ᚗit's all just spiralsᚗ

trans is sacred 》 rowan (he/him) 》 Oghamist 》devotee of Manannán mac Lir 》 revivalist gaelpol animist 》 animator & illustrator 》 decolonize ⠀ ⠀⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ paganism & LAND BACK!!! ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ tá trasinscneach naofa 》 ruadhán (sé/é) 》 Oghamaí 》 móidín Manannán mac Lír 》 ildiachas gaelach athbheochanóir anamach 》 beochantóir ┐ maisitheoir 》 págánacht a dhíchoilíniú ┐TALAMH AR AIS!!!

[caraecethrae]

would you join a Gaelic/Celtic art collective?

We are officially in the new Gaelic Revival, and I am here for it!! Lets keep the momentum going by connecting, sharing, and collaborating. I want us to look to the future in digitalising existing gaelic and celtic artistic styles, be that visual art, textiles, music, dance, etc. I truly believe that innovation can only be done through collaboration. We are only a few members strong so far, and welcoming artists of any flavor or pursuit, as long as you are dedicated to making sacred art in celebration of Gaelic and Celtic lands, culture, and tradition.

If this is interesting to you in the slightest, please dm me!

ᚅᚂᚉᚊᚇᚈᚔᚐ

Ogham UPG Masterpost

send an ask if you'd like a free Ogham reading

ᚅᚂᚉᚊᚇᚈᚔᚐ

𓆝𓆜۝𓆟𓆞

my art tag

I also take commissions, dm me for further details :)

𓆝𓆜۝𓆟𓆞

[rosieandthemoon]

Kilkee Cliffs in Ireland

[mori-mystic]

Something I want to draw attention to in practicing any form of spirituality is to not let yourself become unhealthily obsessed with it. You don't have to look at everything as a sign from the divine or consult tarot for every single decision you make. It's important that you stay grounded and sometimes that means stepping out of a spiritual perspective, living life in the moment and following simply what your heart wants.

[caraecethrae]

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

and hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

—William Butler Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus".

[riseupriseupandcomealong]

hi more ulster cycle art based on this passage: “From the Monday after the feast of Samain at summer’s end to the Wednesday after the feast of Imbolc at spring’s beginning, Cúchulainn never slept — unless against his spear for an instant after the middle of the day, with head on fist and fist on spear and the spear against his knee” - táin bó cúailnge tr. thomas kinsella

[kosmogrl]

[finnlongman]

Hey! I would have loved to properly study Irish mythology at uni; but unfortunately a choice had to be made and I picked neuroscience instead. How do you think I could start educating myself more about it on my own? (Like which texts in which translations (I’m a massive Ferdia fan so anything with him in it I love) and maybe which websites tend to have accessible articles on the subject?) Sorry for the trouble, and if you answer this thank you so much 🫶

Well, as someone with assorted poorly understood headache and nerve pain disorders, it is probably good to have more neuroscientists in the world so that they can research them, but a loss for Celtic Studies!

One of the challenges of independent research into medieval Irish literature is how much of the material is still not available online: a lot is published in academic journals or books, and a lot of those journals and books are print-only and found in a small handful of academic libraries.

I have a Bookshop.org list of non-academic volumes, by which I mean books available at non-academic prices, for getting into medieval Irish and Welsh literature. This is aimed at general readership; it includes Kinsella and Carson's translations of the Táin, and Gantz' collection of Ulster and Mythological Tales. I wouldn't recommend using these for academic work, but they are a solid enough place to start, as long as you ignore everything Gantz says in the introductions to each story 😅

If there is one book on this list that I would highlight, it's Ireland's Immortals by Mark Williams, because I think this is a really good introduction to the "mythological" side of the Irish material, and the difficulties and dangers of looking for pagan gods in medieval literature written by Christian authors. But it also -- and this is what I think is a real strength -- looks at the afterlives of these texts in the modern period and looks at how various ideas (such as Óengus as a "god of love") developed, which helps with filling the gap between the medieval material outlined in the first half and the pop culture understandings that often brings people to the material in the first place! Mark is honestly more mythological in his readings than I am; I'm chronically unmythological, I read all of it almost entirely as literature, partly because I mostly work on late material. So he's not quite the unspiritual and unromantic cynic that I am; nobody who's seen his office could call him that. But I think it strikes a good balance and is a very useful starting point.

