Whether by wheel, spindle, charkha, or what, this is your place for taking fiber and making it be yarn.
What are you spinning?
Hi! I'm Rebecca, I just joined Imzy, and I'm a spindle spinner almost exclusively. I do have a box charkha, but it's currently gathering dust.
I've recently finished an ounce of silk hankie in purple, white, green and yellow (like a crocus). Because silk is so strong, I did it thick-and-thin, and eventually it will be a narrow scarf, when I find the missing dowels for my rigid heddle loom. I've got my eternal white silk top project, currently on a featherweight spindle I made myself with a purple enamel cog for a whorl and a bamboo knitting needle for a shaft (for some reason, I always have a cobweb-weight white silk thread going, sort of my default project; one day I'll finish enough of it to send to a knitter friend, who will make a wedding ring shawl from it). For my purse project, on my tiny Jenkins Kuchulu Turkish spindle, a blend of wools, silk and sparkly stuff in grey, purple, pink and yellow, in a slightly heavier cobweb. (I go for really fine stuff. I'm weird like that. I hardly ever get enough spun to do much with, though. Stripes in larger projects. But that's ok, I weave Saori-style, and stripes of random colors are good there.) There's forever cotton on the box charkha, but I haven't touched it in months.




I'm trying to finish up a project w/ some of my oldest fiber. Part Wensleydale & Part miscellaneous. In the end, I hope to weave a project combining multiple homespun projects.
Oh, I covet those crocus-colour hankies *grin*
I'm very uncreative in the long run when it comes to spinning, I'm afraid -- it's mainly for the spinning itself, it's so relaxing -- but the net results tend to be made up into pouches for dice and the like. I prefer silks, but I spin rather sturdy for the texture in the pouches.
:D I painted those myself. It's so easy! Mix up Jacquard acid dyes with a splash of vinegar and a small amount of water, enough to make dark liquid colors. Lay your stack of hankies on some plastic wrap. Use sponges or brushes to apply the dyes, really saturating the silk to make sure it goes all the way through to the bottom layer. If you need to, flip the stack over and do the bottom as well. Just make sure you flip it onto a CLEAN piece of plastic wrap. When it's colored to your satisfaction, roll it up in the plastic wrap, tightly, and steam it for 10-15 minutes, just in a regular steamer basket.
I did find that my colors blued a lot after I drafted. Next time, I'll add more red to my purple, and more yellow to my green.
Yay dice bags! You're a tabletop gamer then, I take it? What do you play?
Oh, now that's tempting --
I have a lot of things myself and the flatmate are hoping to get off the ground, and a lot of scheduling inconvenience :3;; Atm we're trying for two different 5e D&D ideas, Shadowrun (probably 4e), and Exalted 3e.
Also Godbound, which we may use as a replacement for EX3's system until the Dragonblooded book is out ...
Scheduling is always the bane of a roleplayer's existence!
You should definitely give painting hankies a try! It's fun and easy and then you have all this great silk to play with!
You know, it never even occurred to me that you could spin from silk hankies. That sounds like a fun challenge!
I'm working on some mohair (I think?) that I got with my new-to-me wheel. It is... an interesting thing to spin, that is for sure.
Ah. Not hankies as in pocket squares. Hankies, otherwise known as mawata (Japanese) are a special preparation of silk for spinning. Cocoons are heated in water, and when the loosen up, the whole cocoon is pulled apart and stretched over a square frame. They're stacked up as you go, usually until you reach a certain weight, like an ounce. An ounce of silk hankie is dozens of cocoons. Each layer is thin and wispy, and you spin them by removing one layer, making a hole in the center, and stretching it out into a "smoke ring", then breaking the ring and drafting until you have something like roving of the weight you want to spin from. There are excellent videos of it on YouTube.
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Oh, yeah, like. I always knew you could knit from them, by doing basically that and just... not twisting the silk? But it never occurred to me that if you could knit from them, you could spin from them too!
If I have any left over from the project I'm working on now, I'm definitely going to give it a try. :)
How funny! I knew you could knit from them (I don't knit myself), but I couldn't imagine that someone would not know you could spin from them. Sorry!
I'm still working on my Tour de Fleece project. Umm. from last year. Err. Spindle-spun, Stuff That Used To Be Attached To A Sheep (by which I mean I have no idea what it is other than 'wool'), dyed in absolutely glorious shades of purple by Spinners Hill. It's going to end up as a two-ply of roughly DK weight; I got through one of two braids last year but this second braid is just kicking my butt.
I've had fine white silk on one spindle or another for six or seven years now, at least! I feel ya!
I'm currently slowly working on some spindle-spun Gotland I got back in February. I'm trying to spin it fairly thin because I'm hoping to make a lace project with it in the future, but it's still fairly thick. It's also fuzzier than I'd like, when all I want is a nice, smooth yarn....
I should work on it more, but it's hard to spin when it's hot out. My hands are all sweaty and I just don't want to bother. I'm really hoping this heat wave cools off soon. (I know about talcum powder, but I shouldn't have to!)
Ugh. I took against spinning wool much when I lived in Florida, simply because it was so miserable almost all year. I still prefer silk or cotton, but spin more wool now that I live in Seattle.
The joke is that I'm in the PNW too, we're just in this miserable heat wave right now.
Though I've never liked spinning silk in the heat. Silk sticks so much worse than wool. I've never gotten the hang of spinning cotton, so I don't know how that works.
Yeah, I'm not touching ANY spinning right now! Not even cotton!
Silk for me doesn't stick to my hands so bad, but it snags on everything, especially hankies, which I love anyway. I don't know if I hold it differently or what. Cotton's nicer for hot weather -- it would have to be, wouldn't it? -- and is spun long-draw style, with a very loose grip on the fiber. These days, when I spin cotton at all, I'm spinning it straight from the boll, simply because I have a big bag of cotton bolls someone gave me years ago.
Silk snags and sticks for me. Hankies felt a bit more snaggy, but when I got some silk roving it would coat my hands, my clothes, anything it touched. (I still like silk roving better than hankies, but that's because I really value smooth and consistent yarns and found that hard with hankies)
My biggest problem with cotton is spinning fast enough. It might be easier if I had a thakli or a charka, but I've never gotten the hang of doing it with what I have. Every so often I try again, and every time I just kind of give up.
Weaving Works in Seattle has metal tahklis at a good price, or did last time I was in. (I need to go in again, probably tomorrow. Weaving project!) Puni are the easiest preparation to get a smooth thread from, and those I've always had to order online. Woolery has white ones for $16 for 100g/3.5oz. Which goes a long way. If, of course, you ever want to try it.
I've played with hemp, and that's not sticky, but I've always had to wet spin it to get a smooth yarn, and it's hard to find good quality. And then it needs to be washed well to get soft, usually a few times. I want to try longline linen one of these days, but that requires a whole new set of equipment, and I'd want to take a workshop to learn it, and and and...
i am still going through my stash of angora:silk from world of wool. supported spindling because i really love spinning laceweight even if it takes ages lol. here it is: https://www.instagram.com/p/BI0CT11ADS2/?taken-by=ayamnotkambing
I learned drop spindle spinning this year and I do not do it all the time. I have practice wool on my spindle still. This group is definitely an inspiration to keep at it.
Yay new spinners!