Transcript for
Episode 119:
The Pillars of Skillful Spinning™
Encore episode
Spinning involves both a lot of different kinds of knowledge and a lot of different skills. If you were going to divide up the totality of knowledge and skills spinning encompasses, how would you do it? In this episode I'll share what the map of spinning knowledge looks like to me.
Hello there darling Sheepspotter! Welcome to episode 86 of The Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and my job is to help you make more yarns you love.
When I was learning to spin in 2009, I remember flitting from book to book and class to class and video to video (mostly from what was then Interweave and Craftsy; YouTube wasn't such a thing at that point). I was just trying to soak up every bit of information about spinning that I could. So I just absorbed stuff in the order I found it. And, not surprisingly, information about spinning, which I now call "the field of spinning knowledge" seemed, if I tried to picture it in my mind, like a big amorphous blob of stuff. It took a long time and a lot more spinning and research about spinning to start to create categories in my head for different topics within that field.
When I started to teach spinning in 2016, I was giving one on one classes in my studio, and I became acutely aware of all that I didn't have time to teach them. These students came to me for a series of three beginner lessons, and when they were finished I just turned them loose. They knew one way to draft, the basics of plying and finishing, some tips about beginner-friendly fibers, and that was it. It felt a little like throwing someone into the deep end of a pool and hoping they remembered enough about spinning to somehow get out of the water.
In 2019 I took a course on creating online memberships taught by Stu McLaren. Stu challenged me to create a "success path"—a framework that described a typical student's progression from beginning to mastery. Stu advocates this for two reasons: first, so that students would be able to see and measure their progress, and thus be motivated to keep making progress, and second, so that they could focus on one step at a time and not become overwhelmed and discouraged. That challenge resulted in The Spinner's Journey™ framework, which is foundational to how I teach spinning and which I continue to refine based on my work with students. I'm really grateful to Stu for making me do it, though I found it really difficult at the time and I complained about having to do it a lot. It's an amazing teaching tool.
So The Spinner's Journey™ is a description of a more-or-less linear process. But while I was working on it, it became clear to me that I needed another axis—another way to describe the different areas of spinning knowledge. I call these areas "pillars" or (more pretentiously) the Pillars of Skillful Spinning™. If The Spinner's Journey™ is the x axis, the Pillars are the y. In other words, they were all the things I wasn't able to cram into three lessons with my beginners before I turned them loose.
So a "pillar" is a big chunk of distinct, related information and skills within the larger body of information and skills that make up everything we know about spinning, the body of spinning knowledge. Spinners move through The Spinner's Journey™, by acquiring skills and knowledge in the different pillars.
Here are the pillars I've identified, in the order I like to teach them:
spinning tools (mechanics and maintenance)
drafting
plying
finishing
fiber
fiber preparation
working with color
maintaining your stash
There are also two areas of spinning knowledge that I think of as "metapillars" because they touch on multiple other pillars. The first of these is using your handspun yarn, which encompasses all aspects of yarn design (drafting method, fiber choice, how the fiber is prepared, plying choices, how the yarn is finished, managing color).
The second of these it twist, which also intersects with at wheel mechanics, drafting, plying, and color management. Working effectively with twist requires both an intellectual understanding of what twist is an how it works, and the manual skill of feeling where the twist is while you're spinning and how fast it's moving.
Now I want to be really clear about what I'm claiming in this episode and what I'm not. I'm not claiming that The Spinner's Journey™ describes the exact path of every spinner, and I'm not claiming that the pillars encompass everything it's possible to know about spinning.
What I am claiming is that both The Spinner's Journey™ and Pillars of Skillful Spinning™ are useful fictions. The Spinner's Journey™, for example, is a story I can share with my students to help them give language to their experiences at various levels and to see and measure the progress they are making.
The Pillars of Skillful Spinning™, on the other hand, are a tool I use to ensure that my students are becoming well-rounded yarnmakers (as I said last week, versatility is important to me!). They are also invaluable for creating a comprehensive spinning curriculum that allows students to focus on one pillar at a time and thus prevents them from becoming overwhelmed.
I use the pillars to organized both my beginning spinning class, Spin School, and the monthly challenges for The Guild by Sheepspot, my membership for intermediate and advanced spinners. And from now on, I'm going to be using it to organize the podcast as well. So just as folks in The Guild focus on one pillar a month, I'll be doing that as well in the podcast. Going forward, I'll be focusing the podcast content on the same pillar we are working on in The Guild by Sheepspot.
In January, The Guild is working on the tools pillar, so I've got two episodes on the tools pillar coming up for you to round out January.
There's a post in The Flock where you can comment on and discuss this episode if you'd like. I'll link to it in the show notes, which you can find at sheepspot.com/podcast/episode86.
Well, friend, that's it for me this week. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next Friday with another episode. I'll meet you back here. And in the meantime, spin something! It will do you good.