Fer Diad isn't really in much outside of Táin Bó Cúailnge and Oileamhain/Foghlaim Con Culainn, and we're still waiting for an actually decent text and translation of the latter. (Ruairí... Ruairí where is it. You promised me this several years ago. Ruairí you've been working on this for twenty years.) The Táin has various translations: the academic standard would be Cecile O'Rahilly's translations of the first recension and the Book of Leinster version, which are available to read for free on CELT, the Corpus of Electronic Texts. The only translation we have of FCC is the Whitley Stokes one from 1908.

CELT is going to be your friend for finding translations. Much of what is on there is old and dated in style, but in the vast majority of cases, those texts do not have a newer translation, so that's what we've got. To find them go to "Languages" and then "Translated Texts". The website has looked exactly the same since 2003, but if it ain't broke, why fix it.

The Irish Texts Society are one of the main publishers of texts and translations (Irish on the left, English on the right), but the only publications of theirs which are available digitally are the early volumes that are on Archive. Generally these are linked on the page for the relevant text on CODECS, which brings me onto...:

A good website for finding information about the manuscripts, editions, translations, and some secondary scholarship on texts you're interested in is CODECS, the Collaborative Online Database and e-Resources for Celtic Studies. We work very hard on our acronyms in this field, okay. The secondary scholarship part of this tends not to be the most complete/up-to-date, because this site is run by an absolute skeleton team (at one point it was literally one guy; may still be), but it's good for finding out whether something has been translated, at least, and getting the links if they're available online at all; new info is regularly being added.

In terms of what other texts you should read, pretty much all the ones I mentioned in my post about Láeg yesterday are great. Obviously, I'm an Ulster Cycle researcher, so that's my bias. Other Medieval Irish Literature Is Available. Just don't expect me to know where to find it 😅

It's very hard to find reliable information about medieval Irish literature outside of academic sources, and the lack of online resources is one reason: it's hard for those without institutional access to read and engage with recent research, therefore it perpetuates a divide between Academia and Outside Academia, with those Outside being forced to rely on outdated and inaccurate material. Having struggled through a couple of years as an independent researcher, my solution to this was ultimately to get a part-time library job at a university with a substantial Celtic Studies collection so that I could get access to the books again, which isn't exactly a universal option. I think this is improving slightly as more things move towards an Open Access model, but there is still a lot of material locked away in out-of-print rare books found in twelve libraries worldwide, you know?

I mention this so that my emphasis on academic resources doesn't seem like I'm upholding academia as The Only Way Forward. Despite these barriers, I don't doubt that there are good blog posts and things being written by independent scholars, both those with academic training and those without -- but they are buried beneath a vast sea of misinformation, disinformation, and absolute nonsense, and with the state of search engines currently, they're incredibly hard to find if you don't already know they're there. I don't currently have a list of those sorts of resources to hand, hence the emphasis on academic materials.

(Some academics also have blogs! But finding these is, if anything, even harder, because they are rarely appealing to AI-calibrated search engines. I will however link Anna Pagé's HCommons blog, where she was previously writing regularly on the Ulster Cycle, although she seems to have stopped.)

Anyway, below I'm going to list a bunch of academic journals where current scholarship is being published. This is not an exhaustive list -- just the ones I could think of at the moment / which were recent in my Zotero library. I think in most cases, academic writing in this field is relatively accessible: there are technical terms, but it doesn't tend to go in for incredibly dense and convoluted sentences, although some academics are better writers than others. We do have a tendency to publish in conference proceedings more than other fields, I think (these are still generally peer-reviewed!), as well as in books/edited volumes, so journals only represent a portion of the work being done, but they tend to be more likely to be online.

A lot of people get scared off reading academic articles because they think they're Not For Them. I'm sure that's not you, you're studying neuroscience (!), but I just want to say that although reading academic articles is a skill, it's a learned one, not an innate one, and it's one that comes with practice rather than with qualifications. So don't be afraid to dive in and have a poke around. Also don't believe everything you read just because an academic said it; sometimes they're wrong. The medieval group chat has a "thinkshaming" channel for a reason.

Some academic journals which are Open Access:

Studia Celtica Fennica

Studia Celtica Posnaniensia

Celtica [only recent volumes available online but they're working on it]

Quaestio Insularis [postgraduate conference proceedings but still peer-reviewed]

[If anyone is aware of any other OA Celtic Studies journals, or medieval journals that include a substantial proportion of Celtic stuff, please let me know, I'm trying to keep a list for personal reasons too!]

