Hand spinning - a personal history

In preparation for my friend's visit over Christmas I started tidying up my living room and came across some partially plied handspun. This fiber has been spun in fits and spurts over the course of maybe a year. In the spirit of tidying, I plied and plied and plied some more, wound, niddy-noddied, skeined, washed and stretched and voila! 300 yards of yarn! My living room was maybe not as tidy as I would have liked when my friends arrived.

This is only my fourth handspun yarn and I have to say, damn, I'm good! HA, the humility!

I taught myself to spin after watching my friend Amy make some beautiful lace weight with her drop spindle, buying a beginner kit from a store on Etsy. I'm not going to mention where because I was extremely frustrated with the kit. The spindle was not very good quality and didn't have a notch on the top which I really need. Then the fiber, one part was combed top, the other was a batt and was snarled and just plain impossible to spin from as a beginner. After fighting with it and cursing more than was probably necessary, I finally wrangled something useable out of the fiber.

 

124 yards of varying thickness that I knitted up into a pair of mitts for my mom.

The leftovers from this original kit I kept as singles. Delicious, delicious singles.

Emboldend by actually managing to produce a useable product from such a bad start, I purchased myself a new pretty spindle and a bump of fluff from a different Etsy seller. And spun up thread. Lots of pretty thread.

 This yarn is pretty stuff, if I do say so myself. 530 yards of fingering weight. Beautiful. Given that this was a skill I thought was beyond me in the first weeks of trying, I'm glad I stuck with it because it's relaxing and oh so satisfying. There is currently 4oz of a lovely green fiber waiting for my next spinning adventure, but I'm trying really hard to not acquire a stash. Spinning is a slow process!