FRANKLIN, Maine — Butter-yellow pools of sunshine recently flooded the living room of Susanne Grosjean’s old farmhouse in Franklin, the gentle afternoon light illuminating the dozen or so women hard at work behind their wooden spinning wheels.
The members of the Wednesday Spinners, as the group is called, laughed and chatted as they spun, filling the room with the comfortable banter born of years of friendship. The group has been meeting for 41 years, though some of the faces have changed over the years. Through births and deaths, marriage and divorce, through recipes shared and pots of soup eaten, the spinners’ thread has been unbroken.
“It’s my religion,” Grosjean, 70, said as she deftly spun yarn from the flax she grew and harvested this year. “Anytime the carpenter, or anyone else, wants to make an appointment for a Wednesday, I say ‘no way.’ I think we all realize it’s special.”
The group is comprised of women of all ages — 8 to 80, spinner Cynthia Thayer of Gouldsboro quips — who primarily live in Washington and Hancock counties, although one stalwart member drives all the way from Appleton in Knox County to join her friends. They start meeting each fall, after the busiest farm and garden season is done, at a different home each time.
Usually there are 10 to 18 women who come on Wednesdays, but there are 25 active or semi-active members on the roster. When they aren’t there, they are farmers, weavers, homesteaders, midwives, teachers, writers, sheep shearers, mothers, grandmothers and more, but when they meet on Wednesdays, they are spinners.
“Or spinsters,” they joke.
The group officially began back in 1975, when Grosjean taught a class at the H.O.M.E. Co-op in Orland and students Mollie Birdsall and Mascha Litten decided they wanted to keep on meeting and spinning together. Litten made a vat of cream of spinach soup to share that first Wednesday, although only a few spinners came to her house to spin and share it.
But more soon followed. And although those two founding members are among a dozen or so spinners who’ve died over the years, the group just keeps on meeting.
New members have joined over the years, including Susan Dewey of Jonesboro, who describes herself as primarily a lace knitter who spins very, very thin yarn.
“Historically, spinning was never a solitary thing. It was always done as part of the family and there would be other people around,” she said. “It’s nice seeing other styles of spinning and other ways that people approach fiber and other projects being inspired.”
This week, Gabi Montoya-Eyerman of Columbia Falls, who has been part of the group for a few years, kept an eye on her two young daughters as she spun yarn from a fluffy basket of wool that came from her own sheep. She said that after she moved to Maine from New Mexico, one of the first things she did was to look for a spinning group.
“I knew that any spinning group I found would be welcoming,” she said.
In the evenings, Montoya-Eyerman spins wool before she goes to bed.
“It’s kind of like a meditation,” she said. “It calms me down. It’s very tactile.”
She said it’s worth the drive for her to join the Wednesday Spinners, a group that has served to make some of Maine’s smallest, farthest-flung communities feel a little less remote for the women who are part of it.
“We’re always asking each other what we’re spinning,” Montoya-Eyerman said, and gestured at Dewey, who worked companionably next to her. “Susan and I live miles apart, but I still feel like she’s my neighbor.”
Although they would like to, they can’t expand their ranks much more, Grosjean said. There simply isn’t space in their homes to fit in many more women and spinning wheels.
“Our dilemma is what we’re doing, we think, is wonderful. We love it. But we can’t expand,” she said. “We’re hoping we can be an inspiration to others doing the same thing.”
The group is a longtime part of the Common Ground Fair, where members have been demonstrating wool preparation, carding, spinning, knitting, weaving, dyeing and more for the last 39 years. But lest you think they are too tradition-bound, don’t worry. It didn’t take long this week before Grosjean darted up from behind her wheel to search out a copy of the 2003 calendar put out by the Wednesday Spinners, called ” Wearing Wool: Celebrating the Ancient Art of Spinning and the Ageless Beauty of Women.”
The calendar, which was published only that year, features their handmade sweaters, hats and socks, but it also showcased the naked or nearly naked bodies of 25 of the spinners. It was a lot of work to produce but was a massive hit, generating tons of letters and interest from all over, including some mail from “weird jail men,” they said. They raised $110,000 thanks to sales of the calendar and used a portion of the proceeds to help fund breast cancer prevention research, a disease that had claimed the life of one of the spinners. With the rest of the money, a dozen women went on a trip to Ireland that Grosjean said was “a blast.”
“We searched for spinners and knitters and yarn and sheep,” she said. “It was wonderful.”
The women who didn’t travel used their share of the funds on house projects or whatever they wanted.
“It was really fun,” Julie Havener, a spinner and midwife from Northeast Harbor, said of the project. “We are really proud of the calendar.”
The women do want to clear up one thing.
“We’re a loose organization of women, not a group of loose women,” Penelope Olson of Appleton laughed.
And while the image of women gossiping together behind spinning wheels seems timeless, that’s not exactly what happens on Wednesdays, they said. Rather than a “stitch and bitch” session, the spinners tend to focus on what’s in front of them — not about gossip or drama.
“Of course we share important news with our carpool cronies, or whoever we may sit beside, and we all support each other as we hear about things, it rarely is the focus of the group meeting,” Gail Grandgent of Bar Harbor said. “One of our members recently said spinners is a respite from our other life.”
Still, all those years and all that spinning have pulled the women close, like disparate threads that are woven together to create cloth.
“I think of this group as a family,” Penelope Olson of Appleton said. “The babies that used to be crawling around our feet are now all grown. We’ve been going a long time, and I think it’s amazing.”