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milkweedman · 1 year

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learning to spin on a drop spindle: a beginner’s lengthy yet comprehensive guide

I put this monograph together for a friend, but many other people wanted to read it as well, so here it is !

Fig A: Parts of a Drop Spindle. (image source. notes are mine. Click for higher res !). Apologies in advance for the lack of image descriptions--for the most part I use images because I can’t figure out how to describe the thing in words, so describing the images is kinda the whole issue. If anyone wanted to write them for me I’d add them to the original post in a heartbeat !

How to Get Started Drafting and Spinning

So, you have your fiber and your spindle--now what ?

Friendly pre-tutorial reminder that radfems can fuck right off if they think I’m writing any of this for their benefit. I’m not. I hope they all choke on their spindles <3. This is a safe space for trans people first and foremost.

(Check out this post that goes into picking a spindle and your first fiber, if you don’t have one yet)

First, you might wish to practice drafting a little. Drafting is the process of drawing the fibers out from, for example, a strand of roving or a rolag, into a thinner, airy length. To draft, loosely hold your fiber in your dominant hand, and pinch the very tip of the fiber with your thumb and forefinger of your non dominant hand. Then gently pull. If you pull all the way, you should notice that your fiber detaches from the fiber source eventually. For yarn, we want very very long lengths, so we don’t want that to happen. To get a continuous length of drafted fiber, simply change where you’re pulling from as you go. For example, you can draft out 2 centimeters/1 inch of fiber, and then move your fingers 2 cm/1 in back toward your fiber supply, and draft again.

The thinner you draft (or pre-draft*), the thinner that fiber will spin up. Once we start spinning, you’ll see how adding twist immediately compacts the fiber quite a bit, so you need to draft much thicker than you actually want your yarn to be. When pre-drafting specifically, if in doubt--draft thicker. You can always draft it out a little more as you’re spinning.

Figuring out how to draft smoothly can be one of the harder parts of learning to spin, but even before knowing how to do it perfectly you can still create good yarn.

Check out The Joy of Handspinning website to see drafting in action, as well as several different types of drafting.

Also check out this video explaining pre-drafting roving. 1:00-2:30 is especially helpful. If it’s not clicking from this video, search youtube for “pre drafting fiber for spinning” and watch til you have a better understanding.

*pre-drafting just means drafting before spinning--so it’s the same type of thing as drafting while spinning, but without having to wrangle your spindle at the same time. I’d recommend pre-drafting at least a bit of your fiber until you feel comfortable doing it. Then you can spin with your pre-drafted fiber, and it’ll be easier than if you hadn’t pre-drafted.

Tips: If you have a bottom whorl spindle, you may also want to practice spinning the spindle before it has any fiber on it, just to get a feel for how it moves. You could do this with the bottom point in a bowl or on a flat surface like a book or table. Try rolling the top of the shaft between your thumb and index finger. Don’t worry about it toppling over frequently--your spindle will be suspended by the yarn that you’re spinning, so it won’t topple !

If you have a top whorl spindle, you might have a harder time getting it to spin without being suspended, because the center of gravity is so high. Instead, try tying a piece of thread or scrap yarn to the hook (if it has one) or below the whorl (look for figure B below) and secure it with a half hitch knot. Then try spinning it like that, and let it hang freely to unwind itself whenever it has too much twist before you try again.

You can also try spinning a bottom whorl suspended by scrap yarn or thread. The advantage of trying it while it’s suspended is it can allow you to watch twist being added and see what it does without messing with your handspun, as well as letting you get a feel for how it moves while suspended. If you have a bottom whorl, I’d give both a try !

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Now that you can draft, you’re gonna want to attach your fiber to your spindle. Some people use a leader to do this--it’s a pre-spun loop of yarn that you tie to your spindle. Then you loop some pre-drafted fiber through the loop of the leader, add twist til it holds, and off you go.

Another way to do it is without a leader. I’m much more familiar with this method, and I find it way easier, so I’ll go into more depth on this one:

1. Take the end of your pre-drafted fiber (you will need enough pre-drafted fiber to go from the underside of the whorl to the very top of the spindle, and then back again. If you’ve pre-drafted way more, don’t worry. We’re just working with this short amount for now, but it can stay attached). Make a slip knot at the end. You can roll the fiber between your fingers to add some twist if you’re having trouble making a slip knot with it. (Tip: if you’re having trouble getting the fibers to roll, wet them slightly with water or spit and it will be much easier)

2. Put the slip knot on the bottom point of your spindle, and slide it up so that it’s at the whorl.

3. Gently wind the pre-drafted fiber up the spindle shaft, until you are at the hook or top. Wind it over the hook (or do a half-hitch knot at the top--if there’s a groove near the top your half hitch should sit in there, otherwise it should sit as close to the top as possible while still being secure. You may drop it a few times while learning where the perfect spot is--such is life). Be careful with pre-drafted fiber--depending on staple length and fiber type, it can pull apart quite easily. The trick to keeping that from happening is to keep it a little slack and loose until you have added twist to it.

4. Pinch your pre-drafted fiber between your thumb and forefinger on your dominant hand, about 1 hand’s width from the top of your spindle. Turn the spindle in the direction you intend to spin your yarn (usually this will be clockwise, or to the right). Spin the spindle until you have the desired amount of twist. You should notice that all the fiber above the hook/half-hitch has twist, while the fiber below it has none. You need all of it to have twist, so let’s even it out--pop the half-hitch off with your thumb/unwind the yarn from the hook, unwind the yarn from the shaft so that the entire length you’ve worked with so far is stretched out. This will allow the twist to equalize. Now wind it all back up and put the half-hitch back/wind around the hook again. You may need to repeat this a couple times to get your starting fiber fully twisted (don’t worry though--you only need to do this at the very start. From here on you shouldn’t need to equalize twist like that until the next time you start from an empty spindle).

You’re done attaching the fiber--now you can spin !

Fig B: How your yarn should sit on a spindle, both top and bottom whorl

If that doesn’t make sense, here’s a video showing how to attach it with and without a leader. If that doesn’t help either, search youtube for “how to attach leader to drop spindle” and keep looking until you have a better understanding.

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So you know how to draft and your fiber is attached to your spindle--now it’s time to spin ! There are 3 different parts to spinning a singles on a drop spindle.

1. Adding twist. This can be done with just your hands, but the spindle makes it a whole lot faster. This is the purpose of a spindle--to add twist very quickly (and as a bonus, it’s a handy place to store the yarn as you spin it !). All you have to do is spin the spindle, and the only trick is to make sure you always spin in a consistent direction--don’t start a project spinning clockwise and end it spinning counterclockwise ! You’ll have an impossible time plying it then. There are a lot of different ways to spin a spindle--you’ll see a few watching the videos here, and more if you search out videos of drop spindling yourself. Whatever method is comfortable and practical for you is what you should do.

2. Drafting the fiber. You already know how to do this part !

3. Winding the yarn on. When your yarn is long enough that adding more length will make it hard to work with, you’ll want to wind it onto the spindle so that you can get back to spinning. To do this, pop the half hitch knot off the top/unwind from the hook, unwind along the shaft, and wind it near or at the base of the whorl, in the orientation seen in the very first picture. Always wind in the same direction that you’re spinning, to stop your yarn from flying off.

I would highly recommend starting with the method known as “park and draft” while you learn. In this method, you first add a ton of extra twist (usually as much as you can) and then put the spindle down and draft until that extra twist is used up. Then you wind on, and repeat. This isolates the actions of spinning so that you are only doing one at a time, which makes it a lot easier. Most people move on from this technique once they’ve figured it out, but you don’t have to--the drawback is that it’s typically slower, but hey, spinning is a slow craft anyway. There is no wrong way to spin, and everyone’s hands and bodies have different needs and work in different ways.

How to Park And Draft

First, use your dominant hand to pinch your pre-drafted fiber a few inches/6 cm above the top of the spindle.

Now just spin the spindle clockwise, until it won’t really spin any more. (Don’t try to get ~the most twist ever achieved~ or anything like that--your yarn can potentially snap from too much twist. Take your cue from the spindle--when it stops wanting to spin, you’ve got enough twist.) Don’t let the twist advance beyond where you’re pinching it off.

This is important--if the twist gets into your fiber, it becomes much harder to draft it. But don’t worry, you can undo this by pinching just above where the twist has entered your fiber, and with the other hand just below (pinching the actual yarn here). Now (with the hand that’s pinching the yarn) roll in the opposite direction that you’re spinning in. This will move the twist down into the rest of your yarn. Let go of where you’re pinching the fiber, slide your yarn-pinching hand to where it usually is as you’re spinning, and get back to it.

Your leader/yarn should be very kinked up and wiry. Now put the spindle between your thighs (or between your knees, under one knee, or under something heavy that won’t damage your spindle. Thighs are convenient, but if it’s uncomfortable, try putting the spindle somewhere else. It needs to be held firmly in place and not move around). This is the “park” part of “park and draft”.

Now, you want to be pinching the twist off at the same spot, but using your other hand instead. I usually pinch right above where I’m already pinching and let go with the lower hand.

First we’re going to just bring the twist up the pre-drafted fiber by sliding your pinching hand up the fiber, slowly and gently. You should see the twist follow behind your hand as it enters the fiber. If you have lots of pre-drafted fiber, you might wind on, add more twist, wind on again, etc. You could also draft out your pre-drafted fiber (this is what the majority of more experienced spinners who pre-draft do) while you go.

The “draft” part of “park and draft” is just like pre-drafting, but one end is attached to a spindle. This gives you something to lightly pull against, if you want. Draft slowly and with purpose.

At a certain point, you will run out of excess twist. At this point, wind on. If you’ve only done a short length, you can also add more twist, park it again, and go back to drafting.

If you’ve run out of armspan but still have lots of excess twist, unpark your spindle (let it hang free) and allow it to untwist a little, monitoring it closely. If this happens often, try to put less energy into twisting your spindle, or allow it to twist for less time.

The amount of twist that your yarn has matters a lot--it will impact your finished yarn hugely. A yarn without enough twist will be very limp and might even fall apart as you handle it. A yarn with too much twist will be wiry and inelastic. You want to find a middle ground where it’s got just the right amount for what you intend to use it for--a hard, inelastic wool yarn can make a good bag, but not a very good hat.

To see how much twist you’ve added to your singles as you spin, try a plyback test ! This is really quick to do on spindles--just relax the distance between your fiber supply and the top of the spindle. When the yarn is no longer taut, the live twist will cause it to twist back on itself. With too little twist, you may just get a few sad loops (or no loops, if it’s super undertwisted). With too much twist, you may get tons of tight little curls of yarn. With a good amount of twist, you should have a few good curls (just one if it’s a short length of yarn, or several if it’s your armspan) that aren’t too tight. Those curls are what your yarn will look like once 2 plied, so it’s a great litmus test for whether you’re adding the correct amount of twist or not.

Fig C: What different amounts of twist looks like in your singles.

To fix too little twist, just spin the spindle a little extra until it looks right. To fix too much twist, either draft more fiber or else let the spindle untwist a little.

