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. But first, I'm just going to tell you what I was doing for the past two weeks since we didn't post episodes for the past two weeks.
And that was because the episodes were all written, they were ready to go, and I woke up one Sunday morning and sat up in bed and the room started spinning. And it turned out that I had benign positional paroxysmal vertigo. And this is something that is not one bit medically serious. It's just when one of the little crystals in your ear that helps your brain understand where your head is in space, one of them gets kind of displaced and there's a they're very simple.
You know non-surgical not even medical solutions to this if you can find a physio who specializes in vestibular rehabilitation which it turns out is what I needed and it was absolutely miserable. Not medically serious, but really, really debilitating. And I spent about 10 days with the room spinning or vomiting or just plain dizzy. And finally, the physio and I managed to get the crystals back into where they're supposed to be.
So that was two weeks, And I really couldn't do anything, even read a podcast script. So I'm really sorry about that. It means that our monthly schedule is going to be a little messed up. I had originally planned that we would finish up the month of January on spindle spinning. Turns out that material is now going to extend into the first couple of weeks in February. and I haven't entirely decided what's going to happen in February. So,
All of that to say, I missed you. Sorry I wasn't here. Sorry I didn't post episodes. I'm feeling much better and really feeling entirely well at this point. So it's all good. So let's talk about spindle spinning. I learned to spin on a wheel first. And I always say that that is a good thing because I think if I'd started on a spindle, I would have given up.
I am a person who absolutely loves collecting and kind of messing around with spindles, but I am also someone who seldom actually completes an entire spindle spun skein. So I don't really consider myself a spindle spinner, even though I do have lots of spindles. I love spindles. And prospective students who are interested in my spin school course, sometimes ask if they can take the course without a wheel with just a spindle. And I always tell them that I don't think that that's a great idea.
I am not the person from whom anyone should learn spindle spinning. And fortunately, there are great teachers who teach spindle spinning. And so today I'm going to talk about three of them and give you my favorite spindle spinning resources. My favorite first step for brand new spindle spinners is Maggie Casey's video, Get 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 a really great job of anticipating beginners' 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 that they can slow the spinning process down into discrete steps. She also demonstrates pre-drafting 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 a ton of 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, which she demonstrates with the singles ingeniously placed under ordinary clay flower pots, create a skein, and finish their yarn. It is just enough to get started. And the hardest thing I think about teaching beginners is it's not figuring out what to include, it's figuring out what to leave out and Maggie's teaching is always a master class on that very thing.
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, and I will have more to say on that in a moment, even in professionally produced videos, and I really, really appreciate it here.
Now, 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 Abby Frankemont's video class, Respect the Spindle, which is the companion to her book of the same title. If you are at all serious about spindling, you should actually get them both. The book appears to be still 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, in my opinion, one of the best, most comprehensive spinning books currently available. Praised Maggie's minimalist, just the facts, ma'am, approach to teaching beginners. Abby is 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 with presented with a lot of information, she's also a marvelous teacher.
I took a spindle spinning class with her many, many years ago, and I think about that class all the time. There were maybe, it was a big class, there were maybe 20 people in the class. Some of them had been spindling for a while. Others were touching a spindle for the first time. And 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 in a pretty abstract way.
But somehow, by the end of the day, everybody was spinning. And more remarkably, everybody was spinning pretty well. It was like a pedagogical 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 that I took with her.
Here again, the camera work and the 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're 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 Hellman'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 totally saved my bacon when I was learning to spin on the 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 in their videos, and they also delve into building cops and demonstrate a few different plying setups. And throughout, the emphasis is on how accessible spindles are as an effective, inexpensive, and portable tool.
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 Frankemont's video version of Respect the Spindle might be a good starting place. But everybody interested in spindle spinning should watch it or read Respect the Spindle, the book, or preferably both.
For information on different drafting methods for spindling, or just for a different take on spindling, I recommend Devin Hellman'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 is it for me this week. Thank you so much for listening. I will 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.