Script for

Episode 139:

Great Spindle Spinning Resources

Are you learning to spin on a spindle? Need some help? I can help with that. 

Hello there, darling Sheepspotter! Welcome to Episode 139 of The Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and my job is to help you make more yarns you love. In today's episode, I'm going to share my three favorite resources on spindle spinning. 

I learned to spin on a wheel first, and I always say that that's a good thing, because I think that if I'd started on a spindle I would have given up. I'm a person who absolutely loves collecting and messing around with spindles, but who seldom actually completes an entire spindle-spun skein. So I don't really consider myself a spindle spinner even though I have lots of spindles. 

Prospective students who are interested in my Spin School course sometimes ask if they could take the course without a wheel, with just a spindle. And the answer is no. I always tell them that I am not the person from whom anyone should learn spindle spinning. Fortunately, there are great teachers who teach spindle spinning. Below I talk about three of them. 

My favorite first step for brand new spindle spinners is Maggie Casey's video, Getting Started on a Drop Spindle, from Long Thread Media. If you have never spun on a spindle, this is the class for you. One of Maggie's specialties is teaching beginners, and she has really gotten this down to a science, so she does an amazing job of anticipating beginner's questions and knowing where they are likely to have problems. To meet new spinners where they are, she teaches the park-and-draft method so they can slow the spinning process down into discrete parts, she demonstrates predrafting to help new spinners manage their fiber supply, and she talks a lot about twist, how it moves, and how to work with it, all of which is essential knowledge for beginners. She also deliberately keeps it simple to avoid overwhelming her audience: she doesn't go into detail on different drafting methods or demonstrate a lot of different ways to ply, or use a lot of specialized equipment. She teaches the viewer to draft, manage their fiber supply, ply from two separate balls of singles (ingeniously placed under ordinary clay flowerpots), create a skein, and finish their yarn. It's just enough to get started. The hardest thing about teaching beginners isn't figuring out what to include; it's figuring out what to leave out, and Maggie's teaching is always a masterclass on that. 

In addition, I recommend this as a first spindle class because whoever shot and edited this video did a really good job of including the close-ups a beginner would need to understand what to do with their hands. This isn't always the case (more on that in a moment), even in professionally-produced videos, and I really appreciated it here. 

If you are a new spinner and you're the kind of learner who really likes to learn not just what works but also why it works, I would recommend watching Abby Franquemont's video class, Respect the Spindle, which is the companion to her book of the same title. If you're at all serious about spindling you should actually get them both. The book appears to still be in print, and the video is available as a digital download from Long Thread Media. I'm going to focus on the video here, but the book is IMHO one of the best, most comprehensive spinning books currently available. 

I've praised Maggie's minimalist, just-the-facts-ma'am approach to teaching beginners. Abby's more of a maximalist; her strategy is to spend much more time explaining why what happens when we spin happens, and if you don't get overwhelmed and shut down when presented with a lot of information, she is also a marvelous teacher. I took a spindle spinning class with her many years ago, and I think about that class all the time. There were maybe 20 or so people in the class, some of whom had been spindling for a while and others who were touching a spindle for the first time. Abby spent almost no time telling us what to do with our spindles; she spent most of the class talking about twist, and how it behaves. It was pretty abstract. But by the end of the day, everyone was spinning; more remarkably, everyone was spinning pretty well. It was like a magic trick. She explained how spinning works, in a lot of detail, gave almost no detail about how to actually spin, and yet everyone just worked it out and started spinning. 

In the video, Abby spends more time talking about the mechanics of getting spindles into motion and drafting than she did in the class I took with her. Here again the camerawork and editing really support her demonstrations and allow the audience to see the fluidity and effortlessness of her spinning, which is inspiring in itself. I recommend getting started with Maggie's video and following it closely with Abby's. They are very different approaches, but together I think they could get just about anyone spindling, provided that they were willing to put in the time to practice. 

The last resource I want to talk about is Devin Helman's video class for Long Thread Media called Spindle Spinning Essentials. While I think it would be difficult to teach yourself to spin on a spindle with nothing but this class--Devin doesn't demonstrate park and draft, for example, a technique that saved my bacon when I was learning to spin on a spindle--I think this video is a great next step for those who are already comfortable with the basics of spindling. Devin demonstrates the differences between short and long drafts on a spindle, which neither Maggie nor Abby talk about. They also delve into building cops (demonstrating the difference between a "good cop" and a "bad cop") and demonstrate a few different plying setups. Throughout the emphasis is on how accessible spindles are as effective, inexpensive, and portable tools.

So, to sum up: if you're just getting started with spindling and you prefer a simple, bare bones approach, start with Maggie Casey's Getting Started on a Drop Spindle. If you love knowing the why as well as the how, and you're not likely to get overwhelmed by lots of information, Abby Franquemont's video version of Respect the Spindle might be a good starting place, but everyone interested in spindle spinning should watch it or read Respect the Spindle, the book. For information on different drafting methods for spindling, or just for a different take on spindling, I recommend Devin Helman's Spindle Spinning Essentials.

Tell me, dear Sheepspotter, do you spin on spindles? I'd love to know more about your relationship with spindles and spindling? Head on over to the dedicated discussion thread in The Flock to comment on this episode and discuss it with me and other listeners. The link is in the show notes for this episode, which you'll find right inside your podcast app. So just open up the description for this episode, click the link, and you'll be taken right to the thread.

Darling Sheepspotter, that's it for me this week. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next week to tell you about my favorite spindle for new spindlers: it's inexpensive, beautiful, and a joy to spin with. You definitely don't want to miss it. Until then, spin something! I promise it will do you good.