Academic journals which have online editions if you have institutional library access:

Studia Celtica

North American Journal of Celtic Studies

Studia Hibernica

Eolas - American Journal of Irish Medieval Studies

Zeitschrift für celtische philologie

Peritia

Ériu

Éigse (I guess, technically, but we have a weird thing where you have to ask someone for access and their website is terrible, so that one's only halfway online)

Journals which are print-only but very cheap:

Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies (costs £10 for a yearly subscription if you live in the UK and they will literally post two volumes to your house every year) (listen, our field is strange and old-fashioned, it happens)

People do of course publish in non-Celtic Studies journals sometimes, such as other medieval literature-focused journals or Philological Quarterly or whatever. But if I started listing all of them we'll be here all night and frankly I've probably spent long enough doing this, haha.

Just because a journal is not online doesn't mean its articles won't be, though. Sometimes academics upload them to their own website (my article on transmasculine readings of Cú Chulainn is on my website), and others to places like HCommons/KCommons, a less predatory alternative to things like Academia.edu. If you find a reference you're interested in and it's recent, search those places. If you can't find it, there is also an academic Celtic Studies Facebook group that is usually willing to scan items for researchers in need. Note that this is an academic-focused group: there are no institutional barriers to entry, but they don't have much patience for time-wasters.

If you find you get into it and want to engage more actively and talk about things in depth with people, you might enjoy the Carantes anti-fascist Celtic Studies reading group; they send out articles and have quarterly meetings to discuss them, with no institutional barriers to entry. Another reason mis/disinfo online is dangerous is that a lot of it is hugely racist and readily weaponised by the far right, and I will not claim that the academic side is immune from that (although it will usually take a different form in those spaces), which is why groups like Carantes are important. I'm not affiliated with the group, though I'm on their mailing list and am friends with some of the founding members. Joining their mailing list is a very low pressure way to find out what they're up to and what scholarship they're recommending on some of these thorny topics! (One day I'll actually make it to a meeting instead of just saving all their reading recs to an optimistic Zotero folder.)

And finally here's a link to the Celtic Studies Association of North America's Digital Resources page, because it came up while I was looking for stuff, and maybe something on there will be useful.

This is... very long, and I'm not sure how useful it is? I feel like I've just gone, hey, why not Become An Academic in your free time, which I'm sure you have loads of, neuroscience can't possibly have a heavy workload, etc. If that is not the vibe you were looking for, just scroll back up to the Bookshop.org link and ignore most of the rest 😅

[fongus-the-ninth]

[caraecethrae]

I saw two hares on the runway today when I landed in Ireland. Felt like an omen

[caraecethrae]

Also - I'm in Ireland! I will be in Roscommon/Tulsk area for a week or so. Anyone want to hang out at Ráth Cruachan with me sometime this next week?

[caraecethrae]

I saw two hares on the runway today when I landed in Ireland. Felt like an omen

[directactionforhope]

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

[lore-gore]

May 5 is Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's Day. A reminder that 84.3 percent of native women have experienced violence. 56.1 percent of native women have experienced sexual violence. And the 3rd leading cause of death for native women is murder.

And they haven't even gathered significant information on native women living in URBAN areas. It could be much higher.

Dwell on this. Wear red.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You know, rivers catching on fire used to be a regular occurrence.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Boring, even. Mundane. People just accepted that rivers had oil slicks floating on them that could be lit by somebody throwing their cigarette in the wrong place. Cities had regular protocols in place on what to do when the river caught on fire.

[what-even-is-thiss]

The modern environmentalism movement wasn’t just started by hippies you know. Regular people cared about this stuff because their rivers caught on fire and existing near farms gave them cancer and by the 1970s they weren’t even seeing that much economic benefit from it.

[what-even-is-thiss]

If you don’t live in a world where rivers regularly catch on fire it’s because of stuff like the clean water and air acts. A lot of rivers in the US that in the first half of the 20th century regularly caught on fire are now safe to swim and fish in.

A lot of environmental damage is reversible if we act. We’ve got a lot of success stories like this actually. A lot of formerly endangered species have come back, fish have returned to American rivers, the ozone layer is being restored.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen next with the environment but I hold out at least a little bit of hope. Because rivers used to catch on fire and now for the most part they don’t.

