Spin Your Own Yarn

We spin yarn for so many reasons. Some of have animals that grow fibre, or we know someone who does. Others like the control that comes with designing and making exactly the yarn we like to knit or weave with. Some spinners find the craft soothing and meditative, a cure for life in the 21st Century. And some just want to stick it to big corporations by making our own unique clothing and blankets.

And we spin in so many different ways. Some of us prefer spindles, others like wheels or e-spinners. There are spinners who only want to spin one kind of yarn and there are spinners who are always looking for something new and exciting—a new fibre, a new tool, or a new technique. There are those who prefer to use a long-draw draft and those who hate it. Spinners who have allergies and can’t spin certain fibres and spinners who prefer that one special fibre.

We all spin our own yarn, for our own reasons, in our own ways.

I’ve been spinning and teaching about spinning for a long time now and the one thing I’ve learned is that every spinner is unique. We all have had different teachers, we all have our own motivations for sitting down at our wheels, we all have fibres and yarns we love (and hate!). Some of us are content with the yarn we make and some of us are constantly looking to learn something new.As a spinning teacher, I’ve seen a change in the way we are learning to spin over the past few years. For a lot of us, in-person spinning classes have become inaccessible for several reasons. Fibre arts are in a period of change and local yarn shops and festivals are changing how they offer learning opportunities, fewer teachers are travelling to teach, or the cost of classes can be prohibitive.

I am one of those teachers that is travelling less, so I am working to diversify the way I teach spinning. I have to work more slowly and consciously than I used to, so writing is one of my favourite ways to pass on the knowledge I have gathered over the years. This blog will be one of the places that I work to keep a certain amount of information free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

I don’t want to tell you what to do when you spin, and what not to do. I want to tell you what happens when you do the things you do. The mechanics and physics of spinning yarn are fairly clear—there are certain causes and effects that can lead to better or worse results when we make yarn. Then there are the spinners who want to know why they’ve been taught to do a thing, or not do it, and why it doesn’t work for them. I can’t go to each spinner’s home and sit with them to assess their spinning like I used to do in classrooms, but I can offer you some starting points to help you understand your own spinning a little better.

The intention is to update this blog monthly, but life happens to all of us. I ask for your patience as I work to build a reliable schedule that works both for me as a writer and for you as a reader.

Meanwhile, spin on…