It's "know your enemies" not "knit them"

Everyone by now knows I'm rather addicted to knitting lace. I've spent the last couple of years knitting a lot of Estonian style lace, and I love it but it's time to broaden my horizons. Very modern and very simple things don't tend to excite me, so what did I consider next? Sure, Orenburg lace.

I loved knitting this scarf, and Orenburg is a very different, very interesting type of knitting and construction. My only problem is that Orenburg lace originates with the Cossacks of the Ural mountains. I realize this is the 21st century, but it still feels a little weird to be knitting something that originates with the Cossacks when many of my personal ancestors were Jews of the region and surrounding areas who fled due to the Cossacks. I'll assume that the originators of the knitting traditions had nothing to do with that, and prefer to just move on.

Okay, my second problem is that being me, I want to spin my own Orenburg yarn as well as just knitting lace shawls. And I am having a terrible time learning to spin on a Russian spindle! I worked last night for a little while with some llama from Victoria R.; later today I may also try some flicked CVM (because I always like to try CVM).