I had a question from Jessica about how to teach yourself to spin.

I learned from a woman who, when I commented aloud about a drop spindle kit, "but this doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you can learn from a book", piped up that she would show me.  I don’t think it took more than a couple minutes for me to get the hang of spin/park/draft/travel.  (Thanks, Michelle!)  Now I can do it without parking, which is what you need to handle wheel spinning.

However, Jessica doesn’t seem to have the luxury of a spinning teacher in person.  So here’s what I’ve learned about beginning spinning.

Start with a few ounces of a long-stapled fiber.  I’ve found alpaca to be very easy.  Corriedale is also good.  Don’t start with merino or flax.  (I’m working on flax right now, and not finding it easy.)  Get the print outs from Interweave.  Interweave also publishes instructions on how to make your own spindle, but I’m not sure that this version, which I’ve tried, isn’t cheaper and easier.  I made four spindles for $2.70.   Poke around on both the Interweave site and the Joy of Handspinning site – there’s lots of good info and some videos to watch.

Both versions have you screwing a cup hook into the end grain of a dowel, which really ought to be predrilled, or the dowel wants to split.  That predrilling is the hardest part, and I did it easily.  Sharpen the end of your spindle in a pencil sharpener if you want it pointy. 

I highly recommend playing around with weighting your spindle – gluing a nut onto the whorl would help weight it considerably – a very light spindle is not necessarily the easiest to start with.  However, a CD would allow you to make a spindle that’s conducive to spinning lots of yarn, or bulky yarn, if you weighted it somehow.  (The thicker your bunch of fiber is, the less it’s going to want to twist.)

HAVE YOU READ THE PRINTOUTS YET?  The whole trick with spinning is to not let the twist energy advance past your left hand – if it does, it activates friction in the puffy loose fibers, and they won’t slip past each other as they need to.  To fix, untwist that section and slip it a little thinner.

Ann – is this the spindle wheel that you thought I should get made?  This looks so easy I can probably do it!  Our project night hosts have practically a whole wood shop (and metal shop) set up in their garage, so perhaps I can just do this myself sometime this year!  (I’m not so delusional as to set the April demo as a deadline – I’m just getting out from under a lace shawl, twelve Puritan caps, and the garb for four days of camping at Gulf Wars.  I’ll be lucky to have the basics of cloth production and a few plant dyes ready for April.)