[torstherapy]

[suburbanscrimshaw]

[faithisland]

help me choose pls

left

right

nuance (and pls lmk what would work best)

Voting ended onApr 15

i need to repaint the irises at the bottom and i am stuck bc i need to choose it based on the colour scheme😔

[headspace-hotel]

it's definitely my predisposition to extreme frugality+redneck engineering, but i'm now obsessed with creating things literally without buying Anything. no supplies no tools no nothing, only the stuff you can just find outside, like Plants, Sticks, and Rocks.

I'm making textiles with nothing but foraged plant materials using no tools except sticks. Nature allows you to do this! There's no rules! I mean okay well maybe there might be some rules sometimes but they're just weak human rules! The plants themselves? They're like "Why sure! You can make yarn with nothing but fibers from the dead stem I don't need anymore, a couple sticks from that tree over there, and your own body and mind! Why not?"

Plants like to give us gifts! And nobody has the power to stop them!

[headspace-hotel]

Once you know the ways of the plants, the ways of our capitalist society become silly and hard to understand, sometimes even instilling you with a sense of dread.

I was looking at the textile books in the library to try to learn about plants you can make textiles from. I was shocked to discover how incurious most books are about the origin of the very matter from which textiles are made!

For one thing, there were whole shelves of books on how to weave, how to knit, and how to quilt, but barely a single complete volume on how to create yarn or thread to begin with.

Of the books that did cover how the yarn is created, many of them discussed only wool, and those books didn't concern themselves with how to get the wool off the sheep, or how to find such an organism and enter a mutualistic partnership with it in the first place...

If you know the ways of the plants, you will be almost offended when a book about how to make a thing, starting from the beginning of that thing, tells you immediately to buy something. You don't mean "one or two steps further back in the process of a thing being assembled"—you mean the BEGINNING beginning. You seek to learn how the thing is born from the living Earth, not where to buy a Product in a less assembled form.

Where do Products come from...?...According to the capitalist, consumerist way, they come from other, simpler Products of course, which ultimately are born from Industries. I found a book or two which made some attempt to give a more exhaustive list of possible textile materials, with sub-section for plants, which included: Flax, Cotton, Hemp, Jute, Ramie, and some allusion to other possibilities such as Nettle. This of course is a list of plant fibers for which a Huge Industry exists. Regarding plant fibers for which there is no huge industry, the books either said nothing or said something like "...but sadly, there is no huge industry based upon these plants (so they are not worth talking about any more)"

I found a few cryptic statements saying that the range of plants that could be used for textile purposes is theoretically limitless...but none of the books were interested at all in those theoretically limitless plants.

It's not that only those few plants are really good for textiles and the other ones are inferior, either. I have learned from my delves into the Internet, that many plants now considered totally useless to humans and not investigated for their potential applications at all...have actually been used by some human culture on Earth for thousands of years as a fundamental part of everyday life.

Native Americans for thousands of years utilized plants native to this region for textiles. These ones are among the plants I have been gathering; they are plants that naturally grow here and can be harvested sustainably, in fact in many cases they benefit from being harvested.

Apocyonum cannabinum, also known as Dogbane, is essentially a North American analog to hemp or flax; you extract the bast fiber from the stem by beating it until the woody part breaks into pieces and falls out and the outer bark flakes off. This plant is native to all U.S. states except Alaska and Hawaii and I reckon that's because of its importance as a textile plant.

I've collected big bundles of the stuff by picking over fields that have been mowed already by a brush cutter; it's so easy, because the fibers are so strong that they are not broken by the brush cutter. Instead, I find mats and bundles of fiber 1-2 feet long stretched out over the ground or trailing from the stubs of stems, often with the woody parts and outer bark already beaten out by the mowing. Simply mowing a field where dogbane grows essentially pre-processes the fiber so your work is half done for you.

It is amazing to me that a person can see how the fibers do that if you mow the plants in the fall, and not immediately think, "We should be making string or rope out of that." Early colonial texts call this plant "Indian hemp" and say it is superior to actual hemp. Likewise what few resources I can find on Native American textile plants, list dogbane as one of the main ones.

