Practice, practice, practice. My spinning wheel has been idle since Christmas, possibly even Thanksgiving. Monday I decided to try again. So I got a fresh bobbin, a head of steam, some pin-drafted roving, and started anew. Annnnnnnnnnnd, let's just say it's abundantly clear I'm a newbie spinner. Slub city. What's pictured is about 3 yards of slubby, uneven beginner yarn. It holds together, so technically it qualifies as yarn, but I'm not pushing it.
Notes on technique (such as it is). I don't have any technique to speak of, I'm just trying to capture what I'm doing at the early stages of learning to spin. I think I'm doing a (short) backwards draw because that makes the most tactile sense to me. What I mean by tactile sense is, when I'm sitting in front of the wheel trying to coordinate my feet, my hands, and the fiber, it makes the most sense to me to draft back with my left hand and pinch the twist with my right. My left (non-dominant) hand is the fiber hand and I'm pulling it away from the orifice. My right hand controls (or not) the twist. At this point I don't smooth my yarn as it feeds onto the bobbin.
I'm having some difficulty putting it all together. Monday, I had to play with the Scotch tension quite a bit to even get the "yarn" through the orfice and onto the bobbin. Tuesday I think I settled the uptake/tension issue but I had trouble drafting quickly and/or consistently enough to make actual yarn. I made a pile of bad breaks where the yarn snapped because it was so overspun or drifted apart because there was so little twist.
Frustrations. My biggest frustration is my own impatience. I want to be good already! The reality is I'm not yet able to create the yarn I envision. And I feel like I'm competing with another sense memory, the knitting fingers. My knitting fingers really prefer to knit/manipulate a sport weight to DK weight yarn. My knitting fingers are interfering with my spinny hands right now. It's getting on my nerves a little bit. But it comes back full circle to practice, practice, practice.
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