You can and should do this before winding each new length on, at least while you’re still learning the motions.

Check out this video of how to spin with the park and draft method ! 0:00-4:45 is intro and attaching the leader. 4:46-9:00 is the method itself (note to friend: don’t watch past 9 mins). If this video doesn’t work for you, search “drop spindle park and draft” on youtube.

A few interim tips

1. It’s critical to hold your fiber supply loosely. If you find that you have put a lot of force into drafting, then you are either holding your fiber way too tight or your hands are too close together (or potentially both). Drafting should not require force. If it is requiring force, adjust your grip and your hand placement continually until it gets better, and refine from there.

2. Try to put some tension on the yarn as you wind it on. This will make it sit a little neater and flatter, so that you have a more stable cone of yarn and can fit more on it.

3. If you draft out your fiber so much that it runs thin and just sort of disintegrates, just pull off the most wispy parts from your yarn and the fiber supply, then hold the two together again, making sure to overlap by several inches/6-10cm. Gently draft out a little and add twist before putting that join under the weight of your spindle, or it will fail again. You can join from one fiber source to the next one (necessary with rolags, hand combed top, and strips off of batts) in a similar way; make sure to leave a little unspun fiber for a good join, and overlap the end of the first fiber source with the beginning of the second by about an inch/2.5 cm.

4. If your yarn snaps (rather than your fiber running thin as you draft), it’s because it was A) twisted way too much B) spun too fine for the drop spindle you’re using C) both A and B or D) your spindle has become heavy enough that it can no longer spin as fine as you were spinning.

For A, B, and C: remove as much twist as you can from either end of the snapped yarn, then put both ends in your upturned palm, overlapping them over the whole width of your palm. Add enough either water or spit to get them good and wet (not dripping, but they do need to be wet). Now place your other palm down on top, and rub vigorously for about 30 seconds until the ends have joined together. If necessary, you can also just tie the ends in a knot, although it’s not invisible and you can usually feel it in the finished yarn.

For D: is your whorl removable ? If so, remove the whorl and continue spinning. If not (and for the vast majority of beginner’s drop spindles it won’t be), your spindle is full ! Even if there’s still room, it’s too heavy to continue spinning on for that project. You could keep going spinning a thicker yarn, but that means your yarn will randomly get thicker somewhere near the end, which works for very few projects. If this happens to you when there’s still tons and tons of room on your spindle, that means in general you ought to spin thicker yarn on that particular spindle if you want to fill it up all the way.

Okay, I spun yarn, now what ?

So at the moment, you have what we call a singles (some people just say “single”). That can be used as is, or it can be plied--that is, held together with more strands of singles and twisted in the opposite direction. But either way, you need to get it off your spindle !

If you’re going to leave it as a singles, then you’ll be winding it into a skein (we’ll get into that later). If you want to ply it though, you’ve got a lot of options. (I’ll get to how to actually ply later, this is just discussing those options.)

Many Methods of Plying

Plying Straight Off The Spindles

First, if you’ve got multiple spindles capable of spinning the same weight of yarn, you could just set your full spindle aside and spin another one. You’d need at least 3 spindles (the third, ideally, a bigger plying spindle) to get a 2 ply yarn, and 4 spindles to get a 3 ply with this sort of setup. This is what I do with supported spindles, since I have many, and I can attest that it saves a lot of winding time and is terribly convenient.

But it’s also probably not doable for many people, and it’s ridiculous to buy 3 drop spindles when you’re just getting into it !

Wind And Store

Second, you can wind your singles onto something for storage, and then use your now-empty spindle to spin another singles. Two great things to store yarn on are small rocks and empty toilet paper (loo) rolls.

Winding it around a small rock is better than just winding it into a ball for plying, since the rock will weight it and stop it from flying up in the air once you start plying. A big pebble works great. With this setup, you’d want to put all your balls of singles in a bowl or container of some kind, hold the ends of each, attach it to your spindle, and let them roll around as you ply.

They can tangle (mine usually don’t, but it can happen), so the toilet paper rolls might be an upgrade--these can be put on a stick, and the stick can be put on something (or you can poke two holes in a cardboard box, put the stick through one hole, load the rolls onto it, then put it through the other hole as well) to keep it stationary so that the rolls... well, roll. This requires some storage space (usually if you do this often, you don’t wanna make a new one every time, so keeping it is preferable) and is honestly not a huge upgrade... unless you have a ball winder that can wind the yarn onto the TP rolls for you, in which case this is a big time saver. If you don’t have one and don’t have issues with tangling, the rocks will probably work just as well and take up a lot less space.

Fig D: Diagram of a Simple Ply Box

Ply Bracelet

Thirdly, if you want a 2 ply yarn specifically, you could wind it onto your hand and make something called an Andean Plying Bracelet. Here’s a link to a page that goes into it in detail. I highly, highly recommend learning how to do these. They look a little complex, and I couldn’t tell you the motions if my life depended on it, but I can do them with my eyes closed while not paying a whit of attention. They rely entirely on muscle memory, so once you learn them, they’re easy as pie.

The whole point of a plying bracelet is to get 2 strands of yarn out of 1 singles. You could of course wind a singles into a ball, then wind half of it onto another ball, and then ply from there. But a plying bracelet is a lot faster, and will always match up exactly.

One downside of a plying bracelet is that, as the name implies, it goes on your wrist. So if you keep needing to put your spindle down to take care of other things, you’ll need to pull off the plying bracelet as well (or carry the whole thing with you). They can be stored on a cylindrical object that’s smaller than your wrist, or sometimes also draped on hooks or put on the spindle shaft itself. I don’t usually encounter problems when pulling on or off my plying bracelets--it doesn’t seem to tangle them--but if you’re plying while cooking or watching a child or something else that might require you to stop immediately and hurry over to whatever needs tending, then you might want to save the ply bracelet for another day.

Chain Plying

Fourth, you could wind your singles into one ball, and then chain ply it. Chain plying is a way to turn one singles into a 3 plied yarn. It also preserves stripes in your singles (we’ll talk about this in more detail later), so it can be perfect for a very colorful singles.

Chain plying is simple. Do you know how to tie a slip knot ? Of course, because you needed one to start spinning ! (Although here’s the link to how to tie a slip knot again, if you need it.) So that means you basically know how to chain ply as well.

Step one: tie a slip knot at the end of your singles (you want a very short tail, since that’s basically waste). Make the resulting loop nice and big, and lay it over your singles. Pull the singles through the loop--now you have a new loop ! Make it nice and big as well. Lay it over your singles. Pull the singles through. Repeat until you’re at the end of your singles (try to have your last loop be a very small one). To finish, place the end through the loop, and then just pull on it until it tightens the loop. Note that you typically are adding ply twist and winding on as you do this, but you can also just chain ply an entire single and wind it into a ball as you go, then add twist once you’re done. That can be a lot easier to wrangle, if you’re having difficulties.

You might notice that this is basically a really open crochet chain. Yep ! It needs to be open so that the twist can enter the yarn, but you can do very big or somewhat smaller loops--although no matter what, you need to keep the loops large enough to at least hook a couple fingers through them so that you can make the next loop. Note that sometimes, the bump at the start of each loop can be felt and/or seen. Also note that chain plying is best done with smooth singles that can slide against each other. It can be done with a bumpy, lumpy yarn that sticks to itself, but bumps and lumps will catch as you try to chain, and if the yarn sticks to itself then it won’t slide nicely, which can really slow you down.

You may find that you prefer holding the ball of singles as you chain, or you may want it in a container on your lap/on the floor. You could also make a little wrist pouch to hold it, although take friction into account--if you make it out of wool yarn, choose a smooth one.

Ply Ball

Fifth is a sort of hybrid of a few of the others I’ve already mentioned, called a ply ball. To make a ply ball, simply wind two or more singles together into a ball (I’d suggest winding them around a small rock for a ply ball, too). The number of singles you wind in your ply ball will be the number of plies your yarn will have. A chain plied single wound into a ball is also functionally a ply ball.

Ply balls are extremely portable--you only ever need to work with one at a time, so you can just keep it in your pocket without worry of tangling, and it’s not attached to you or a box or another spindle. The downside is that it generally requires you to either have multiple spindles (ex: fill up two spindles, wind both off into one ply ball) or do extra winding (ex: fill up your spindle, wind it off to a rock for storage, fill up your spindle again, now wind from the spindle and the rock to get your ply ball. Add more winding for more plies).

However, you can also wind a ply ball from plying bracelet (yes, that’s more winding--but now it’s portable, and you’ve just turned one singles into a 2 strand ply ball) or even chain a singles, but wind it into a ply ball instead of plying it then and there to get a 3 strand ply ball (this also might let you play around with really long or really short chains without having to think about ergonomics as much, since your spindle isn’t involved).

Ply balls can also be helpful if you’re having issues wrangling your singles while you try to ply, since they’re laid together already--so they’re worth an attempt if you are having trouble keeping your yarn in line while plying.

There’s a short (but full of tips) article on ply balls here.

There’s even more ways to ply--look into "plying from a center pull ball” (similar to a plying bracelet, but requires a ball winder or a nostepinne) and “ply on the fly” (chain plying at the same time as spinning the singles--highly portable instant gratification). There may also be others that I’ve forgotten or not heard of, hopefully mentioned by others in the notes !

So Many Ways to Ply--How to Choose ?

So, every plying method and every number of plies has its own effects on the finished yarn, and you can use those effects to get the yarn you’re after.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with yarn weights such as lace weight and worsted weight, you should read this first !

A singles is great for your soft, fluffy, luxury stuff--cowls, hats, mittens that won't get a lot of wear, or shawls. It also preserves the colors that you spun exactly--so if you spun a beautiful perfect rainbow singles and the most important thing to you is that it stays a rainbow, you could leave it as a singles ! You can knit, crochet, weave, and nalbind with them like normal (I actually really prefer them for nalbinding--they felt easier so the joining is quicker), although because they haven’t been plied, they’re a lot weaker to abrasion and snapping. So they’re not ideal for things that need to be durable, and if you’re spinning short and/or fine fibers, you may find that even with some care they still don’t last very long, so keep in mind that stuff made from singles probably won’t be passed down or anything like that. But still, I’ve knit several small pouches from singles that have held up just fine being tossed around my room. One advantage to note is that you have the most yardage and the least spinning time this way, so it’s a very ‘time cheap’ yarn--you spin 100 yards/90 meters of singles, and you get 100 yards/90 meters of yarn. No time spent plying. However, it is as thin or thick as you spun it, and however consistent or inconsistent your spinning is, that’s your end result ! A lot of spinners (me) balk at this.

