Jul 29
Playing with the support spindle for the first time in a while with these mini rolags one of our guild members sells. Enjoying the color shift through the set so far!
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Playing with the support spindle for the first time in a while with these mini rolags one of our guild members sells. Enjoying the color shift through the set so far!
Spindle shaft occupied by another spin? Just butcher a random skewer and pop your whole on there
My Malian cotton spindle. The bead is heavy and it can spin quite fast.
Too many spindles? Dunno her.
And these are just my office spindles. I suspect I might have a problem.
First time using a Tahkli-style spindle. This one spins so smoothly.
Fiber arts update:
Forgot to mention it, but I got a Tibetan-style supported spindle for Christmas!
It's another Peter Locke spindle; whorl and spinning bowl are bog oak, the shaft is padauk. He had the same combination as a drop spindle a while back and I missed out on it, so I'm super glad I managed to snag the supported version.
This one weighs 30g compared to my Russian-style's 24g and it's fascinating how much of a difference the 6 extra grams and the weight distribution make where the spinning feel's concerned. This one is a fair bit slower and more of a finger workout to get going, but also runs practically forever.
The fiber on it is 1/4th of the alpaca combed top from the 2024 fiber advent calendar I never really got to work with because I was in the hot phase of writing my master's thesis at the time. Alpaca will never be my favorite thing to spin, but long-draw alpaca spinning on a supported spindle is still a heckuva lot less godawful than short-forward-ish on a (Turkish-style) drop spindle. (Neither is difficult as such, but working with only one staple length at a time sure makes the fiber less of a sensory and fiber management-y nightmare. Also wow does this stuff need a lot of twist to hold together; and my Turkish-style spindle is so, so very slow lmao)
I'll ply this stuff once I have a spindle free that I don't dread doing that on, and then... I mean, what do you do with 2x25g of relatively fine 4-ply alpaca in two contrasting colors? I'd say a crochet colorwork headband or cowl, but both of that will need a LOT more than 50g of yarn...
(maybe I can find more fibers to combine with these, but I'm aiming to keep them completely sheep wool free, so I can maybe make something for my (extremely mildly allergic) mom, which limits the selection considerably)
Fiber arts update!
Finished spinning all my mystery fluff:
(almost all of it, anyway; I'm keeping a little to check it against other samples because I really want to figure out what this is; my best guess right now is baby alpaca, but... ???)
decided to ply it via a plying bracelet and wisely chose not to use my own hand for the winding of said bracelet. So, uh. stuck some crafting stick things into an old, small notebook and was very happy I did, because the yarn just Would Not Stop.
I plied it on another Peter Locke spindle, actually: This thing is comparatively tiny and very, very fast. So, perfect for plying a little bit of very fine yarn!
Aaaand, yarn! A lot more of it than I would've thought!
I measured it while winding off onto my niddy noddy, and it's about 53m / 58 yards, very squishy and exceedingly soft. I expected the singles to be a fragile mess, but nope! Plied up just fine. It's not suuuuuper even, but given the kind of fiber I was working with and my relative lack of experience with supported spinning, I'm pretty pleased with this.
Plus, I had a lot of fun! And this ain't a bad amount of laceweight(ish) for 1.5 days of casual spinning, either. Neat!
New spindle!
I've been craving supported spinning lately, and my only supported spindle is... Vaguely tahkli-adjacent and full of cotton for the foreseeable future. So, I had some birthday money and my favorite spindle guy had some charming Russian-style spindles for sale, and now this one's mine. It's made of delightfully rustic oak, and the woodgrain makes it look like it's got an eye on the bottom. Love it.
I don't actually know what I'm spinning right now, it's from a bag of mill ends. It's very short-stapled, quite shiny, very very Very soft and almost certainly not cheap. Could be baby alpaca, baby camel or yak; whatever it is, it works great on this thing. I'll have to find out what the heck I got and get myself more of it.