Something clicked, the other week, after I finished my first yarn off of my wheel and I’ve hardly been able to stop spinning since. That’s a little bit of a lie — I don’t think I’ve spun anything in the last couple of days because I dug in to a whole new knitting project (which, like a lot of my knitting lately and quite sadly for you, dear reader, is yet another stealth project) and haven’t really had the time to do a bit of both in any given day. Something about planning a wedding… it takes a lot of time and work. I know the day will be really lovely, but in all honesty, I cannot wait to be married so that I can be a more selfish knitter invest time in my work and my friends and my own projects that I want to do and that don’t have tight, looming deadlines. (Like, oh, blogging about Cookie A.’s class at Sock Summit and my sock design and the redesign it needs that I’m really actually going to start once I have time to figure out how the legends in Twisted-Stitch Knitting work… and maybe even knitting those socks. Or a sweater. Or a shawl. Or an anything that is just for me because I want to make it and want to wear it).
I digress.
So, the Damson came off the wheel and is currently sitting in a tidy little skein while I try to come up with a suitable project for it that I don’t have to design myself… I had almost settled upon my next fibre (which, despite all of the fiber-stash enhancing I did at Sock Summit actually wound up being fibre I purchased recently from Hedgehog Fibres … go figure) when this beautiful, creamy silk/merino combed top, also from Hedgehog Fibres turned up in my mailbox.
The colorway is called “Irish Sky” and it’s beautiful. Everything I could wish for in a fiber and then some… and wonderful, soft, sweet colors. It doesn’t surprise me that by the end of the night, I’d spun over an ounce of fibre. An ounce still seems like a lot to me… it wasn’t that long ago that I was spinning on a drop spindle and one ounce of fiber took me about two weeks worth of spinning working at it for over an hour each day. The wheel seems to be an order of magnitude faster.
In any case… in seemingly no time flat, I had a beautiful collection of singles (at least, I think they’re beautiful, but I am maybe a little biased) collected on a bobbin and then two ounces had gone by and suddenly it’s time to change bobbins. I’m sort of amazed at how somewhere, something clicked and spinning doesn’t feel nearly as complicated as it did even a mere month and a half ago when Miss Patience was nothing more than new addition to my collection of craft tools. 6 weeks of steady practice, I guess.
Of course, to humble myself, I started reading The Intentional Spinner and proceeded to realize just how much I still don’t know and delve right back into being highly critical of my singles. I tend to overtwist… which is sort of okay because I get tight plies out of it… but I would like to learn to be more sensitive to what the twist is doing on my wheel. I think the most precious nugget of knowledge I gained from the spindling class I took at Sock Summit was that my drop spindle is a twist-o-meter. If I pay attention to how it is behaving, I can learn a lot about how much twist I have in my yarn, and whether said yarn is capable of taking up any more twist or not. Wheels are so fast and so strong (especially mine which is rather weighty and massive) that it’s easy to misjudge the balance of things. In time, I’ll learn, I suppose. My brain and my hands and feet will all learn to work together as a complementary unit that manages fiber with both attentiveness and dexterity. (Yes, I’ve become one of those people who discusses the way in which fiber has a mind of its own. Really. Much more than yarn, actually, which is probably one of my biggest adjustments in learning to spin after spending most of my time and effort knitting. But that’s for another post).
I’m enjoying the journey. And pretty sure that after a few days away (I have some travel in my future, after all), I fully expect to find myself missing my spinning wheel in the same way that I’ve missed my clothes, or my toys or my stuffed animals when I’ve been far from home in the past.
Pretty Little Purls 