2 ply is next. I use 2 ply for almost everything besides socks--it’s quick, it’s fairly durable, and it looks very pretty (and an error correction: is ideal for lace). A 2 ply halves the amount of yarn you end up with--if you spin 100 yards/90 meters and 2 ply it, you’ll end up with 50 yards/45 meters. It also has a distinct ‘handspun’ look--2 ply knits up to a messier fabric. I really love that effect, but if you want a neat, uniform fabric, don’t do a 2 ply ! I’m not sure how it affects crochet or weaving, unfortunately, but do I suspect it’s similar with crochet. It also bulks up your yarn--it’ll be a little bit less than double the thickness of your singles, usually. 2 ply holds up alright to gentle/moderate daily wear, and is great for hats, gloves that don’t need to be hard wearing, scarves, and bags that won’t need to bear a huge amount of weight. It’s a workhorse yarn--you can use it for almost anything, and it’ll probably be okay. The only thing I would never use it for is socks--that’s a 3 or 4 ply project.

Let’s talk 3 ply ! 3 ply can be achieved either through chain plying or else as a traditional 3 ply--meaning 3 separate singles all plied together. You’ll get very different effects from these two methods in terms of both color and even-ness. If your singles had any stripes of color, with chain ply they will remain as stripes (this could be an alternative to your rainbow singles !). With a traditional 3 ply, your stripes will all blur together, and you’ll get a varied and multicolored yarn. You will get 1/3 of the yardage/meterage of your original singles, so a 3 ply yarn takes longer to make than a singles or a 2 ply. But it is also about 3 times thicker than your singles, so if you’re struggling to spin thick singles but want a thick yarn, 3 ply is a great option.

If your singles are very even, you’ll see no real different between chain ply and traditional 3 ply (except for the bumps at the start of each loop--they are usually visible as well). However, if your singles are kind of all over the place, chain plying magnifies this. On the other hand, a traditional 3 ply really evens out any inconsistencies. Even though I’ve got a few years under my belt, I am not a very consistent spinner, simply because I can neither visualize nor remember the weight I ought to be spinning, so it’s always a total guess (damn aphantasia). Beginners are also often inconsistent spinners, just due to lack of muscle memory. Either way, a traditional 3 ply can be really helpful in creating a fairly smooth, even yarn from really wild, inconsistent singles.

Fig E: comparisons of chain ply and traditional 3 ply, in terms of consistency

Lastly, 4 ply. 4 ply will turn your heavy laceweight singles into a light worsted, if it puffs up in blocking enough. I love 4 ply for my supported spindles mostly, since those spin very fine yarn and I don’t have a use for anything finer than sock weight yarn. It’s also very durable, and a laid 4 ply (like a traditional 3 ply--just 4 strands held together) make good socks. A cabled 4 ply (take two 2 ply yarns and ply them again) makes terrible socks, but is still very durable and has an interesting rope like appearance and texture. 4 ply in general is great for socks, bags, blankets, and especially sweaters, as it doesn’t pill much and will stand up to heavy wear. However, you have to spin 4 times the singles to get your finished yarn--a 100 yard/90 meter 4 ply skein requires 400 yards/360 meters of singles, and then more time for plying. So these are rather slow. They’re an awesome option for a fiber that refuses to spin up to anything other than the finest lace, and they will make great objects and garments that will last for a good long while.

Past 4 ply, you kind of just get rope. I haven’t ventured past 4 ply much--give it a shot if you’re curious !

The Why of Ply is a great article on the different aspects of different plies, and touches on some stuff I don’t mention (like stitch definition and cables) if you want to know more ! Highly recommend it.

How to Ply

So... you know at least a few methods of plying now, know how many plies you want your finished yarn to have, and you may have even already wound a ply ball or filled all of your spindles. Which means it’s finally time to ply everything.

To start, you need to attach all your plies to your spindle. For the methods that I’ve discussed (with the exception of chain plying), you’re going to do the following: gather the ends of your plies together, and make one slipknot with all of them. Then put the slipknot on your spindle below the whorl, the same way you would when spinning singles (and when not using a leader).

For chain plying: chain your singles until you’ve got about a foot or a third of a meter. Now you want to attach it to your spindle. Take the very first slip knot loop and slip it onto the spindle, below the whorl.

Now, secure your yarn by wrapping it around the hook or else with a half hitch knot, and spin the spindle counterclockwise (anticlockwise). You should immediately see the plies twisting together to form plied yarn.

From here, you will proceed basically the same way as you did when spinning singles--you’ll add twist to your plies, then wind on. This can be a really great opportunity to practice doing things while the spindle is in motion; you won’t be drafting, but depending on the type of plying you’re doing, you may be chaining, pulling from a ply bracelet, or simply letting the plies slide through your fingers (you do want to tension them and keep the twist from getting past your hand). If that requires too much coordination, feel free to park and ply--that is, spin the spindle to add excess twist, park it and let it into your yarn, then wind on.

If you try to ply your yarn the same direction that you spun it, you’ll notice that it doesn’t really turn into a cohesive yarn, and instead becomes wiry and the plies don’t slot neatly together. If you notice this happening, turn your spindle in the other direction. A yarn that is both spun and plied in the same direction won’t be stable or strong, and will tangle the second you try to work with it.

This is why it’s helpful to be consistent in which direction you choose to spin your singles, by the way--if you always spin wool clockwise, then you can know with certainty that it will be plied counterclockwise.

We refer to yarn as having either Z twist or S twist (this refers to whatever the finished twist is, so a singles that you’re never going to ply, or a 3 ply yarn, for example). This just makes it a little easier to talk about and recognize what we’re doing.

Fig F: S and Z Twist in plied and singles yarn

It’s essentially a mnemonic device that allows you to glance at your yarn and go “Oh! I spun these three singles counterclockwise, so I should ply them all together clockwise.” I often have to draw an S or Z in the air (just like I sometimes have to draw an L in the air to pretend I can reliably tell left from right), but it is pretty foolproof and will prevent you from, for example, trying to ply an S twist singles with a Z twist singles and then wondering what on earth went wrong.

By the way, this page has a really helpful chart on what direction you might want to spin in based on what you intend to do with the finished yarn. For example, crocheting (right handed style) with S twisted yarn will remove the twist as you work, but knitting in continental or English style (or crocheting left handed style) with that same yarn will add twist. Most spinners spin their singles to have Z twist and ply them with S twist--but if you’re a crocheter or knit Eastern style this will unply your yarn as you work, and you are encouraged to try reversing things to have better results with your handspun projects. The more you know !

Now, back to your plying. You may be wondering how you’re supposed to know how much ply twist to add, which is a great question, because plyback tests don’t work when you’re actually plying. Those are for when you’re spinning your singles. Instead, I do what I call a “hanging test”. Just hold out a length of plied yarn between your hands and let it hang (not pulling it taut--the yarn should have a nice downturned curve). A balanced yarn--that is, a yarn that has equal and correct amounts of spin and ply twist--will just hang nicely. An underplied (or underspun) yarn will usually also hang nicely, but you will see gaps inbetween the plies. This is no good at all. Gaps won’t just make your yarn look bad, they'll also make it split when you work with it, and will be less durable and more prone to pilling, felting, and eventual disintegration after much use.

On the other end of the spectrum, an overplied yarn (which may have both too much spin and ply twist, or may be underspun and then overplied in an attempt to fix ones mistake--which won’t work, by the way. You need to go back and add more spin twist to your singles) will twist in the middle instead of hanging. If it only twists a tiny bit, you’re fine. But if it twists a lot, there’s problems. Overtwisted 2 ply yarns tend to be aggressively smooth--this is only relevant for 2 ply, since those have a sort of pearled silhouette. If your 2 ply is smooth, then you’ve most certainly overplied it. 3 and 4 ply are always smooth, however, so a smooth profile for one of those is to be expected.

Fig G: Ply twist in 2 ply yarns. Do these yarns have S or Z twist ?

Don’t worry if your first yarns aren’t perfectly spun or plied (really--they won’t be). Every spinner is striving for something different with their yarn. Some are aiming for total technical perfection, some aim for exquisite fineness, some aim for beautiful colorways and for finding the softest and most lovely breed of sheep. Some just want to spin, some just want usable yarn, some just want a pair of socks that last on their feet and find commercial sock yarn to be about as durable as wet paper (that would be me). You certainly don’t have to know what you want to get out of spinning right away, but the point is that every single spinner has their own standards that they hold themself to, and you don’t need to (and shouldn’t !) try to meet others standards. Especially when still learning, but also just all the time and forever.

I’ve Plied My Yarn, Now What ? OR I Just Want Singles, Now What ?

Now your yarn needs to come off the spindle ! But not the way we’ve been taking singles to ply off the spindle--we need to make what’s called a hank. A hank is basically a loop of yarn that’s been tied so that it’s nice and secure. These loops can be pretty big (mine are all 2 yards/1.8 meters) or as small as the distance around your hand--it all comes down to what you wind your yarn onto.

I have already made a tutorial that goes into quite a bit of depth (and has pictures, even), so I’m gonna speed through this part a little bit.

1. Find something to wind your yarn around. A Niddy noddy is the preferred tool for the job here, and will make it much faster to wind and thoughtlessly simple to calculate the yardage/meterage of your yarn (I’ve seen people use yarn swifts as well, and they certainly look very speedy), but they are by no means required. Substitutes include: a large hardcover book, the back of one or two chairs, your hand (ideal for very small amounts of yarn), your forearm (for smallish amounts of yarn--wrap between the thumb and forefinger and go down to the elbow, then back up), or anything else that won’t deform with pressure and is holding relatively still.

2. Wind your yarn around that thing. You may need to start with a slipknot to attach it to whatever it is you’re winding on, or else a piece of tape. If you’re using your forearm or hand, you can simply pinch the end to hold it in place. Unlike when winding your yarn onto your spindle, when winding your yarn into a hank, you want to use as little tension as possible so that you can get a more accurate measurement of length later on. Also try to keep your winding tidy--in an ideal world, the yarn should be traveling almost the same path every time, not a few inches to the left one time, then wildly skewed to the right the next time.

3. Tie off your hank. Once you’ve finished winding, you need to secure your hank so that it doesn’t tangle. You can use either scrap yarn or else the ends of the yarn you just made (I prefer the latter, since the ends tend not to be very good anyway, so at least they don’t go to waste. In this case, snap off or cut both ends--the length you should cut depends on how thick your hank is). Find where both ends are--you will need to tie knots near the ends so that you can attach the ends to them. Tie an overhand knot a few inches/5cm below the first end, and then hold that end alongside one of your strands of knot-tying yarn, and tie another overhand knot. Repeat this with the other end. Make sure you haven’t overlooked any strands of yarn and left them out of the tie--that’s a very easy way to get tangles.

4. Remove your hank. Gently push your hank off of whatever you wound it on. Put it to the side--now we want to measure. Use soft measuring tape (or a piece of inelastic string or yarn, if you don’t have one--you will then need to measure that against a rigid measuring tape) to span the entire path that your yarn traveled. Write down that number, and now count the number of strands in your hank. Multiply the two numbers together. Now convert your inches or centimeters into yards or meters, and you have your yardage or meterage !

Ex: You wrapped your yarn around your palm, which measures 10 inches. There are 41 strands. 10x41=410. 410 inches is roughly 11 yards. Or: You wrapped your yarn around a small book, which measured 21 cm. There are 50 strands. 21x50=1050. 1050 cm is of course 10.5 meters.

