#spinning fiber

[allonsybadwolf]

Here are the results from my week of dyeing!! I shared the last two photos already but I wanted to post them all as a group. The first four (plus a couple more) are available in my shop right now ✨ and if you buy fiber from me PLEASE tag me in any photo posts of your finished yarn once (if) you spin it, I need to see it 👀

[moonymoon90]

Ok, let's start this spinning year!

From the World of wool advent calendar 2022, mistletoe & Wine! Double plied, around 335 Mt long, 29 wpi yarn 🤩

[felina5]

I have not been motivated to spin for a few weeks. But yesterday the motivation came back full force, so know I have a new project on the e-spinner, and 2 projects ready to ply on the wheel.

Here is the progress on the new spin so far:

[watcherofthevoide]

im gonna try to do tour de fleece this year, even though i’ll also be spending the month recovering from top surgery (yaaay)

but i suppose spinning is something to do, and i don’t have to lift my arms much…

still probably wont spin for most of the first week but that just means i should start early to make up for it!

i am very glad my pocket wheel is 6 pounds, and therefore under the ten pound weight limit i’ll have after surgery

here is a picture of my beautiful cherry baby for your viewing pleasure

[avaylee]

Inspired (and jealous) of the current haul that @trashpandacraft acquired, I asked the spouse to make a thing. There was some fancy scrap wood around and some boredom, and somehow this showed up in my hands three hours after asking.

It has feet on it! It can be taken apart! And comfortably holds three jumbo bobbins!!

Thrilled is an understatement.

Not a TdF post, but wanted to share.

[guardevoir]

Fiber arts update!

First of all, Friend(tm) has been successfully convinced to start spinning! It was fascinating seeing her go from "how do I make the fiber go? >:/" to spinning while walking in two days flat. With a wooden whisk beater that has a hook drilled into the top, no less, lol - my first DIY spindle. I did tell her to get something that spins for longer than five goddamn seconds eventually, but it works for now.

Then, my own progress:

Coburg Fox on the drop spindle, Merino on the supported one. Mostly just killing time until it's Tour De Fleece time. Haven't done much wheel spinning over the last few days because with my friend sitting next to me too, things would have gotten a little cramped.

Then, Sparkle Merino: There's three singles now! Working on the last one right now.

Also acquired my first hand-painted tops:

I have decided to shelve the Queer Flag Yarn idea for a bit and do these for Tour de Fleece first - Question is, how.

I'm either gonna spin the left one straight through, or as a fractal 2-ply: I love the way fractal yarn looks, but I prefer the look of gradients when actually in a project, so I'm not sure yet. The right one could either be spun straight through too, or I could ply it with some Zwartbles, which would stretch the 100g of fiber a bit further, but then again I could just spin plain Zwartbles yarn to go with it...

As per usual, I'd love some input!

I might set up some polls for this later actually; I'm limited to one poll per post, so I'm not gonna do it in here, but I haven't worked with colors that much yet so I'm still a bit "???" and grateful for any hints and pointers.

[mappsiemakesthings]

I carded more of the felty top into fluffy clouds (wondering if that would actually work better with wool combs and then started researching and such and i really wanna try wool combs now and i want to find a way how to make some. Wood, long nails, sanding paper, glue... the ingredients are pretty easy to get, but how to properly combine them with next to no skill and experience in wood working?).

Anyway, I won't get to spin these up today, but maybe during the next few days..

[janerhoadesart]

I got some wool roving for Christmas and immediately started spinning some yarn with it!

I still have about 10 oz left so there’s more to come. But look at how pretty this yarn is 💕

[things-from-strings]

finished spinning that xmas fiber. i'm not used to this recycled silk stuff, so it was a bit of an adjustment from "smooth & even" type wool. fun tho! so textured & full of color! really looking forward to seeing it done

[saja-star]

I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

[allonsybadwolf]

I've been IN the dye pots y'all. New braids dropping in my shop very soon. I have so much wool to spin right now. It's literally all over the house. We've way over capacity. I need to finish the lace weight spin on my EEW and my spindle spin and then maybe I'll do a poll on what to spin next, because I am currently SPOILED for choice. and. famously bad at choosing 😂

[moonymoon90]

First attempt at neat wrapping on my spindle, a bit slower process, but I like the result 😍

[piment10]

I'll try and document my expectations on milkweed fibers!

[watcherofthevoide]

[avaylee]

My Tour de Fleece 2023 goal is simply to do something fiber related every day (minus days I'm traveling this month).

I'm finishing up these alpaca, silk, firestar rolags tonight or tomorrow. Should be ready to ply by Monday. Once that's finished, probably back to the loom with some basic cotton threads to learn a thing or two.

Or... I have so much fiber. Perhaps something new on the wheel? TBD. But... planning a daily tag on TdF every day of something.

My first TdF. Woo!

[guardevoir]

Next round of "help me decide what to spin for the Tour de Fleece because the most interesting thing I've ever spun was some blended combed top and idk shit about colors":

I'm tempted to make this my drop spindle project! I will probably regret this severely! I do know that Coburg Fox is really good drop spindle material though, so if I do spin a larger project on there I might as well, right?

ANYWAY. Polls.