A Calming Thread

They trudge up the long stairway every Saturday to Wendy Clarke’s snug cottage on an oak-shaded hillside in Topanga Canyon, lugging spinning wheels and bags of uncarded wool.

“I’m so glad to be here,” said film producer Kathy McMahon, setting down her wheel and passing out photos of her latest travels.

Clarke and Myrna Castaline are spinning carefully separated handfuls of wool into yarn, feet pedaling a silent rhythm. They stop to admire the photos, reserving cheers for a shot of sheep grazing in an English field.

Second to spinning their wool, nothing elicits more passion from the four regular members of the Topanga Spinning Guild than sheep. They know all the specialty breeds and qualities of wool they produce. Some individual sheep they know by name.

The women are part of a growing group of people who have taken up the gentle art of spinning, said Anne Seth, who teaches the subject at the Weaver’s Cottage in Canyon Country. Pastimes such as spinning, weaving and knitting provide relaxation in today’s fast-paced world, she said.

Spinning involves twisting the strands and pulling against the draw of the wheel to produce yarn. The treadle spinning wheel used by the guild members has changed little since it was developed more than five centuries ago.

“The wheel is just mechanical--it turns the bobbin,” Clarke said. “You power it with your feet. That’s what we like about it. You don’t need electricity.”

Clarke, a critically acclaimed video artist whose work is currently being shown at the Whitney Museum in New York, has been knitting since she was a child.

“I went to the Waldorf School-Rudolph Steiner--it’s complicated, but he was a philosopher,” she said. “We learned to knit in the first grade.”

She took it up again recently and made shawls to wear to a memorial service for her mother, who died two years ago. McMahon saw the shawls and told Clarke, “You must learn to spin.”

Clarke took classes at the Weaver’s Cottage, where she learned to wash and dry the wool and spin it into yarn.

“I got addicted,” she said. “You fall in love with it. Then you buy all these fleeces.”

A former New York advertising executive, McMahon started knitting to relax. When she moved to California a few years ago, she experienced a sort of epiphany: “I had to learn to spin. Had to. Had to.”

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On a business trip to Scotland, she searched for a teacher, finally coming across an old barn with a sign out front that read “Spinner Inside.” She had expected an elderly woman at the wheel. Instead, she was greeted by a handsome, young man.

“Gorgeous,” she said. He taught her to spin.

Castaline, a masseuse and mask maker, has been spinning on and off for a few decades. She met members of the Spinning Guild at the annual Topanga Christmas Fair two years ago, the same year Clarke and McMahon hatched the idea for the club.

But McMahon said, “We can’t start the Spinning Guild unless we know about sheep.”

Clarke and McMahon headed out on a road trip that took them to Oregon searching for fleeces. They happened upon the Tuckaway Farm in Youcalla, Ore., a spinners bed-and-breakfast complete with a flock of Romney sheep.

“We stayed five days,” McMahon said.

Cathy Snygg, a landscape designer, learned to weave in 1972 at an experimental college in Denmark. When she moved to California three years ago, she started making sculptures incorporating weaving and wood, which she calls “woven trees.”

Snygg is working on her first sweater, the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree for these spinners and knitters. Although some members sell their creations, everyone cherishes their first sweater. “I would never sell it,” McMahon said. “Never.”

“It’s a part of you,” Clarke said.

For Clarke, whose work involves computers and video, spinning is relaxing.

“There are no bad moods after spinning,” she said.

McMahon said spinning is satisfying because practitioners can see their progress.

“You know, Gandhi lived in a very spare room,” she said. “But he had a spinning wheel. He said everyone should spin a little while everyday.”