Fig H: Winding a hank on a hardcover book.

It can be very helpful to label your handspun yarn. The yardage/meterage is critical information when it comes to using patterns, less so if you don’t use patterns. But there’s other info that you might still find handy to know later on, such as what the fiber is, where and when you got it, when you spun it, how you plied it, any info on the dye job, what the yarn weight is, what spindle you spun it on, whether it is part of a set, how much it weighs, etc.

Some of my really verbose labels might look like this: Avocado dye and copper mordant hand dyed in the fleece 2020 Cormo Bought 2019 Spun for 2020 TDF 2 plied on wheel 210 yards 3.4 oz light worsted weight

But most of my labels just have the yardage and breed, if I label them at all. I tend to document things online and also remember spinning my yarn better than I remember anything else going on in my life, so I’m a little lazy about labeling. Your labels should include the information that you think you’ll find helpful in the future, or that you know you won’t have another way to recover if you end up forgetting.

Blocking your yarn

Don’t attach that label just yet--we aren’t totally done with our yarn. It has one or two more steps before it’s ready to be used, and that first step is called blocking. There’s a few ways to block yarn--wet blocking, steam blocking, and resting.

Wet blocking: Get your hank of yarn wet, using anything other than very hot water (this could start felting your yarn). You could run it under the tap for a minute or else let it sit in a bowl of water with a little hair conditioner for about half an hour, if you wanted your yarn to be a little softer, then rinse the yarn. Squeeze as much water out as you can, then hang it to dry. You can (and should) also snap or thwack it--but I've gone into detail on that in a link below.

Steam blocking: Get a source of steam going--like a pot of water simmering or a very hot tap running. Using tongs or a long wooden spoon, hold your yarn over the steam and slowly rotate it until the whole skein has been steamed. Don’t let the yarn touch the water.

Resting: If neither option above is possible, you can also just let your yarn sit for at least a week. This lets the twist settle down, so it’ll be a lot easier to work with. However, it doesn’t do anything else that blocking does, so it won’t really show you your “finished” yarn, and may lead to problems down the road.

So--why did we just do that stuff ? Well, we blocked our yarn to reset the fibers, basically. During the spinning, we put the fibers under tension, and they more or less stay in that slightly stretched state. But it’s not really stable--the next time they get wet, they’ll spring back into the natural crimp that the wool wants to have (this changes drastically depending on breed and even individual sheep), and will often puff up. The hank might lose a little length and your yarn’s weight (not as in ounces or grams, but as in lace, dk, or bulky weight) often increases some. So if you’ve made your yarn into something before blocking it, with the perfect gauge and nice drape, the first time you wash it you’ll find that it’s thicker and a little smaller and has less drape. It might not fit anymore, or the seams might be messed up.

This is all entirely avoidable if you just block it before you do anything with it, so I highly recommend that you do.

The other thing that blocking does is set the twist, so your yarn won’t kink up as you work with it--even a perfect, balanced yarn can kink up as you work if the twist is live--which makes it a lot more pleasant. Resting sets the twist as well, as mentioned above.

I’ve gone into blocking in more detail in this post here, if you’d like to know more--I’d especially recommend reading the last section about snapping and thwacking your yarn.

Once it’s fully dry (and remember--wool can hold a lot of water and still feel dry, so give it a little extra drying time just to be sure) it only needs to be wound into a ball before you can use it ! Congratulations on your handspun yarn--that’s a real achievement.

Storing your yarn

If you don’t plan on using it right away, you may want to skein your hanks up to keep them compact and tidy. To do this, put your thumbs on the inside of your hank, and pull it taut. Then, one thumb at a time, twist in the opposite direction that you plied in. Your hank should start to kind of look like rope. Once it has a lot of twist (enough that you’re struggling to add more), find the center point of the hank, and fold it. With 2 yard hanks I tend to fold it over my knee, but a doorknob or something else would work just as well. It should immediately look like an oversized piece of yarn--that’s because we just twisted it one direction, and then folded it in two and let the excess twist twist it in the other direction, which is the same way you ply yarn ! There should be a loop at each end where your thumb was--take your thumbs out and put one loop through the other. Now you can attach your label and you’re good to go !

If it’s a very small hank (one that’s been wound around the palm, especially) you’ll probably just want to wind it into a ball instead. You could do this with any length of yarn--it’s not an ideal way to store wool yarn ultra long term, since staying wound into a ball can stretch out the fibers again, which means you’d need to wind it into a hank and re-block it if you wanted to make an accurate gauge swatch or something. Short term (a year or less) it’s just fine.

If you’re wondering how to wind up a big hank into a ball without tangling, just sit down with your knees up, and put your knees inside the hank, then move your knees apart until the hank is taut. Now you can wind in relative peace, free from tangles. You can also use a yarn swift, if you’ve got one.

I would recommend, by the way, using up some of your first skeins as soon as possible (you might want to keep your very first skein so that later you can see how far you’ve come--I really wish I kept mine). You won’t know how your spinning is until you’ve used it, so to prevent you from getting to skein #40 thinking you’ve been doing great, only to discover that your yarn is actually unusable... use your early yarn ! Evaluate it, make judgements, and learn from it. Does it need more twist ? Is it very lumpy ? Are there lots of spots where it went thin ? Do you like how the colors turned out with the plying method you chose ? These are all good questions to ask yourself as you use your yarn.

Moving On From Park and Draft

Once you’re comfortable with the park and draft method, you might want to try moving on to true suspended spinning. As I said earlier--it may not be for you, and that’s fine, but you won’t know if you don’t try. True suspended is quite a bit faster than park and draft, so if you want to speed up a little, you should give it a shot.

In park and draft, you first add twist, then park the spindle to draft your fibers into yarn. In true suspended spinning, you set the spindle going and draft while the twist is being added. This eliminates the whole ‘standing/sitting there with your arm outstretched, waiting for your yarn to accumulate twist’ section.

The easiest way to get into true suspended spinning is to work your way up to it--try drafting just a little bit while your spindle is building up twist during park and draft. To give yourself more time, set the spindle spinning slower. Then try drafting a bit more. The goal is to draft at the same rate that twist is added, meaning that you can wind on pretty much as soon as the yarn is too long to keep spinning.

The trick here is to adjust the speed at which your spindle spins rather than the speed at which you draft. You can only draft so fast before your technique gets sloppy, and past that you’ll be focused far more on keeping pace with the twist being added than on drafting evenly.

So if I find that I spun my spindle too aggressively, I still it immediately and try again, but slower this time.

I answered an ask about this a while ago where I went into a little bit more depth, if you’re interested.

And if you haven’t seen it, the pinned post on my blog is a lot of stuff like that all collected into one post for easier perusal. Some of them I’ve already linked to earlier in this post, but others I haven’t.

Small Projects, Scrap Projects, and Big Projects: Tips for All

You may be wondering, What the hell am I supposed to do with this yarn ? This isn’t even enough for a pair of fingerless gloves !

Which is a fair concern--endlessly accumulating small skeins of yarn can be frustrating if you don’t know how to use them up.

Drop spindles are limited in how much yarn you can make on them, and while you can make huge skeins by joining smaller skeins together, they may not all be the same weight ! Or they may not match. Or it may just be really boring.

You may also be doing a lot of experimenting, and ending up with 30 yard/meter skeins that you can’t even make something tiny with.

Small Skeins: For single skeins that are too small for gloves, hats, etc, you may still be able to make things like pouches (for yarn, crochet hooks, dice, coins, etc), baby socks or hats, coasters, or other small items. My spinning wheel oil holder is a little basket crocheted out of some handspun, and I have a mini tape measurer on my keys with a cover crocheted over it from handspun as well. You might have to invent things to do with your handspun, but using items that you made enriches your life--I promise.

Scrap Projects: What about tiny skeins ? Or maybe you’ve already made all the coasters and baby socks and spinning oil holders that you could possibly need, and now the small skeins are piling up again. I humbly submit the Scrap Yarn Project--my favorite type of project by far. I’ve been slowly working on a handspun scrap blanket for about 2.5 years, using tiny scraps, small skeins, and leftovers from projects alike. I knit 5x5 inch stockinette squares (some have colorwork, some have different stitch patterns, but mostly I let the yarn be the star) and for the most part just try make squares that are thick enough to stay warm but thin enough to have a little drape. It’s an incredibly satisfying project.

Fig I: An older image of the author’s handspun scrap blanket in progress. The yarns used range from fingering weight to super bulky, and are spun in all sorts of different ways. But it still feels very cohesive.

I like the square approach (and of course if you wanted to crochet granny squares, that would work perfectly too) because it’s modular, so you can decide halfway through that you don’t want a sweater, you want a bag--and then just sew the squares into a bag, instead. But it doesn’t need to be squares by any means--you could also make scrap yarn sweaters, hats, socks, scarves, etc., that are constructed normally.

The only thing to look out for is yarn weight--in some cases, you might want the weights to all be very similar. Socks, for instance, won’t do well if you have parts that are bulky weight and parts that are light fingering weight. You could hold yarns together to get similar weights if necessary, or just only add to the project when you’ve got another scrap skein of worsted weight or whatever. For squares you can use any weight of yarn if you want, but you should change your hook or needle size to get a fabric that’s a similar density, so your stitch count will change from square to square.

Big Projects: These can be difficult even for experienced spinners, because consistency is key to ending up with an even fabric. Not from armspan of yarn to armspan, but from skein to skein--if the weight changes, things can suddenly get much more complicated while you try to correct for the skeins that are too thick or too thin.

One way to try and mitigate that is to not ply anything until you’ve finished spinning all the singles--that is, if you need 10 skeins of 2 ply, spin 20 spindles worth, then go through and pair off your stored singles, thin with thick and average with average. It can definitely be more tedious to do it this way, but if you’re worried about consistency, it might be a good idea.

It also might not be necessary. Try to let your mind stretch back over the whole course of human history--as a species, we’ve been spinning yarns for pretty much all of it, and until very recently, what you spun was what clothed you. If the skeins you spun for your new cloak were all different weights, well... you probably either repurposed those skeins (IF you could, and that’s a pretty sketchy IF) or you shrugged, wore a lumpy cloak, and got on with life. Perfection isn’t everything, my friend. Either way, do what’s going to make you happy. For me, I’d be just fine with a lumpy cloak.

Out Of The Basics: A Few Further Pushes Into The World of Spinning

There’s many, many techniques out there, and an infinite variety of yarns to be spun. Some require tools, some don’t. Some are very advanced, and some quite simple. There are many other tools to spin on besides drop spindles. There’s also processes related to spinning--such as dyeing, fiber prepping, and wool washing--which can greatly enhance your spinning enjoyment and variety. I can’t teach them to you today, but I can certainly tell you about them so that you can look into them yourself !

Changing Up Your Fiber or Techniques to Get Different Effects

We touched on this earlier in the section about the number of plies--a 2 ply yarn will knit up into a bumpy, slightly irregular fabric, and a 3 or 4 ply will be very regular and neat. But that’s not the extent of what you can do to change your yarn up (without buying anything new). I’m going to throw some terms around now--you’ll need to google them, because this is already absurdly long.

