"S" Week

At my granddaughter Sophia's school, they are going through the alphabet, with a letter highlighted for a week.  Recently it was "S" week, and I offered to so something on Spinning.

I decided to bring Spindles, Spinning wheel and a Story.

My other granddaughter Raven helped me make packets for each child, with a piece of yarn and some unspun fiber.
She also copied larger and simplified an illustration from the story "The Three Spinners" in my Brothers Grimm book:

I packed up spindles, fiber, strapped my Louet into the passenger seat (and hereafter I expect people to call 'spinning wheel!' rather than 'shotgun!' though with kids grown, not many people are calling anything to ride in my car.)

and went to meet my audience (Sophia is front and center):

Now, either I was amazingly enthralling with my presentation, or these kids are amazingly attentive, because they listened to everything with interest.  I demonstrated spindle spinning, wheel spinning and then told the story. 

I modified the story somewhat - in the original version, the mother is beating the daughter who will not spin. In my version, she loses her patience and yells at her. I also qualified the mother's lie to the Queen with 'and now her mother did a bad thing, she told a lie.'  Finally, at the end, in the original tale the girl takes credit for spinning the flax which the Three Spinners actually spun and I had the girl confess that she hadn't done it herself...and the Prince remarks that he'd rather have an honest wife than the best spinner-in-the-world wife.

This was really fun for me, especially because of the storytelling. I've long had an idea in my head that I'd like to combine storytelling with spinning and weaving, both in telling classic stories along with demonstrating and in creating stories through my work. This was the first time I've actually tried the former and I think it was a successful effort.

Best of all, Sophia was totally proud of her Zannma!