Hooked on Spinning

In a boat down a fast-running creek,
it feels like trees on the bank
are rushing by. What seems

to be changing around us
is rather the speed of our craft
leaving this world.

— Rumi, Essential, p. 194


April 2009

I am completely hooked on making yarn from scratch.

Susan, fiber friend and neighbor across the street, said recently she was taking a week off from work to spin out some of the wool she had accumulated. We agreed that would be a good time to have an hour’s visit and some knitting & chat, which she’d been wanting to have me over for since I brought her a meal when she had cancer last winter.

So Tuesday was our day. I packed up my knitting and also brought along some of the wool I’d dyed a week or two ago with turquoise Jacquard dye. At her place she asked if she could card a bit and spin it out on a drop spindle to see what it would look like.

I’ve intentionally postponed learning to spin on a wheel until I’m done with school because I know it will quickly become an obsession. Never thought the drop spindle would be anything I had the patience for.

She took a little brush (a cat brush—she couldn’t find her carders) and carded the wool against her leg, then selected a drop spindle from her collection—a lovely filigree one. She keeps them in an upright basket. She spun it out roughly, then we folded it back on itself—which is what it wants because of the twist—“plying”—and it was lovely: tweedy, turquoise and gray.

She showed me how to do it. The rest is history.

Right after leaving Susan’s I called the Portland Fiber Gallery and yes, they had drop spindles—for $18 (!!). (My carding brushes were $55.) After picking up the boys we stopped by the fiber gallery and bought one—nice simple maple drop spindle. For the next 24 hours (with a few hours for sleep) I played and practiced; the boys helped turn it when the came through the room.

I had previously carded a lot of the medium gray wool from the Coopworth fleece (I’d separated the fleece by color—black/charcoal; medium gray; pale gray with flecks of charcoal) with the hope that another friend would be able to spin it on a trade. But that trade has never happened. So the box of carded wool has remained with me. Within a day and a half of figuring out the drop spindle I spun out 2/3 to ¾ of that carded wool.

Standing in my living room — the green nub of spring pushing up through the dark earth — drop-spindling while C&B play in their PJs and listen to music and stories — I recognized a moment that was utterly impossible while I was still wed to Facebook. There’s no way that I would have had the time, the desire, and the focus to learn this. I never expected to like drop-spindling — expected it to be frustrating — and so thought that a $500 spinning wheel would be the only way I could learn to spin, and that was out of reach.

According to Susan’s colleague, drop spindling is “slower by the hour but faster by the week” since you can take it anywhere. I'm completely, utterly, happily sold.