For one thing, if you have roving, you can try splitting it lengthwise and fractal plying your yarn for a very beautiful self-striping but marled effect. You can also try spinning it from the fold on multicolored roving, which keeps the colors separate instead of muddied, which can happen otherwise.

With any fiber, you can always mix and match, or add pops of color ! If you’re spinning a bunch of gray rolags, for instance, you can occasionally detach the rolag, spin a tiny bit of blue roving, reattach the rolag, and go back to spinning. Depending on how you ply it, this could produce almost specks of blue or else slips and streaks.

Speaking of plying, the way you make a 2 ply can really change the colorway of the yarn if your fiber is a gradient or multicolored. Say you’ve got roving that’s a gradient from white to purple--if you do a plying bracelet, your yarn will be part barberpole, part gradient: a purple ply with a white ply at one end, and then gradually transition to the midpoint of lavender-pink in the middle, with both plies the same color. But if you plied it the other way, by wrapping your singles onto storage rocks and then plying from those, you’d get a yarn that’s got one pink ply and one white ply at one end, and one pink ply and purple ply at the other.

Chained 3 ply versus traditional 3 ply will make a huge difference as well. If your fiber has stripes, chain plying it will preserve them perfectly (as long as you’re careful to start a loop at the color change--or if you wanted it to fade in a little, you could start partway through a color change), whereas a traditional 3 ply will always marl them, no matter how careful you are about evenly splitting your fiber into 3 sections.

If you like really colorful and bright yarns, you might enjoy cabled 4 ply (where you ply two 2 plied yarns together). If your starting 2 plies are already colorful, you’ll get super colorful yarn with a cabled 4 ply--to me it always looks like dashed lines in different colors.

A laid 4 ply can also make some interesting color combinations, and is perhaps the ideal candidate for mixing random singles together, since it has 3 other plies each singles can hopefully be tempered by. And a yarn that has 3 plies of one color and 1 ply of another color can be interesting indeed !

It’s not just color that you makes an exciting new yarn, though--you can also try making boucle, or thread plying or autowrapping, or spinning beehives, spinning beads into your yarn, spinning thick and thin yarn... the possibilities are almost endless. I’d highly recommend giving “The Spinner’s Book of Yarn Designs” by Sarah Anderson a read if you can--she discusses all of these and many more, and shows how to do them. Other good books that’ll show you how to make lots of different kinds of yarn, or how to tailor your yarn to your needs, are: “Yarnitecture”, by Jillian Moreno, “Spin Art” by Jacey Boggs, and “Yarn Spinning With A Modern Twist”, by Vanessa Kroening. Your library may well have copies, and if not you could likely request they buy it.

You Don’t Have to Drop Your Spindles

...Because there’s other kinds of spindles ! And things that aren’t spindles, but on which you can also spin !

There are Turkish Spindles, which are functionally almost identical to drop spindles (and you can drop them, to be fair), but you wrap your yarn around two detachable interlocked arms that also function as the whorl. When you remove the arms and spindle shaft from the turtle (not cone) of singles, you can then 2 ply with it immediately using both ends. Turkish spindles are great if you love 2 ply and hate winding.

There are Supported Spindles, which come in many forms but are essentially fancy sticks with pointy tips that you spin in bowls. These have more winding than drop spindles because you spin in very short lengths at a time and wind onto a temporary cop that’s just below the tip (it’s much faster than if you wound all the way down to the cop near the bottom). However, you use them while sitting or even (with a bit of wrangling) laying down, and your arms stay in a comfortable, much more relaxed position while spinning. It also spins, as a default, finer yarn than your average drop spindle (I can achieve a very fine and consistent laceweight on any supported spindle, but have only managed that on my tiniest and lightest drop spindle). And they are very fast tools--with proficiency, they can be much faster than drop spindles. Supported spindles are great if you find drop spindles painful, if you have low energy, if you’re mobility impaired, or if you want to spin finer yarn.

There are Spinning Wheels, which come in many shapes and sizes but are the fastest way to make yarn by hand. There are a few objects which could fall under the umbrella of a spinning wheel (namely Walking Wheels, Charkah Wheels, and Electric Wheels) which do not have treadles, but the majority of spinning wheels are powered by foot treadles and can spin faster than you can spin a drop spindle. They also remove winding from your list of duties (for the most part), since the flyer will wrap your newly spun yarn onto the bobbin as you go. New spinning wheels can be prohibitively expensive, but you can also find used ones for ludicrously cheap on craigslist, at estate or garage sales, at antique shops, or other places where old items might be sold. (You can also often find them at affordable but not cheap prices at fiber festivals). Be sure to research the parts of a spinning wheel before you try to buy a used one from a non-spinner--there are many SWSO’s (Spinning Wheel Shaped Objects) out there that will fool you. Spinning wheels are great if you want to make larger amounts of yarn, or want to make yarn faster.

There are Electric Wheels, which are small machines that will add twist and wind the yarn onto the bobbin for you, so all you have to do is draft. New low end models are much cheaper than new spinning wheels, and they take up far less space. They also remove the element of treadling, so if you are intrigued by spinning wheels but have weak legs in any capacity, these can save you a lot of pain. I have a spinning wheel and can’t spin on it much anymore, because my knees and hips dislocate almost immediately. I switched to supported spinning primarily, but an electric wheel would be a good substitute as well. Electric wheels are great if you want to make more yarn faster, but can’t afford a spinning wheel or don’t have the space for them. They are also one of the more accessible tools for those with severe mobility impairments.

And there’s still more, although I can’t do a pitch for all of them xD. There’s Tahkli Spindles for spinning cotton, Navajo Spindles that are long thigh-spinning tools, Medieval Spindles that are easy to whittle replacements for if you break your spindle a lot, and even more beyond that. Many cultures have their own traditional spinning tool, each with their own techniques and strengths, and if drop spindles aren’t doing it for you but you still want to spin, I implore you to check out other kinds of spindles !

From Sheep To Sweater (Washing and Processing A Raw Fleece)

Most people learn to spin from roving (even if it might not be a very good beginner’s preparation), although there’s also rolags, batts, top (both commercial and hand combed), sliver, and cloud. But what if you could start with a raw fleece (unwashed, with vegetable matter and lanolin and who knows what else) and make things out of that ?

There’s some immediate advantages to starting with a raw fleece (even over a washed fleece). For one, raw fleeces tend to sell very cheap. This will depend on where you live, but the vast majority of fiber that I buy these days is raw fleece, and I’ve never spent less on fiber. At a fiber festival, I once paid $10 USD for 2 pounds (slightly under 1 kilo) of raw Shetland fleece. So--they’re cheap. As soon as someone starts putting work into a fleece, like washing it or dyeing it, the price immediately jumps.

Second, if you’re looking for the most bang for your buck, starting from a raw fleece is the way to go. You need to wash it, skirt it (take out the really terrible or gross bits), perhaps sort or grade it if it’s multicolored or there’s clear variation in fiber quality, dye it (if desired--I only dye my white fleeces, as I quite like brown and gray and black), process it into spinnable fiber, spin it, ply it, and then knit/crochet/nalbind/weave/do whatever else your heart desires with it. A single raw fleece can last me a month even if I work on it tirelessly, and I might have paid $20 USD--a little over an hour of wages for me.

It also brings you a lot closer to your work. I can’t say I felt very attached to my fiber when I worked exclusively with roving, but sorting through a pile of hand washed Southdown Babydoll locks while I comb them into top to spin into sock yarn on supported spindles that I whittled myself--I can tell you, I feel pretty damn connected to my work, to the ridiculous little sheep whose wool I have, to my socks, and to the wool itself. It adds a lot of depth, both to the experience, and to my understanding.

It’s also honestly pretty easy. To wash a fleece, you need a dedicated wool pot (as in, don’t cook in it again), a bit of dish soap, and some time. Put the fleece in--don’t crowd it, just work in batches if your pot can’t easily fit all of the fleece--add cold water and a squirt of dish soap, and let it cook on the stove for about 45 minutes, without a lid. Don’t let it boil--ideally it should be steaming but not quite simmering. You can use a dedicated wool spoon/tongs to gently and infrequently stir the wool. The water should get pretty gross. After 45 minutes, start the tap running (you need to rinse the wool in very hot water--if you let temperature shock happen, it could felt), drain the water, and rinse the fleece. Then repeat--filling up the pot with hot water now--until the water stops looking dirty at the end of the 45 minute cooking time. Rinse it one more time, and then let your wool dry, ideally on a clothesline but over a vent/spread out flat on a towel is fine too.

Yes, it really is that easy. If you’re worried about felting or otherwise ruining the entire fleece, you can always start by washing just a handful, so that way if you ruin it there’s not much waste. But I’ve washed at least a couple dozen fleeces that exact way, and I’ve never ruined one.

After washing and drying your fleece, you need to prepare it. I typically prepare enough to spin for a day at a time, but you could also do it all at once if that’s more your style. There’s many ways to prepare wool, and I’ll discuss most of them at least in brief, but we’ll start with teasing. This is where you take a lock in your hands, and tease it open. Let any VM (vegetable matter) fall out or pick it out yourself, and open the lock up to the point that you can no longer see any lock structure. It’s now spinnable, just like that ! This is a pretty slow method, but if you start out your raw fleece journey buying just a few ounces/50ish grams of fleece, it’s perfectly doable to tease it all open by hand.

If you have money to put into the endeavor, a humble pair of hand cards (70 TPI will card most wools), or you can kind of make do with two pet brushes like these (although at that point, spend $10 USD more and you have a pair of hand cards, so idk what the point of that is, unless you already have them) is a very good place to start. Load the fiber onto one card, card it until it’s uniform, roll it into a rolag, and it’s spinnable !

You also have hand combs, which are a lot more expensive than hand cards, but which can process very long fibers and can get out all the vm. Cards don’t remove a lot of vm, so combs is the way to go for super vm-y fleeces. They also produce hand combed top, which spins up into a very compact, strong, and abrasion resistant yarn--great for socks.

Past that are drum carders, which are machines in the way that spinning wheels are machines--manual, but they certainly automate the processing of fiber for you. These can be expensive indeed, but process fiber very quickly and are a great choice if you plan to sell the fiber, if you want to start with raw fleece but haven’t the dexterity to do it by hand (and there are electric drum carders as well--otherwise, you are turning a hand crank), or if you want to process high volumes of fiber because you just go through it that fast.

Honorable mentions include flick carding (both cheaper and slower than hand cards--you work with a couple locks at a time and open them up by flicking them with a tined brush), blending boards (these don’t process raw fiber, but they turn already processed fiber into batts--so you can blend many wools very easily for different textures or colors. These are like painting with wool--so fun !), and willowing (I haven’t tried this one yet, but you lay out your wool and repeatedly hit it with willow branches or other bendy sticks, which opens the fiber and also sends it flying all over the place. It looks very fun, and rather slow, and is also free as long as you can find a willow tree).

