Transcript for

Episode 118:

The Spinner’s Journey

Encore episode: 

You're listening to the Sheepspot Podcast, a show for hand spinners about making yarns we love. Hello there, my darling Sheep spotters. Welcome to episode 63 of the Sheepspot podcast. I'm Sasha from Sheepspot dot com where we are laser-focused on helping you make yarns you love with beautiful fibers and top-notch instruction. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. So I am recording this on September 12th, and actually, right after I do this, I'm gonna have breakfast, then I'm gonna prep for my grad seminar. 

But I just wanted to record a quick episode for you and to let you know that the first part of my free video workshop is now available. So if you're on the mailing list for the Sheep Spotters Society, you will have gotten an email about this yesterday, and you may already have seen the first video, but even if you aren't on that list and really why aren't you on that list? But even if you aren't on that list and, and you're not interested in the membership, you can absolutely still watch this video workshop. The videos are completely free and you can find them at Sheepspot dot com slash TSS videos.

So SS that stands for the Sheep Spotter Society Videos. And of course there will be a link in the show notes, and you can find the show notes for this episode at Sheepspot dot com slash podcast slash episode six three. I would love to know what you think about the video. So you know, please, please, please head over and have a look.

And it's about 18 minutes long, and it's the first in a series of four. So, so remember how in episode 56 and 57 I told you about my spinning story and episode 56 ended with a kind of cheesy cliffhanger with me in a hotel room in Lennox, Massachusetts with a Schacht ladybug, some Merino top and some really terrible yarn. Well, the video workshop, which is called the Spinners Journey, is all about my spinning story. This is about your spinning story and specifically how you can understand where you are in your spinning progress with respect to this thing that I've made up called the Spinners Journey Framework. And the purpose of the framework is to help you understand the stages that every espinner goes through on the way to being able to make whatever yarn she wants with ease.

And so that's what this whole workshop is about. How do you get to the point where you can really spin anything you want? And my premise, the premise, the argument, if you will, of the workshop is that that involves going through a series of stages. And I call these stages excitement, commitment, growth, exploration, and confidence.

And I'm gonna tell you just a little bit about the stages here. I go into more detail about them in the workshop, but so let's, let's imagine a espinner, and let's call her Alice. I've been calling her Alice after my next door neighbor's Labrador. I think Alice May have been barking. Alice barks a lot, and I think Alice might have been barking when I, when I was thinking about this. So anyway, so our imaginary spinners name is Alice, and, and she starts off in the first phase. She's an excited beginner. And that's why I call it the excitement phase because looking back on, on my own sort of disposition to the world at the stage, I, I just remember being so excited to be making yarn.

I just thought that was the biggest kick. Anyway, so Alice is super excited, but she's still kind of struggling. So she's, you know, she's not really best friends with her wheel yet. She still has some trouble getting it to go in the direction she wants it to go. She's, she, her twist is all over the place.

Her circumference, you know, the di sorry, not circumference, diameter, the diameter of her yarn is all over the place. She's plying is like, oh my God, what do I do with my fingers? You, if you're in that stage, you know what I'm talking about. And if you have, if you're beyond that stage, you still remember those moments where you're like, you know, how do I adjust my tension so that it's not yanking the yarn out of my hands? All that cool, excited, slightly out of control feeling. So you're feeling really excited, but you're also feeling like, can I do this? So that's the excitement phase. So, Alice, you know, she sticks it out and she makes it through the excitement phase, and she heads into the commitment phase. And so she's committed to learning more and getting better. And she starts to solidify her skills a little bit, and she gets a little more like she learns to adjust her tension, and she starts to get more control over her diameter and more control over her twist. 

And, and she's, her yarns are getting better, steadily better at this stage. And she starts to notice how wonderfully relaxing spinning can be. So this is, as I remember this moment for me, like for me, this corresponds to that phase that I describe in episode 56 and 57 of just spinning Bluefaced Leicester every day. And, and just, you know, incrementally every day my yarn is getting better and better.