So I gather the dogbane. It is astonishingly strong, fragrant when you handle it, and beating the fibers is loads of fun, just a great way to blow off steam. The fibers range in color from almost pearly white to cream to peach to beautiful shades of orange and copper, and have a lovely sheen to them.

After I've beaten the fibers and gotten them to mostly separate I tease them out with my fingers and scrape out all the remaining little bits of bark, and pull them through a plastic comb until the soft and lustrous fibers are separated and all that's left is some nubby bits of lint.

The last picture is what it looks like after combing and cleaning. The color looks more washed-out than it is for real because of my white lamp.

These fibers weren't quite as well-processed so the end result was kind of rough and scraggly, but I experimented by making some string:

All I used to spin it was a stick with a notch in the top so I could twist with my fingers, holding the other end of the stick steady and pulling the strand back towards myself. Whenever I finished a little more I would just loop it over the bend in the top of the stick and keep going.

The other fiber I've been experimenting with is milkweed seed fluff. This one is an interesting one because it was the first material I became interested in spinning, and the first I experimented with to the point of making a yarn. It took a long time to figure it out, I have quite a bit of single-strand seed fluff yarn now, and intend to spin this into a three-ply yarn to make it strong.

I was so happy! My first yarn! Spun with nothing but a stick. It's delicate but it holds together and handles being unwound and rewound just fine, and I think making a 2 or 3 ply yarn would make it pretty workable.

So imagine my surprise when I begin reading about textile arts and the possible uses of the plants i'm working with, and learn that spinning milkweed seed fluff is impossible?

Milkweed bast fiber has been used, like the dogbane bast fiber, but according to the internet, spinning the seed fluffs into yarn is something that cannot be done, because they are too short, smooth, and fragile. Many have tried! It doesn't work!

That was news to me.

As I read more about spinning the more conventional plant fibers, though, I consider what a deep knowledge humankind has cultivated of the ways of wool and flax and cotton, and think...is my total lack of knowledge about spinning yarn, the reason I was able to spin the milkweed fluffs?

Normal people would have armed themselves with the proper tools for undertaking a new activity, but I didn't even bother to look up what I was doing, because MacGyvering cool stuff out of materials from nature you can find anywhere outside is basically half my personality at this point, and makes me feel unreasonably powerful. As a result, I made a technological approach to spinning yarn that was designed specially for the challenges of spinning milkweed seed fluffs, and only later realized that 1) this is not a normal way to spin yarn and 2) i'm not supposed to be able to spin this stuff at all.

And it's because I came at it backwards. Instead of trying to use existing technology to spin milkweed fluffs, I became determined to spin milkweed fluffs and developed my technique based on what would work to do that, without any knowledge of what I was "supposed" to be doing.

If I had been normal about it and thought "Hmm, I should buy the right tools to do this" or even thought "Hmm, I should start with fibers that are usually used to make clothes" this would not have happened.

I'm coming at everything backwards: instead of "Where can I purchase Thing I Want To Work With?" it's "What does Nature provide, and what cool stuff can I do with it?"

I didn't even set out to work with textile materials. It's just that the plants kept giving me textile materials. This hobby absolutely snuck up on me out of nowhere this was not my idea

People have had success blending milkweed fluffs with other stuff, so I'm going to try to blend it with the dogbane next! I am fully going to go all the way and make like clothes or bags or blankets out of this stuff. There is no turning back for me, the euphoria of creation and the profound wisdom of the plants have inflicted a fascination with my task.

[dr-dendritic-trees]

What's the staple length of that milkweed please? I am fascinated by it.

[headspace-hotel]

You mean like the length of the individual fibers? They're like an inch on average, the biggest seed pods have fluffs a little longer.

Basically the reason it works, I think, is that I'm twisting the strand with my fingers, pulling back toward my body and using the other end of the stick as an anchor point/leverage. There is something about the warmth and moisture of touching the fibers so much that makes them want to bind together more.

There is a lot of twist to the yarn, but it's not a problem, in fact if you twist until it kinks up, you can just...mash the kinked part between your fingers really hard and it'll flatten out and you can keep going. The fiber is springy and pliable in a way that lets you do things like that with it.

Where a lot of people messed up was they tried to card it. All you need to do is spend some time gently pulling the fibers between your fingers to separate the individual fibers in each "tuft" that attaches to a single seed. If you're too rough with it, the fibers will just break and that's not good. But you do kinda have to play with it in your hands? I don't know if it's the oils in your hands or what, but touching it a lot makes them want to mold together to each other more.

