UPDATED 17 July 2017! I originally wrote this in 2008, but have updated it annually ever since. At this time of year, we seem to always have a huge crop of new spinners and would-be spinners looking for information about getting started. So I thought I’d take a morning and pull together an overall post […]

Updated as of 11 February 2015, to reflect the latest wheels on the market and latest pricing. Choosing your first spinning wheel is somewhat like choosing your first car. There’s a level on which it doesn’t really matter exactly what it is, because it’s going to do the trick to get you started, and odds […]

1. What is spinning from the fold? The short answer is this: you take a not-very-long length of spinnable fiber, and instead of presenting it end-first to be spun, fold it over. Instead of drawing fiber off the end of your supply, it now comes from the folded part in the middle. Linda Diak from […]

The long-awaited Pagoda Shawl is finally done! Let’s recap the story. At some point early this year, Pippi gifted me with some fiber in her Pagoda colourway. And of course, that prompts me to say, “Check out what Shannon did with that fiber also!” Here’s how mine spun up: I spent a while pondering what […]

Well, I’m making progress on the Foggy, Foggy Dew shawl, though it’s reached the point where things seem to move at less than a snail’s pace. It’s about 15 minutes per plain purl row, 20ish for a pattern row. So this seems to translate to about a repeat per day. I weighed things yesterday afternoon, […]

I spent rainy yesterday tidying a bit. It was a day of impressive thunderstorms. Storm the third for the day was reported on the evening news as having dumped 1.65 inches of rain on this town specifically, in about 90 minutes. Not a good week to want to dry things outside, I suppose. So, I […]

In-progress shots of lace are always so disappointing. But I’m sure enough of you are lace knitters to know that, and thus be able to do a little light imagining… The Triangle (will somebody name this for me? I am no good at naming things, I fear) has grown to the point of being about […]

Friday morning, and Thursday did result in almost all the batt club boxes making it out the door. The remaining 4 go today, whew! Yesterday also brought me this: Thank you, Amy! As it happens, I was just thinking, “man, I need a little bag to put some of these things on my end table […]

Some of you may recall these 50/50 merino/tencel dye testers… There were several, but these were the pair that I culled to spin for myself and test which of several methods of dyeing I planned to use with merino/tencel moving forward. The one at rear, with the greens, remains unspun as yet, but I did […]

Well, here it is, Wednesday morning, and I haven’t gotten that plying video done yet. It might happen today, but there’s also some production work that has to happen, it’s the boy’s last day of school tomorrow and he’s got a couple of days of early release, and lo and behold, it turns out we’ve […]