About Spinning Weal

Meet The Wealers

We would like to introduce to you the people that makes Spinning Weal spin. Our strong workforce makes a solid foundation for us to provide top class craft material and also ensures that it is rarely your turn to get the kettle on.

David & Sarah Harris

Sarah Harris is the resident knitter, spinner and shop owner aking with Mr Harris. She teaches spinning at the shop, and goes out in the trusty Spinning Weal van giving talks about spinning to clubs and groups. She also visits guilds and spinning groups with the van packed with fibres wheel spares and other goodies for sale. A life long knitter (from the age of 4) and compulsive maker-and-doer, Sarah finds having the shop is a dream come true.

David Harris is our project manager, tea maker, accountant and resident mathmatician. He calculates VAT, yarn quantaties, fabric requirements etc and keeps our suppliers on their toes. He learned to knit last year (he first learned 40 years ago and promptly forgot!) Now he helps customers with their knitting problems. He puts the paperwork in order, grapples with the taxman, keeps the kettle boiling and fills the paypackets.

•  Ann Hibberd
• Belinda Williams
• Deborah Wilding
• Heather Bell
• Laetita Atkins

 HISTORY

By Sarah Harris

Dave and I are the Hampshire-born children of seafarer fathers. After some years of adventures, and the arrival of our children, we found ourselves in Bristol, in need of a bungalow to accommodate our son's wheelchair. We moved to our smallholding, and acquired extra land when the farm next door was sold. Then came sheep, to mow the fields. Then we discovered how little money a farmer can expect for a sheep's fleece. Then I learned to spin. Time passed. I knitted my first homespun jumper. The children grew up, and began to make their own way in the world. The Next Thing was waiting to happen...

Following an eventful time in our lives - Dave leaving his job, our teenage son undergoing major emergency surgery, both of my parents dying - we decided to look for a new direction, for a project which would allow us to work together, to earn our keep, and to enjoy ourselves. Plan'A' was to run a tea shop, but since I hate cooking, keep a slovenly kitchen at home, and we have been making tea at every possible opportunity for the last 30 years anyway, we decided that we needed something else, preferably something which would make the most of our talents, not highlight our shortcomings. Besides, we'd drink all the tea ourselves.

I had been teaching spinning for a while, and found that many people wanted to learn. I went on to start selling spinning wheels to students, or repairing wheels from their attics and sheds for them. I had long mourned the passing of the little high street wool shops which once could be found in every town, however small. Gloves and hankies in a glass fronted cabinet, ribbon, pinnies, hairnets; fearsome whalebone corsets and armoured brassieres in prodigious sizes kept discreetly beside a curtained-off fitting room. Knitting wool which could be 'kept by' behind the counter and bought at a rate of one or two balls each week; needles, threads, darning wool, pins, scissors. The shopkeeper who knew all her customers by name, who could offer gossip and advice in equal measure. Ladies with shopping baskets, purses with shillings and threepenny bits in, time to have a cup of coffee in a tea room before catching the bus home.. Never mind what customers might need - I needed a wool shop!

So here we are. There is plenty of tea drunk here, of course, but I can make the most of my lifetime's experience and enthusiasm for making things, while Dave's love of order, attention to detail, and considerable project management skills, not to mention his talent for adding up, keep the books in good order. Customers are friendly, enthusiastic, happy to chat and to take time choosing. Not only that, they seem to be buying stuff, too.

And that,
dear reader is the end of our History...so far.