Spinning yarn is like perpetual Marmite

Oh, how I love to spin! It is a calming past-time, the end product of which is something you can use to make many more things with. It's a double whammy of hand crafted loveliness!

Never mind the occasional frustrations where the fleece slips through my fingers and I have to fiddle bits of yarn back through the orifice, or when my concentration leaves me and an extra thick slug of rovings pop onto the bobbin. I only get momentarily angry when the two yarns I'm plying ply themselves together in a horrendous knotty mess and I spend precious minutes separating them, all the while trying to figure out how I will keep them apart from each other until I want them to meet.  

A recent hand spun yarn of mine, made with rovings from Three Violet Buttons

And then there is always the awkward rarebreed fleece which requires a different tension, and so the start of the bobbin becomes a mangled mess, swinging between overtight twiddly bits to thick, low twist areas that will undoubtedly unravel as you carefully wind the yarn into a skein. 

There are the bits of fleece that will just. Not. Twist. Together; so in a fit of rage you TIE them together. At times it's like trying to make two children share a birthday party - YOU WILL ENJOY IT, YOU WILL PLAY TOGETHER, AND EVERYONE WILL HAVE A GOOD TIME. 

---

At times, it would be easier to lob the spinning wheel out of the first floor window whilst cackling like a maniac. It would be easier, MUCH easier, to buy machine spun yarn.
 
It would be so nice to just send that fleece off to the mill, where they will wash it, card it and spin it for you; as oppose to me toiling in the bath tub, wrestling a thoroughly soaked fleece with my trousers rolled up my legs - not that it helps to keep them dry, I still end up covered in 'eau da brebis. Then picking bits of bramble, thistle and gorse out of the fleece, and putting it through the drum carder, which always takes FOREVER. I haven't even got to spin it at this point.  

Some of my first hand spun yarn, spun on my first spinning wheel

---

Unicorn Hair (actually Blue Faced Leicester with some colourful acrylic)

The spinning wheel in my house occasionally ends up neglected - longing for work, with drive band sagging and flyer stationary. I take to crocheting or knitting for a while, which helps, and then at some point I'll come across a skein of yarn that I MADE. Then I remember. 

I couldn't have possibly made my learning experience more difficult for myself. I bought a rickety old spinning wheel from Hemswell Antiques Centre, with an orifice the size of a gnat's bum, and one leg longer than the other two. I bought raw fleece from eBay. I watched a few videos on Youtube. Then I started spinning. 

---

The whole message behind this post is not purely about spinning. Nowadays it is very easy to get too self critical, and look at the small things that don't necessarily add up to the bigger picture. I am an insane perfectionist. More often than not, I will look at the work I have done and nitpick. It's not always a bad trait, as long as you learn from your past work. 

You see, the things I forget about my spinning experience are this - I have had no input from anyone else on spinning technique. I have not been to classes. I still had to go on Google and look up spinning wheel anatomy to write this blog, so that I was actually using terminology as oppose to "that spinny bit with hooks that makes the yarn go round". I feel somewhat of an ignoramus to the finer points of hand spinning yarn. I am yet to host a spinning class because I don't feel I know enough. 

And yet, granted there have been other people who have worked hard to help produce these yarns - there is a whole huge line of steps between the fleece still being attached to the sheep and it ending up as a yarn - but the fact is I made these. Every single one. Not only that, but every skein I spin gets a bit of love put into it - unless spinning machines are becoming sentient, that's something you'll not get from your average ball of yarn. Sure, the yarns I made in the beginning were a bit rough, but it's fair to say I've got the hang of spinning. 

A recent skein using Three Violet Buttons hand dyed rovings

Norwegian sheep fleece. Carded, spun and dyed by me!

---

Thought of the day: Focus less on what you can't yet achieve, more on what you've accomplished already, and what you can learn