THE WHEEL TURNS ROUND AND ROUND

WAITSBURG - To the average person, the spinning wheel is an obscure relic, relegated to glass-fronted museum cabinets and renditions of "Sleeping Beauty".

To Waitsburg native Ronda Bell, however, it's much more than that.

Bell has been spinning wool for nearly 18 years now. "Until you do it, you don't understand," she said as she described the "peaceful feeling" of pressing a spinning wheels treadle and listening to the mechanism make a gentle thunk noise as the wooden wheel rotates.

Her first encounter with the ageold art took place at Waitsburg's Fall Festival, where the Blue Mountain Spinners (which Bell is now a member of) were giving a demonstration. She describes it as a love-at-first sight experience, saying that she was "immediately enamored" and asked to join on the spot.

The spinning process, Bell admits, is something of a labor of love. The raw wool (sheep, goat, and alpaca wool are Bell's mainstays) must be carefully wetted without agitation (to avoid felting it) and hand-picked for foreign objects once it's dry. It is then "carded", using an apparatus similar to a tined dog brush, in order to make all the fibers go in the same direction; and dye is applied if color is desired.

Once all this is done, the actual spinning begins, with Bell pumping a small pedal (or "treadle") that powers the spinning of the wheel. The yarn is pulled over the wheel's rim and around a spool, a process that twists the wool into a thin strand which is then "blocked" or stretched. To finish, the yarn must be soaked in the hottest water possible ("I use my shower," says Bell) and dried.

Bell enjoys knitting with the resulting wool. "Alpaca," she says, "makes beautiful, soft sweaters." She also weaves on occasion, sometimes as part of the Blue Mountain Spinners' annual Sheep to Shawl event.

She gives demonstrations frequently at community events - "usually at the fairs", she says. She is a perennial demonstrator at the Fall Festival and the Columbia County Fair, as well as occasionally at Walla Walla's Kirkman House Museum. At some of these events, she sells beautifully handcrafted wool items as well as skeins of yarn she's spun.

On occasion, she creates special projects at a customer's request. "A man brought me some musk ox wool that he collected from trees," she says. "I spun it for him and I wove it into a scarf. He gave it to his wife for their anniversary."

Bell spoke of women who worked spinning wheels in centuries past. "It was their whole life," she says, describing how these women had to take care of the sheep that gave the wool, go through the laborious process of weaving it, and sew all of their family's garments out of it.

Spinning, of course, doesn't fill all of Bell's time. But the love of creating colorful yarn and gorgeous projects certainly brings a little extra joy to her life - and a little extra beauty to her community.