I can really see how this material is totally different than anything else you could spin in many ways.

[headspace-hotel]

Top: Dogbane bast fiber

Bottom: Dogbane bast/Milkweed floss blend

On a different note I went thru mom and dads closet to find really old clothes to practice sewing and embroidery on, and I am so mad!!!!! at how much more sturdy and robust clothes from the 1990's are compared to today.

I am just staring in fascination at these clothes from a few decades ago like "Wow they are so strong and sturdy...the fabric is such high quality...." What HAPPENED?

[headspace-hotel]

Inner bark fibers of first-year grapevine twigs. They can be processed into incredibly fine strong soft strands with soaking, stripping off outer bark and gentle crushing by rolling a round rock over them

[motsimages]

Thank you for this.

I have been on a personal quest (that is now in stand by due to life events) about flax. I live in a village that was famous for its flax, hemp and wool fabrics. Its name is literally related to the hemp-farming. And currently, nobody ever grows any of these plants and what I find surprising, with my very limited knowledge of botanics, is that... there are no rest of them either? Even in the first half of the 20th century some people still worked the flax in the traditional way, and now there aren't any carried-by the wind rests anywhere? no abandoned farms where it poorly grows anymore? no decorative reasoning to have them in your garden?

People don't remember, they don't even know. Linen was an estimated fabric and this village had enough to dress its inhabitants and sell the left-overs around. Same with the wool. Only the old people remember because they still worked it. Other villages, with larger textile industries, also have lost this memory.

The moment you look at things the way op mentioned, with the "how do you get this done?" mind, things change. Its value change. I only wish I had more time and more health to really make myself a linen tshirt, from scratch. To make myself a woolen blanket, from scratch. Particularly, I have the wool because my parents have sheep. I could do so many things if I dedicated every bit of time off and energy to it, but alas I can't. I do it when I can, little by little. I envy you, op. Please, keep us posted of your progress.

[sunrisenebula]

I'm thinking of this one time time I was bored while catsitting... I went out on my friend's property, found some sticks and rocks, improvised a spindle, brushed the cats, and spun up some yarn. One cat has slightly darker fur, and they are both long-haired and very soft, so I was interested to see what the yarn would feel like.

My original spindle fell apart, and they must have just cleaned the yard because I couldn't find sturdy enough sticks for replacement, so I did admittedly use borrowed bic pens instead of purely natural supplies...

I ended up with a few strands of 2 ply cat hair yarn! It was kind of scratchy and felt like twine. It wasn't the easiest to spin compared to the wool I've worked with, but boredom is a powerful motivator!

I left the yarn with my friend as a memento, but I'm considering making more the next time I catsit so I can try actually knitting something with it.

[dr-dendritic-trees]

@headspace-hotel

I have another dopey question about your milkweed experiment if you aren't out of patience yet.

Did the books that claim milkweed is unspinneable mention what tool they were using (drop spindle, wheel etc)? Because I just reread the post and it sounds like you had the spindle in your hand the whole time, rather than letting it hang freely in the air?

That's a specific style of spinning I'm currently failing to learn: supported spinning, and its specifically often used to spin short, delicate fibres, and/or very fine delicate thread, but its not done very often in anglo-european traditions, so I'm wondering if there was some Distinct Cultural Biases in the books you were referencing.

[makerandbean]

I also wanted to ask how your cat yarn and milkweed yarn have held up? I’ve spun with cat hair “fresh off the cat” before - I just groomed my resident beast and then pulled the hair out the comb and spun with a drop spindle - but I’ve found it’s not held up very well. I knitted a teeny tiny swatch with it and it’s fuzzing and sort of slowly edging towards either felting or just sort of falling apart :(

might have worked better if i plied it, or I might have underspun it bc I was very new to spinning when I did it, but… I do wonder also when people say “you can’t spin with that” whether they sometimes mean “the yarn falls apart very quickly so don’t bother”

[headspace-hotel]

Two very good questions from @dr-dendritic-trees and @makerandbean !

First: Yes! I haven't posted photos of my spinning in a while, but yeah, I essentially use a stick with a side branch at the top that I use as a spool. I hold the stick in my left hand and twist the strand together, letting my left hand slide down the stick as I spin, then when the strand is as long as the stick I wrap it around the top and continue.