So, so she's also absorbing all sorts of new information and learning about, you know, all the, all the other stuff that you can do as a espinner. And as she learns more, she's kind of growing in the craft. And I call this the growth phase. And for me, the growth phase is the, I'll try anything once phase.

So she's, you know, she's trying all the things, she's trying different fibers and different preps and, and maybe she's trying, prepping some of her own fiber, so maybe she gets a little fleece at this point. And, and she's learning about the different drafting techniques and practicing them. And she's, her applying has gotten much better and she's starting to make different kinds of ply structures.

And at this point she's, she's also sort of settling into like, she's doing all this experimentation, she's also settling into a little bit of a default yarn, right? So she's kind of, she's done all this learning and the growth phase for me is really about solidifying what your default yarn is gonna be. So you find something that works and it's completely natural, you just keep doing it, right? 

You just keep doing that thing. But Alice, because she's super smart, realizes that the growth phase can actually be a little bit of a trap. And I, lots of spinners get stuck here and they never really go beyond their default yarn. And I think that in order to really become the best espinner that you can be, you need to go beyond the growth phase and into something that I call the exploration phase. And the exploration phase is about setting yourself a bunch of new, slightly more difficult, incrementally difficult, more difficult spinning challenges. So you're back in the kind of experimentation mode and you're trying new things like that are a little bit harder, harder than you would've tackled during your commitment phase when you were trying all the things in the exploration phase.

You're, you're really trying to, to master some more advanced skills. Maybe you're working with new fibers, maybe you're doing some textured yarn techniques. And Alice, because she is so brilliant, understands when she's in the exploration stage that every single yarn that she makes, whether she really likes that yarn or not, she might not like every experiment as much as she likes her default yarn, but she knows that every single yarn she makes is making her a better espinner. And that's what's so key about the exploration stage. And so after she does a bunch more experimentation and trying new things and going back to her default and trying new things and going, you know, that sort of back and forth motion that I think a lot of us do as more advanced spinners, she realizes that she has reached the final phase, which, which I call confidence. And for me, the final stage is about, okay, I can spin whatever yarn I want and I can spin it on pretty much any wheel. And I have the knowledge and the kind of manual skills to be able to envision a yarn and then just create it.

And I think of this as spinning nirvana. So that's, that's the spinner's journey and Alice's course through it. And while she passes through each of these phases, she's also encountering what I call the eight pillars of great spinning. And by pillars I mean the eight areas that spinners need to focus on in order to be able to spin really great yarns consistently and to be able to spin a bunch of different kinds of yarn really well.

And those pillars are understanding your wheel, drafting, plying, finishing your yarn, understanding fiber, huge topic, understanding fiber prep, managing your stash, and working with color. And these pillars are not so coincidentally the exact topics that we will be focusing in on, on in, sorry, we will be focusing on these topics in the Sheep Spotter Society and we're gonna be doing one per month.

So that's kind of the way the membership is structured. So there is a lot more info about the spinners journey in the workshop itself. So by all means head over to the website and check it out. I really hope that it'll bring you some additional clarity on where you are and what you wanna work on next to really improve your spinning and make more yarns you love.

And unless of course you're already in the confidence phase, in which case as always you do you, but there might be some things in the video that might be useful to you guys as well. So you can find the workshop at Sheepspot dot com slash tss videos, or you can just head over to the show notes, which are at Sheepspot dot com slash podcast slash episode six three and you will find the link in the show notes, the first episode of the workshop. The first video in the workshop is available now, and the next one goes up on Tuesday. It will be right on the same page. So that one link will get you to all the videos and they're gonna be released sort of every few days over the next couple weeks. So dear hearts, that is it for me this week.

Thank you so much for listening. As always, I will see you next week. I cannot wait. And in the meantime, I hope that you will go spend something and go check out the video all. Thanks so much guys. Talk to you soon. Bye.