This website describes some of those methods (and one I didn’t get to) if you’d like to check it out.

Colors to Dye For

Wool takes dye very readily, and you probably come into contact with several natural dye materials every day--onion skins, avocado pit and peel, daffodils, coffee, black tea, thyme, even grass ! You don’t have to be working with fleece to dye it (although dyeing fleece gives you so much color variation and is very fun)--you can also dye roving very easily. Batts, rolags, and top less easily, although it’s possible with a lot of care.

For most natural dyes, you need to collect quite a lot of it, and then let it cook overnight on low heat. Boiling (sometimes even simmering) can kill the color, so you’ve got to be patient. Crock pots on low or medium are great for this. If you can cook it two days, all the better. Let it sit and cool for at least 12 hours, then strain it. (Tip: you can store natural dyes in jars in cool, dark places for at least a year without any ill effects--so you don’t need to use the dye immediately)

The majority of dyes need something called a mordant (I go into more detail about mordants in this post if you’re interested). There are many mordants, but some easy household ones are alum, baking soda (bicarb), copper (put a few bits of copper pipe in a jug of white wine vinegar, let sit for a few weeks at least before using), or iron (same as copper, but with rusty nails. Use a plastic jug !!! Metal will rust and glass can break). Most people mordant their wool by putting it in their dedicated wool pot with some water, adding the mordant, and letting it cook on low for an hour. Then drain the water and add the dye.

Natural dyes need to cook for a while to set--I usually let them cook overnight at least.

For batts, rolags, and top, you can do something called solar dyeing--carefully mordant your wool as usual, then place it in a jar with the dye, and put the dye outside in the sun. Over time (at least a week--often months, especially if you don’t live somewhere warm and sunny) the heat from the sun will warm the water and dye the wool. You could also try storing the jar somewhere you know will be warm, such as near the stove or fireplace.

You don’t have to use natural dyes either--there are also acid dyes, or food coloring, kool-aid (sugar-free), etc. I’m a lot less familiar with those, so I can’t go on at length. They can be a good choice if you don’t have the time for natural dyes, or if you want to get specific colors and not guess what your wool will turn out as. Look into them if you have any interest !

Dyeing your own wool is immensely satisfying, and can be a very cheap (or free, in the case of many natural dyes if you’ve collected or grown them yourself) way of obtaining more color, if you find that you keep ending up with a lot of white wool.

Endless Breeds of Sheep

There are many breeds of sheep on there (not endless, sorry--although there will always be new breeds being developed, so endless in a way !), and they all have different qualities, both in terms of the sheep themselves, and the wool they produce.

Do you want your wool to be very hard wearing ? Down breeds such as Southdown (one of my absolute favorites), Shropshire, or Dorset can be quite durable, and are resistant to felting. You could also go for stronger, coarser wools such as Jacob or Romney--coarser means stronger with wool, and softer tends to mean weaker.

Do you yearn for a softer wool ? Cormo is fantastically soft, as are Rambouillet, Debouillet, and Merino. Many lambswools (meaning the fleece from a lamb--the older a sheep gets, the coarser its wool tends to be) can be softer than their breed standard, so seeking out lambswools even from breeds like Jacob or Rya (both usually strong wools) can lead to soft fleeces.

Of course, there are more considerations than just soft and hard wearing, but there’s pretty much a breed for everything. If you’re interested, “The Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook” by Carol Ekarius and Deborah Robson is an incredible resource, and covers just about every breed under the sun (with pictures, samples, notes, recommendations, and interesting bits of history), as well as most non-sheep fiber producing animals as well ! Speaking of...

There’s Not Just Wool

There’s also many non-sheep fibers, and plant fibers too !

Animals with easily usable fiber include: alpaca, llama, angora rabbits, goats, camels, musk ox, and more ! Their properties are usually different from wool--all of the fibers from the animals above have little to no crimp in their fiber, meaning that they aren’t elastic like wool is. They’re also varying degrees of warm (cashmere--the undercoat fibers that come from many different breeds of goats--are extremely warm, but still not as warm as musk ox down), and some are unbelievably soft. If you can, I highly recommend getting a little cashmere, a little camel down, or whatever other exotic fiber strikes your fancy. They’re very fun to experiment with, and small amounts can easily be worked into projects to add warmth, drape, or softness.

We can’t forget about silk, either--produced mainly by certain species of silkworms, although most insects undergoing complete metamorphosis produce silk of varying quality as well. Silk is a very interested fiber to spin--but it can also be reeled instead of spun, which is how you can get extremely thin silk pieces without even needing to spin thread-weight yarn.

But in early human history, before we domesticated sheep and bred them to have better wool than they started out with, we spun things like inner tree bark, flax, nettle, and cotton. These all require very different techniques than wool, but most of them can be spun on the same tools (and all but cotton can be hand twisted into cordage instead, if that’s more up your alley). They are also inherently cooling--fabrics made from linen will keep you very cool indeed--so if you live somewhere hot where having wool objects is mostly pointless, don’t despair ! There’s still stuff for you to spin.

Connect With Others !

I’m about done with this monograph, but there’s a few last things I want to share.

First is the existence of Fiber Festivals--you may or may not have some in your area. They’re extremely fun, and you can meet many spinners there. They’re also usually a very cheap source of fiber, as prices are often a lot lower at festivals.

Second is the existence of Spinning Guilds--again, you may or may not have one locally, but if you do, you might want to join ! There are also spinning clubs and groups, which might be a little lower-key and more welcoming to beginners.

Then there’s TDF, or Tour De Fleece. You may have heard of the biking tournament called Tour de France which happens in July--well, every year a lot of us spinners do a tournament ourselves, but it’s generally not competitive (except on Ravelry--there are teams and points and everything). For the most part, participating in TDF just means setting a spinning goal for yourself from July 1st to July 23rd (the end of the race) and then trying to achieve it. For a lot of people, this means spinning every day. Some set goals like “get through this whole fleece I bought 10 years ago” or “spin a sweater’s worth of yarn” or “learn how to spin flax, finally” (that’s what I did last year). Or maybe it is just spinning every day--even if just for 20 minutes. On tumblr you can see other’s work and post your own under the tag #TourDeFleece2023, or #TDF2023 (there’s many variants as well)--we’d love to have you !

Lastly, there’s International Spin In Public Day ! To be honest, nobody can really agree on what day that is--allegedly, it’s the 3rd Saturday of September. (For me, it’s literally every day that I leave my house, but I digress). But I’ve also seen posters for October, for September 10th or earlier, and just generally lots of different dates. I’d say play it safe--if you see someone say it’s International Spin in Public Day, go spin in public just in case :D. The purpose of a day like this is to bring spinning back into public knowledge--let’s face it, most people in the western world have zero clue how yarn is made, and couldn’t differentiate a spindle from a spatula. This sucks ! Spinning is such a great activity--it can be meditative, calming, fun, exciting, or a background motion to other activities that allows you to actually pay attention (if you have ADHD). And I think a lot more people would spin, and would enjoy it, if only they were exposed to the idea. You certainly don’t have to act as Spinning’s public outreach officer, or anything like that... but when people ask what you’re doing, explaining it patiently and encouraging them to look into it does everyone a favor.

In Conclusion

I hope this has been helpful and not too confusing ! It’s really important to note that I’m just one guy--I don’t know everything, and I might not always have the best techniques. Looking for information on spinning from multiple sources is a good way to get a well-rounded understanding, and to correct common misconceptions that you might have already learned. Perhaps more importantly, there’s pretty much an infinite number of ways to do almost every single step I’ve described here, and if the way I showed you--or the video I linked to showed you--isn’t working, don’t despair ! There’s nothing wrong with you, you probably just need to do it a different way. I must have watched 3 dozen videos of people drop spindling before it finally clicked with me.

I hope I’ve opened up the world of spinning to you at least somewhat ! There are many things I didn’t touch on, and lots of stuff I wish I could talk more about, but at the end of the day I mostly wanted to 1) show you how to make yarn and 2) pique your curiosity about the whole rest of it. If you have questions, I’ll try to answer them (Purple, I will of course answer all your questions and also attempt to mind read your questions before you’ve even asked them so that I have a 10 million slide power point done by the time the question is out of your mouth), but check the comments and replies first ! Someone else might have answered it already.

Thanks for reading, and happy spinning !

Fig J: The author holding his old drop spindle, spinning at a doctor’s appointment. The spindle now belongs to the friend for which this monstrosity of a tutorial was written ! :D

#spinning #drop spindle #beginner spinning #tutorial #handspinning #handspun yarn #fiber arts #i truly have no idea how to tag this #its over 13k im so sorry #swords i did end up adding tipping to this blog bc of your recommendation thank you !#i cant seem to add tips to posts that i made after tipping was enabled tho. which is very annoying. so its just on all my posts for now #hopefully will fix that later #this did take about a week of writing ! so if anyone #(BESIDES PURPLE FOR SEVERAL OBVIOUS REASONS THIS WAS A GIFT FOR YOU <3)#wants to show some appreciation if it helped you at all #i would be very thankful as i am so goddamn broke lol

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batsplat · 1 month

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ok but what could be the motogp/casey stoner magical girl anime’s equivalent of rgu’s black rose arc……🤔

*cracks knuckles* okay admittedly I read this ask, had it jangle around in my brain for half a day and then read it back and realised I'd zeroed in on the 'casey stoner' side of the line and completely ignored the more general motogp prompt. since then I have had. some more thoughts. but they do come back to casey

so let's set out in proper scientific fashion and figure out what doing a black rose arc even MEANS. briefly summarising the arc, on the most literal level possible... it's the middle arc of the show, wherein characters proximal to the primary duellists get indoctrinated in a sham therapy session into fighting utena, a process symbolised by pinning black roses to their chests. she wins against all of them fairly comfortably in direct combat, managing to destroy the black rose and in doing so free the duellists. at the end of the arc, utena learns that the whole thing was orchestrated by mikage, a scholar frozen in time after burning down a lecture hall and killing the hundred boys within. he seeks to kill anthy, the rose bride, so that he can save his beloved mamiya by making him into the rose bride and achieving eternity. except his memories had been manipulated all along by the puppet masters of the whole show, anthy and akio, so that his memories of mamiya had been bastardised into what seems to be a version of anthy. mikage had been trapped in the school by false memories, has perhaps been dead all along, and had been used as a tool to bring utena closer to being able to achieve revolution. in the end, he too is discarded

which... okay, yeah, it's very hard to describe the show on a literal level, and I think in some ways the black rose arc is the one that's the most open to interpretation? icl it took me about three watches to really wrap my head around what on earth mikage's deal was supposed to be. which means you can also take the motogp crossover approach in several different ways... because of my own academic background, watching it the first time I kinda zeroed in on how the process by which the characters become black rose duellists is one of radicalisation/indoctrination into a cult. the process by which they are prepared to commit violence is built on humiliation, an experience where they want something and feel shame (or are made to feel shame) for wanting it. kanae is subjected to anthy's silently judgemental looks, keiko is made into a fool and an outcast by nanami, wakaba suffers a brutal rejection, and so on... it's not just that they have an enemy, somebody who treats them poorly - it's that a vulnerability is exposed that fundamentally threatens their self-esteem. it leaves them destabilised, unsure of themselves, with a fragile sense of self. when the characters go to seek guidance, they are quite literally being provided with a new sense of 'direction'. they are being guided towards finding purpose