I'm actually really happy you brought that up, because I had no idea what the technique was called, and had never heard of it before despite it being a fairly intuitive, ridiculously low-tech way to spin that gives you a lot of control over the strand you're putting together.

You basically pinch a big thick tuft of your fiber between your index finger and thumb of your right hand and splice it into the strand you're working on, and as you work you pull the tuft downwards so it slowly distributes all the fibers into a long strand.

This is especially effective when you're working with dogbane bast fiber, which inevitably has a great number of fibers of just 3-5 centimeters, and a smaller but still significant amount of fibers 10-20 centimeters long. The long fibers give the strand a backbone and the short fibers give it more weight and fuzziness.

The staple length you could get from dogbane fiber if you processed it carefully is, I feel certain, longer than any other natural fiber that exists.

Using dogbane, I have figured out how to get an incredibly smooth even thread by twisting the strand, then scraping my fingers up and down the strand to make stray fibers stick up, and untwisting and retwisting it in short sections at a time so the stray fibers get twisted into the strand.

I think it helps the final result to alternate between holding the strand in the hardest twist you can manage and then letting it relax to whatever extent it wants to, and twisting again.

It's slow but I'm getting steadily faster and faster at it, and it feels plausible that a person using this method could produce enough string for weaving into a garment on a Neolithic type amount of free time.

On the second question: I havent actually tried turning the milkweed yarn into anything since I can't knit or crochet, however, I think it would be so clearly better to blend the milkweed fluff 50:50 with another fiber (possibly milkweed bast fiber!) that I haven't really tried experimenting with pure milkweed fluff much more. I will hopefully show y'all how the bast/fluff blend goes!

My experiment shows it's possible to spin milkweed fluff, however I think it wouldn't be sturdy enough for an item for daily wear unless blended. However blending the milkweed and dogbane has excellent results.

I actually did some research online into milkweed fluff, and the main purpose for milkweed fluff in textile-adjacent things is actually stuffing. It apparently makes amazing stuffing for pillows, blankets, and jackets—it is incredibly warm, hypoallergenic, and so buoyant that it can be used to stuff life jackets.

[shosta]

@headspace-hotel if you haven't already, I would seriously recommend writing up an in-depth description of your milkweed spinning technique, with as much photo/video/diagram as you can provide. Documenting this process and being able to compare it to standard supported spinning practices as well as the pinching/twisting/holding that you've described helping bind the fibers would be phenomenally helpful not only to fiber artists here but to material science as well!!

also, i don't think any of this is going to be exactly what you're looking for, but here are some reaources i found both helpful and fascinating during fiber sciences :)

Fiber Plants of Africa and their Usage (Iseki et al 2010 for JAICAF)

Native American Ethnobotany Database, and the usda summary of common fibrous plants and their uses

UK wild plant fibers and Nettles for Textiles are not sources I'm as familiar with but seem much more up this alley

I have a longer list somewhere of Indian and Himalayan species and fiber development processes but that is saved somewhere on a drive I haven't used in. like a decade.

[headspace-hotel]

This post is going around again I feel the need to update it

On Spinning:

I think my technique that I started with was not actually "spinning" at all, but rather like twisting cordage? Because I was applying the twist with my fingers. So it embarrasses me that I was referring to it as spinning since that is not really the right term.

I did, however, make a drop spindle. It was a very different drop spindle than others. I used a stick, a glass bottle, duct tape, and a rubber band. The duct tape goes around the end of the stick until it is thick enough to tightly stop up the neck of the bottle. You secure the start of your thread to the other end of the stick with the rubber band. The rubber-band end of the stick goes into the bottle, and the duct tape end stops up the bottle's neck, with the thread sticking out.

You have to keep taking out the stick and winding your thread onto it. But it's faster than just twisting.

This rig is extremely fucking heavy so it only really works with dogbane, which has really long staple lengths and is really strong. But other drop spindles are too lightweight to spin dogbane.

On Milkweed Yarn:

Also, I think the impossible nature of spinning milkweed fluff is because the yarn falls apart so easily. I don't think you could craft anything from pure milkweed. However, milkweed fluff seems possible to blend with other fibers and get a decent yarn with it.

Honestly I haven't done very much more with the fibers because I did it during a time I was really depressed and my brain associates it with the depression. Oops.