#also i'm falling down a rabbit hole...made my own spindle (which i think was what led to the breakthrough actually)

[senadimell]

Oh, the euphoria of a new skill...I’m finally starting to get the hang of spinning and I get such a thrill of happiness thinking about it. I’m looking over at my little spindle and the single I wound last night to ply today and I’m thinking “I made that! Me!”

It’s such a nice feeling, especially because I kinda resented spinning a few skeins ago because it was really hard and my yarn was so wonky until somehow something just clicked in how I was holding it and now I have so much more control than I used to.

#spinning is an interesting learning curve because it's quite easy to do but hard to do well #a bit like skiing so i've heard #whereas stuff like nalbinding was mindbendingly hard to figure out but really simple after that #anyways i have one gorgeous little skein of finely spun stuff that I want to ply later #oh and i started using a distaff which was really neat! #still getting the hang of it #but wow I have so much wool! So excited! #next step after i ply the single i wound last night is to learn about dyeing #because all of my current wool (except a 4 ish ounces of natural brown corriedale) is undyed cream colored stuff #and i think my yarn will be a lot happier if it was golden or purple or something #a shame my favorite colors are hard to achieve with natural dyes #but there are so many natural dyes out there! #also i'm falling down a rabbit hole...made my own spindle (which i think was what led to the breakthrough actually) #and now i am becoming too powerful #oh no #all those online people with fifty million spindles...it will be me if i'm not careful... #anyways since i don't have a lathe and kneaded erasers and blue tac are a little unreliable #i think i'm going to make a polymer clay whorl next to go on my homemade spindle #switching to a bottom whorl for a while is i think what helped me figure out how to do this #also i think i was maybe holding my wool too tightly before and that's why i was wavering rapidly between lace thickness and single-thicknes #aka thick enough to be a single #also turns out nalbinding yarn has to be way more quality than some fluff internet pieces would have me believe??? #they're like *oh nalbinding predates knitting because you can use short lengths of yarn #so you don't have to have the tech/skill for longer or plied stuff* #but hello. you can knit with very fragile yarn but nalbinding? there's a LOT of friction there and badly spun yarn is p. hard #ask me how i know #anyways i think i should probably troubleshoot and find out what makes a yarn slubby because i don't know anything yet