the descending lift is a key part of the process, by forcing the characters to focus in on their negative emotions and let them consume them. the humiliation is strengthened, made more brutal - the voice instructs them to "go deeper" and bare more of their soul. they are expressing their vulnerability in front of a mirror that reflects their most twisted, painful desires back at them. subjected to the reflection of the negative emotions at the self... they are forced to make themselves weak in front of the voice, essentially debase themselves, and in doing so they strip away their own walls and barriers and mechanisms of self-defence. as the lift descends, so do they regress

the most obvious expression of this is the butterfly that becomes a cocoon (and then a leaf). utena is all about the process of becoming an adult, of achieving revolution as a metaphor for growing up, breaking the egg. but here, as an extension of anthy and akio's schemes, instead the characters are forced backwards in time. part of it is again this process of... well, ritually breaking down the characters, chipping away at their sense of self so that it can be reconstituted in a way that is useful to the order of the black rose. part of this is more generally about the show's themes of maturity and adulthood - the characters are being reduced, now governed only by their very worst impulses

it is at this lowest moment that mikage steps in to offer the characters their only solution. the only answer they have to somehow bring meaning back to their lives. all they have left to reclaim some kind of sense of self is to embrace mikage's vision of revolution. so you have a personal experience of humiliation, you have the character being guided towards a figure of authority who is supposedly able to help those in that kind of situation, you have a 'gradual' process stemming from externalised pressure to make the character focus only on their negative emotions, and eventually you have said figure of authority providing the character with the 'only' way out of the emotional turmoil and insecurity they are feeling. this route eventually leads to complete suppression of the self in the name of the cause and also... well, acts of violence. staircase model, my old friend! or if the staircase were a descending lift, I suppose

you may be wondering how I can possibly make this relevant to motogp and, well, *cracks knuckles again for good measure* let's see how this goes. I'm not going to make some big spiel about how becoming a rider (yes, even a vr46 one) is a comparable process of indoctrination or any of that. (there's some very broad comparisons, like how riders cannot choose to be assimilated into this strange and dangerous system but are instead sucked into it as children, following dreams that have been handed down to them by others... but I'm mostly gonna stay clear of that stuff.) what I'm more interested in is... hm, the emotional management aspect of sports, how delicate it is in what it requires of athletes. the eternal question of motivation, how you can bring yourself to put yourself out there and compete again and again - despite the eternal possibility of failure and, yes, humiliation. from here

'the challenge of managing vulnerability' is the key bit. on a very, very basic level, the process of growing up is about managing vulnerability, being able to manage your own emotions... there's a similarity between ohtori academy and the paddock in that they are both sheltered, closed off environments that send its young through unnatural, almost twisted approximations of growing up. their emotions are evoked by artificial scenarios, by competitions that aren't 'real' in the sense they aren't provoked by any naturally existing scarcity - but are instead elaborately designed shows designed to test its participants and, yes, reveal something of them. sports as a pure measure of human achievement is fundamentally hollow; it is only provided meaning by the ridiculously heightened emotions that are evoked by it. the characters transition into their new roles of duellists in a moment of vulnerability and it is only in this raw, unguarded state that they are able to fight

there's also another bit from a post I ended up not publishing in an exciting moment of self-awareness where I went, 'you know what, nobody cares about this', but it still exists in unedited form in my google doc. here (the post was about mozart + salieri, hence the references to music):

the idea here is basically that it's actually incredibly tricky to manage the exact right amount of self-awareness you should have as an athlete - and the emotions that come with it. you need to reveal yourself, to make yourself vulnerable, to be able to compete to your fullest extent. you need to debase yourself in front of a crowd, to accept the possibility of not just defeat but of humiliation, of the embarrassment of losing and how degrading that experience is. now, to stop yourself from actually going insane, everyone will need some kind of explanatory framework in their own head to process defeat. some of these narratives will by necessity rely on our good old friend delusion. young athletes cycle through victory upon victory and defeat upon defeat, often in ways seemingly inexplicable to themselves, which means their self confidence is fluctuating like a yo-yo on acid from generational levels of cockiness to the darkest self-loathing imaginable. some level of baseline self-belief, of thinking you will 'make it' despite all the odds being extremely not in your favour, is really kind of key to the process

the problem, of course, is that... so narrow is the emotional window that provides the ideal performance potential that it makes managing this window both crucial and horrifically difficult. maybe you can perform better when you're angry - or maybe you'll crash. or maybe you'll make a fatal error of judgement. you need hubris, but not too much. calm without passivity or complacency. joy might be the enemy of concentration. shame can motivate or it can make you retreat. your rival can spur you to action or paralyse you in your own inadequacy. and at the core, again and again, lies the concept of vulnerability. the moment you step into the arena, it is with the knowledge that it is possible for you to lose. competition is a moment of exposure, of revelation, of truth. this day may end in the gravel trap. you may humiliate yourself. you do it anyway - and to do so you need purpose, and to make sense of the defeats you need more purpose

plugging the autobiography passage again:

such a good passage, isn't it? to bring it back to the black rose arc... 'analogy' in the loosest of senses - you have moments of 'truth' in different forms. you have the truth found at the bottom of the lift, where the characters reveal their most painful insecurities - but it's fundamentally not a very balanced truth, is it, focused on the purely negative and self-loathing. they don't go out to duel in the name of passion, they are not duellists in the same way juri with her love for fencing is - which you can see from how they need to essentially steal the style of 'their' duellist to fight utena. there's no positive affect there. it's a power gained through vulnerability, yes, but one that is fundamentally self-destructive and exists in an ultimately fragile state of crisis. utena can free the duellists from their roles simply by cutting the rose; the student council members don't stop being duellists just because their roses are cut because this is something they care about for themselves. you can't be completely reliant on others to provide you with purpose in sports - some of it is going to have to come from some internal urge to compete, to win. no parental determination, desire, at times abuse can create an athlete out of nothing if their child is fundamentally unwilling (as ever, agassi's autobiography is very interesting about this). so while end of the world, in all the malevolence and abuse, may proffer a path towards meaning, towards revolution, to the student council members - it would be entirely useless if they did not still have 'hope in their hearts'. desire. the will to win. utena is able to defeat the black rose duellists with relative ease... she might not have entirely selfless motives, but her desire to protect anthy still stands up as being far more robust than a mere desire to lash out in response to humiliation. she wants to be anthy's prince, she wants to live up to this role - and in the end it means she will always be able to dig deeper than the black rose duellists

there's a few other ways we can torture this metaphor, while we're at it. "deeper, go deeper" is a phrase that to me is... very sports-coded, I talked about it in the mind games post I linked - going to the 'dark places' within yourself to win. to find release through the suffering, some form of revelation, reaching some kind of imaginary 'zone', to be able to perform at the highest level. only then can you achieve revolution... eternity, if you will. it's the performances where athletes dig the deepest that immortalise them, after all. but then, for all this talk of balance and some need for positive affect, of course there is a lot of negativity that feeds into the motivational process. the motogp twitter account posted a video today a few days ago by the time I actually post this... of our dear two time defending champion talking about how he primarily uses criticism to motivate himself

there's something ever so slightly comical about pecco talking about how, sure, he'd like to live by his 'go free' phrase and the associated ethos of just enjoying himself out there... but actually, he doesn't motivate himself through all that fun stuff at all. instead, he makes use of *checks notes*

reading something bad about himself

being told something bad about himself

making mistakes

when someone attempts to hit him in the mental side

well, that's nice! welcome back, casey stoner

am I saying pecco is going down the black rose arc lift to motivate himself? well, maybe I am. who's to say. a little bit!

you're getting yourself into the ideal performance window by basically... deliberately exposing yourself to criticisms, to degradation of the self, to the suffering of embarrassment and humiliation, dwelling on your mistakes, on those who do not believe you are adequate (or 'special', as in the black rose arc)... and, well, obviously I'm not saying the lift descent is a particularly healthy process... I'm admittedly a bit wary of the welfare implications of the sports equivalent. I actually had a long conversation last week before last about what essentially amounts to forms of digital self harm, this phenomenon of stars seeking out their 'haters', both within sports and other public fields... and, idk. there's 'being motivated by your rival being a dick about you' normal levels of spite and 'constantly subjecting yourself to what your cruellest detractors think of you' levels that seem distinctly unhealthy to me. without more context, you'd kinda hope pecco's sticking closer to the former type than the latter. casey also was a very spite-motivated athlete, perhaps somewhat in contrary to his assertion that he never got obsessed with rivals and didn't care who he beat. you see it with his whole 'ooh beating a spaniard at their home circuit' schtick, you see it with his 'yamaha rejected me so I'll show them' thing, quite frankly even his 'ah well mind games actually backfire because they motivate the other party more!!' line. he was constantly trying to prove a point to someone.... but was also extremely prone to self-criticism, to putting himself down, to being so perfectionist that it tipped over to being terrified of failing and crucifying himself for any mistakes. some of these things will have contributed to making him as good as he was - the same traits that tortured him also were what drove him to seeking perfection. sometimes, these roles of 'duellist' and 'athlete' may demand a fundamentally unhealthy emotional balance to excel at them

there's also something in how.... hm, mikage wanting to kill the rose bride so he can control eternity. the concept of 'eternity' is also big in sports, both in wanting to secure a legacy and wishing to preserve an un-preservable youth. inevitably, you will be replaced, they will move on from you, you cannot compete forever... mikage is frozen in time - and more than that, time is distorted in the ohtori academy. only a few like mikki even appear to notice it, constantly measuring it with his stopwatch as it continues to fluctuate around him. the uncertain nature of time is impossible to separate from how insular the academy is, from how it is cut off from the outside world, from how all point of reference is lost. sports does a similar thing in many ways, with the insularity heightening the stakes of this conflict, the occupants of that space living to different rhythms than the rest of the world.... the cycles of life and death, how rushed everything is, a youth that has to be captured and bottled before it slips out of your grasp, the calendar of races, of a travelling circus that touches the places it visits without belonging to it... valentino stretched out his career, even beyond a time when he was no longer competitive, due to his love for racing, his passion for it - a state of arrested youth, how he's been given the moniker of peter pan to go along with his own little band of lost boys. right at the opposite end lies casey, who achieved the truest 'revolution' early by leaving the cycle entirely, choosing to forsake this world that had constituted all that was of meaning to him - rebuking those who said he was wasting years of his prime, of the precious youth he still had one hand on, by stepping away. even though casey too had been striving for something unachievable.... the key thing about the 'revolution' is that it is something false, a mirage like the castle hanging over the arena, an ideal to be fought for without ever being attained. for casey, it was a quest for perfection that tormented him - so impossible is it for athletes to accept their own fallibility, their flaws. it can never be reached, because it is not an end point in and of itself. there is no definitive revolution that can be arrived at, no place of satisfaction, no easy way in which the power to revolutionise the world is granted to the duellists. all that remains is the process of working towards that revolution - that, in the end, is the only thing truly eternal

