Spinning Most Popular New Hobby!
© Suzanne Griffith
This reporter has learned through confidential sources that next week's cover of Newsweek magazine will show a man in a suit and tie picking up his handspindle and a large section of cashmere roving from the console of his BMW before leaving the parking garage of a high-rise office building. Spinning with handspindles is becoming more common than doodling, according to preliminary survey results, at staff meetings, with men responsible for an estimated 65% of spinners and women 35%. Cashmere, silk, vicuna, and other luxury fibers account for most of the fibers used by upper-middle-class spinners, while working class spinners seem to be content with wool and cotton.
Sally Fox Buys Microsoft: The boom in handspinning has been an enormous benefit to sheep, goat, and rabbit breeders, one of whom has endowed a scholarship fund at Montana State University for students entering the new Spinning Fleece Studies program. Cotton growers have been similarly blessed with prosperity, and Sally Fox, the previously obscure owner of Fox Fibre(r) and grower of naturally-colored cotton, is now involved in negotiations to buy Microsoft.
For those who spend more time in the home, spinning wheel spinning is also popular. Martha Stewart is devoting an entire hour program in her next series to decorating spinning wheels; she will demonstrate a new faux-finishing technique to perk up the old Ashford Traditional wheel. She emphasizes the importance of spinning daily, so that visitors to the home will see new yarn on the spindle every time they're invited to a dinner party. Martha has, of course, introduced her line of custom niddy-noddies and lazy kates at Target stores, and sales are brisk.
Successful spin-off businesses are popping up all over, including Spinsters, the largest retailer of spinning attire for all genders, and of course The Orifice chain, with stores in every strip mall on the continent.
With the enormous rise in the numbers of spinners, there's a lot more yarn in the world, so knitting and crocheting are on the rise, too. The image of the old-lady knitter has vanished, to be replaced by that of the muscular Ernie Trout, whose music video, showing Ernie knitting a sock out of handspun cotton and woolly nylon serging thread, is aired nearly constantly on MTV.
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