A new way to spin

I love spinning, and I love learning new crafts, new techniques and new ways to do crafts. Of all the vast amount of crafts that I do, spinning is one of my favorites, it’s just so peaceful and I love making yarn I’ll adore and love the mystery of what the end result will be. The mystery is why I almost never spin solid colors and am bananas about starting with unprocessed raw fiber/fleeces.

This post has two of my favorite things as it means I’m learning a new way and new techniques for spinning. I started spinning on a drop spindle K made for me from stuff we bought from Michael’s, it wasn’t perfect in any way, but it worked. I moved onto bought drop spindles both top and bottom whirl. Then when I got my back pay from SSD when I became officially handicapped I bought myself an Ashford traditional spinning wheel, that’s when I truly fell wholly in love with spinning. Not only could I make a variety of different weights of yarn much easier and tons faster, but it’s also very peaceful and almost hypnotic. It’s hard to be cranky with raw fiber flying through your fingers and your foot/feet moving in a smooth rhythm.

For a long time, I wouldn’t touch another drop spindle and really I thought I likely wouldn’t again. Why go backward I thought. Then I found this amazingly beautiful, handmade dark wood spindle and I had to buy it, even though it was top whorl which I have never really liked. It spun like a dream, almost hypnotically so and I think that opened the door for the tiny Turkish spindle I bought shortly after. Once again I had tried a Turkish spindle in the past but had hated it, yet this tiny handmade spindle was enchanting.

While looking up how to properly wrap a turkish spindle (apparently I’d been doing it all wrong) I discovered a type of hand spinning tool that I’d never come across before somehow, called support spinning. I’d seen the large unusual ones that had a big whirl you sort of kicked with your foot, but never anything like this. Basically it’s a handful of spindles mainly used for fine yarn making that you spin in your lap, but its method of getting the twist into the fiber is a touch different.

It’s darned hard to describe the differences between the two methods to none spinners without actually showing you. I think the one thing most people nowadays think of when they reference spinning wheels they’ll likely think of Cinderella pricking her finger on a rather large wheel. Those wheels share an action with this new spindle, and that’s that the fiber kinds of flick off the end of a narrow spinning point. That’s not how newer spinning wheels or regular drop spindles get the twist into yarn, and it makes watching that tip almost hypnotic. It has meant that I’ve had to learn to do things slightly differently, but that’s not a bad thing really, and it does make very nice fine yarn as you can see here. I think I fell in love with it almost instantly. It isn’t going to replace my wheel, I mean come on, you can’t beat its speed, but I think it will be the way I do truly thin yarn.

I bought this lovely handmade spindle from Straddlecreekspins off Etsy, they were very nice, packed the spindle very well and even sent me this pretty fiber for free. If you are interested in getting a support spindle, I couldn’t recommend them more. https://www.etsy.com/shop/StraddleCreekSpins