so, what does that process look like? you prepare yourself for the duel, you motivate yourself - either through positive or negative affect. athletes all lust after victory or fear defeat or both. utena ascends the staircase while the black rose duellists descend with the lift. for her, this also functions as a process of preparation, a repetitive yet effective way of bringing herself into the right mindset for the battle ahead and definitely not a way of saving animation costs

to me, it's key that those are stairs, and that there's a silly number of them. the black rose duellists are prepared swiftly, easily, with little effort from their part beyond the own horror of their emotions. they are not trained duellists and merely temporarily assume the mantle. utena has to work to even get to the arena - she has to put in an unreasonable amount of work, if anything. the demands to even be allowed to fight, to compete, are beyond what could be expected of anyone - and yet she willingly puts herself through it, because she wishes to fulfil an ideal she has been taught. the great athlete, the legend, the prince... it might work, she obviously does become an excellent duellist, for at least some of the time, she does manage to protect anthy.... but it's still one of the absurdities the academy is imposing on her, breaking her down as she no longer questions the surrealism of he world around her. she climbs the stairs because that is her role - and she readies herself for the battle she has been assigned

eventually, utena is allowed to both ascend and descend using a lift. now, listen, if you really want to get left field with this, you COULD say that her being allowed to ascend the lift rather than climb the stairs is... her no longer needing quite such an intricate method to emotionally prepare herself for the duel. she's integrated into the system now! she's an experienced duellist! she can get herself hyped for battle in a lift! but it's also a privilege she is being granted by the powers that be within the academy, which reserve the right to bestow meaning onto her, to single-handedly decide how worthy she is. and then, in the penultimate episode, the lift returns as akio attempts to break down utena. now utena is the subject, the patient, the one to be indoctrinated. she is invited to see herself as the princess akio wants her to be. she ends up re-embracing the ideal of prince (temporarily until anthy stabs her)... because that's what her power comes from. she'd never be able to find strength in the process of extreme self-degradation and exposing of one's own insecurities embodied by the descending lift. she needs to fight for positive reasons! some people are just like that, apparently

anyway, my pitch for how you'd black rose arc a specific period of casey's career... I reckon it's 2006, his rookie season in motogp at lcr honda. a seat that he'd had to scramble for, rejected by yamaha and not exactly high on options. he'd just finished second in 250cc to dani (if on inferior machinery) and was like.... well, he was definitely highly rated in the paddock, but perhaps didn't have the reputation of being particularly easy to work with. it's this version of casey:

as ever, casey was fast pretty much from the get-go. he had a very strong debut in jerez, exploiting a gap at the first corner after toni elias barrelled into valentino and finishing sixth. at the second race, after having been severely ill the week before, he rocked up like fifteen minutes before practise due to flight delays and ended up popping his bike on pole. that's also the race in which he had his very first battle with valentino, who came up to him to do the grabby hands thing on the cooldown lap. at the third race, casey came painfully close to winning - but scored his first podium of his premier class career

(side note, there is something amusing to how casey was yapping about valentino's disgusting yellow tainting the ducati when he's draping that australian flag of his absolutely everywhere he can, even in his rookie season. has someone maybe spent a little long away from home and feels the need to strengthen his own sense of self by plastering that thing on every available surface?)

anyhow - after that third race, casey's season went downhill. he crashed frequently enough to bag him the nickname of 'rolling stoner'

Like I had done my whole life I kept pushing and, of course, I kept crashing and I got slammed for it in the paddock and in the press, earning myself the nickname 'Rolling Stoner', which really bugged me. The pressure began to build as people questioned my talent and Ramon started to suggest that I was crashing because I wasn't physically fit enough. I knew this couldn't be the only solution, but l couldn't work out why I kept crashing. As a rookie I wasn't to know any better but people around me with experience should have helped me to understand the tyre issue. I would come in after a race saying, 'I didn't do anything wrong, I didn't make a mistake. I would know if I had.' But they would say, 'Well, you must have done because you crashed.' All the blame went to me and with everybody telling me it was my fault, I started to believe it. Ramon is a very good crew chief, extremely skilled at setting up a motorcycle, but I wish he'd listened to me a little more.

humiliation!! embarrassment!! others seeding uncertainty in him... being at the mercy of figures of authority who are giving him false guidance, but who he has to blindly follow. feeling unheard, beginning to believe what everyone says about him

he also had just a little bit of a temper back then, perhaps not completely familiar with the working process of top teams. but the crashes were not entirely his fault - they were (according to him) down to michelin seeing his potential but also exploiting his lack of status in the sport to essentially use him as a guinea pig for their new tyres. back then, this was how tyre suppliers handled things, and the whole thing was laughably uneven and unfair. whereas some riders like valentino were so successful and so influential they could generally lay claim to the best tyres (apparently with the exception of the actual title decider), others were at the mercy of the whims of michelin

Michelin had started to realise that I could do the lap times, especially on used rubber, so they started using me as a guinea pig. They would put me on a certain set of tyres for free practice and I would be happy as anything, right on the pace. Then on race day they'd say, 'You can't use that tyre.' They'd insist on us using a different tyre and then we'd find out on the grid that Dani or Nicky or somebody else was on the tyre I was planning to race on. Contractually we were obliged to use whatever tyre they decided on. [...] I kept pushing because I trusted them but there was some massive crashes which I thought were caused by the tyre combinations I was given at the last minute. [...] I started feeling like a crash test dummy and as the season progressed the situation got worse, to the point where I'd get angry and go off. I got a reputation as a spoilt brat. I am not making excuses but I was frustrated. Dad would come over to Europe to try to settle things down but the fact was I felt the tyres were causing me to crash. My confidence also took a hit and it took me back to the doubts I had in my first season of Grand Prix in 2002. I started to question myself a lot. Was it me or the bike? After a while I couldn't be sure. It was my debut season in MotoGP and I really didn't know what I was capable of. I'd proved I was competitive but the race results weren't showing what I could do. It started to mess with my head and unfortunately it seemed that my crew chief Ramon Forcada didn't have a lot of faith in what I was capable of either.

not only was this harmful for casey's reputation - it was also terrible for his confidence. as the autobiography passages describe, he wasn't getting good guidance about how to make the tyres work for him and inevitably the frequent missteps worked to erode his self-belief. after all, how could he know whether it was his fault or the fault of the bike? he told the team and the press these weren't his mistakes, but he wasn't believed... the paddock rejecting that he was to be taken seriously, enforcing a regression from the new 'adulthood' he had been granted by way of entering the premier class, but was illusory... which is where we get to the black rose element. it's repeated instances of humiliation - because there is something inherently humiliating to crashing. getting a nickname that makes it the thing people most closely associate with him. sinking into his own negative emotions, lashing out in anger at his own team, feeling the sting of embarrassment as well as frustration and self-doubt... and then, towards the end of the season, once again yamaha first seems to offer him a deal before changing its mind. another pattern he can't seem to break. casey has had plenty of self-belief in the past, not just dreaming of a title but believing he was capable of it - to the extent that he attempted to get to the premier class as quickly as possible, because he believed those were the titles that really counted. that's what he's here for... but what if it was all delusion all along, finally meeting reality?

which, yeah - it's those elements that make it very black rose-y to me. it's almost like... a touch of infantilisation, of refusing to take him at his word... he trusts these more experienced adults - in the same autobiography section, he talks about learning not to trust people just because they had a lot of experience. constantly choosing or being forced to listen to these guys who aren't giving him good advice, who don't have his best interests at heart, who don't have faith in him... and it chips away at him, it makes him angry and frustrated and will inevitably have contributed to some of the turmoil of his rookie season. he's being returned to the 2002 version of himself, a newbie in grand prix racing who didn't know what he was doing - and he doesn't know if he has a future in the sport. he wants to believe in himself, but maybe he can't. and it's just... creating this foundation of negative emotion that he would continue to use for the rest of his career to draw motivation from. the insults, the criticisms, the doubters, the haters... yamaha once again closing their doors before opening it a year later to some other young rider whose name escapes me. humiliation turned into a source of motivation. and once the process is complete, he emerges as the primary challenger of the champion (yes, yes, not literally, but vibes-wise obviously still THE big name at the time) in the following season

in the end, ducati gave him the call - he wasn't the first option, but he'd do. utena functions partly as a deconstruction of the type of story in which the ordinary wakaba would be the protagonist (ordinary girl romance protagonist surrounded by larger than life characters)... and the wakaba-centric episodes have akio posit that there are fundamentally 'special' people in the world and all those who can only hope to be special for brief, rare moments. in the meta-narrative of a show like utena, of course that is true, where some people have added significance by dint of being main characters in a story. in sports, too, there may be an unfortunate truth to it - an inevitability to the hand each athlete has been dealt. even if casey was publicly flayed and humiliated and figuratively descended the lift, like utena he was fundamentally still one of those 'special' people, whose natural talent meant none of his confidence was unearned. at ducati, he swiftly showed how he had been judged far too soon by the paddock. unlike the black rose duellists, he successfully challenges the champion. unlike the black rose duellists, he could never have been swiftly stripped of his status as duellist - even if there might be the occasional princess who attempts to trip him up and torment him. still, the bedrock of his determination in 2007, the steel that led him to a title, was ultimately established the year before. he was going to prove yamaha wrong for hanging him out to dry; he was going to prove the paddock wrong for ever doubting him. yes, the passion for winning is undeniable - but so is the spite. in seeking to achieve perfection, he found his motivation for the fight in his own way. and eventually, he would be granted the power to humiliate others... before eventually breaking free of this small world entirely

#something funny about how valentino accidentally raised a mini casey #neurotic spite-riddled wary of drama introvert..... where did it all go wrong. how did this happen #anyway don't you have to climb the stairs or descend with the lift every time you compete... does this even make sense #not to shock anyone here but I was always a descending lift kinda player. wanted spectators to be on the opponent's side. annoying child #//#brr brr #spec tag #batsplat responds #heretic tag #if a tumblr post can have a troubled publishing history this one does #i wrote it mostly on my commute but was like. super sleep deprived. so let it lie for a couple of days. scheduled it as per #and then realised?? it hadn't posted?? and it was just GONE. and like an idiot I hadn't backed it up. icl I was ready to end it #so I'd made a few bullet points from memory but was extremely not feeling it... this has happened to me before which makes it even dumber #but THEN I figured out the post still existed in the mass post editor drafts section. like a lil ghost. which?? what help is that #I tried a fix I'd read about by adding and removing tags. nothing. if you follow the link to the post obviously there's nothing there #BUT you get the number of the post. and if you combine that with the url you'd use to edit a post... presto there it was #ready to be backed up and scheduled anew. anyway if anyone has THAT particular problem. hopefully that should fix it #quite possibly the dumbest spiral I ever had over breakfast cereals #anyway i will make a tag for this family of posts at some point. i do enjoy turning them over in my head

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