One of my friends has a couple of spinning wheels and does use them fairly regularly. I was taught how to spin yarn by hand when I was in Greece, but didn't carry on with it when I went back to Germany or to the UK. Living in places where it wasn't easy to get the wool didn't help.
My oldest sister used to make bobbin lace, and I have tried it in the past but with not much success. It was too slow a pasttime in those days. I've still got the pillow, the bobbins, and a vast supply of pins; maybe I'll try again. She lived in the Isle of Wight so I didn't see her very often. One day she was doing a demonstration of bobbin lace making in our local Council's Bank Holiday Fair, and would you believe I missed her! When I got to the stand she was on, she was at lunch and by the time I got round to that stand again she was on a break.
I was more used to knitting than anything else, but she did teach me how to crochet. No mean feat because she was self-taught and left-handed. I was crocheting a shawl when my daughter decided to come into this world and finished it in hospital. The lovely German ward sister was amazed that I could even do it because of the way I held the crochet hook and the yarn. Since then I've learned how to do it the "proper" way. My daughter still has that shawl; both her daughters made good use of it when they were babies.
