A Yarn About Spinning

A couple of weeks ago I bought very fancy drop spindle - the Aston Martin of drop spindles according to Jane from Kennixton Sheep. This was at Wonderwool, a weekend festival of temptation and dangerous traps for craft nerds. Jane wasn’t selling these drop spindles, she just knew where you get the good stuff, and showed me how to get started using a sliver (proper term) of wool from a sheep called Bumble. I sent up the emergency batt* signal to some friends and we signed up to her beginners spinning class. 

The course was particularly brilliant and informative- Jane knows everything from sheep to yarn in impressive depth and has a spinning origin story that starts with accidentally owning a dog and somehow logically ends up with her as a shepherd for hire. I would watch this film.

But Ali! What the hell are you talking about? What is this drop spinning business? Well, you know how you can’t knit directly from a sheep (unless you’re a Wallace and Gromit character)? Spinning is how you turn the wool into yarn. A bit like Rumpelstiltskin turning straw into gold. You could use a spinning wheel like that cheeky imp uses for his alchemy, or you can use a weight on a stick and gravity. That’s a drop spindle. After we saw a demonstration in a castle once, my friend Clare tried it using her wallet as a weight. Research suggests that this is not an ideal approach for beginners.

By the end of the day, with a lot of guidance, trial and error, we’d all spun and plied at least one skein of wool with various levels of consistency. In the picture above the white skein is my first try - it’s lumpy but I can pass that off as Art Yarn and I have big plans for experimenting on it with natural dyes. I will be so useful in the post apocalyptic world.

I can already tell I’m going to do a lot more spinning -  drop spindles are like advanced fidget spinners, as proved by Hannah persistently spinning a rather nice merino and silk yarn in the car on the way home.

Once you drop (spindle) you can’t stop (spindle).

*A batt of wool is wool that has been prepared for felting, so this is a very good joke not a typo, OK?