Friday 29 June 2012

It's spinning, but not as we know it...


I am not a naturally fine spinner, I have a default spinning style that produces a heavy fingering weight yarn. I'm pretty happy with this, you get lots of yardage from 100g, and you can do quite a lot with 300m of fingering weight. This yarn however, is rather thinner than this, I think you could safely call it frog hair. The lumps and bumps are because I'm spinning silk noil. 


I'm spinning frog hair because I was given one of these for my birthday. 


It's a Charkha, it's used commonly in India for spinning cotton. Ghandi used to spin on one for an hour each day. I'm not using it for spinning cotton, it's not a fibre or yarn I use very much. However it's great for spinning anything with a short staple, so far I've tried out camel and yak down. I'm off to FibreEast in a couple of weeks and plan on getting some cashmere to try as well. 
It's rather addictive, and is a very different style of spinning, the first attempts were very lumpy, but as I'm working out how to get the best out of it the results are getting more even. The silk noil is also helping, definitely hides any imperfections! 

No comments:

Post a Comment