

Unfortunately it was not all that busy that day, but we had a good time anyway.

Some children came and enthusiastically investigated what we were doing. A little girl said "look they are doing Sleeping Beauty!" But a lot of the adults were too shy to come up and have a good look or talk with us. Some did though and were very surprised to see this craft in action. Most of them had no idea about spinning.

Enjoyable!