Last week-end I was invited by Kent Guild of Spinners, Dyers and Weavers, to tutor a workshop for their annual members day.

The workshop started at 11.15am and finished at 3.30pm and with lunch there wasn’t a huge amount of time for the participants to get their head around Creative Spinning from an image as their source of inspiration!

However, those who took part really rose to the occasion and produced some lovely yarns using colour blending techniques and some fancy yarn techniques.

Some of the results are shown on the left and the inspiration ranged from images from costumes,

Images of landscapes,

Images from greetings cards

Images from postcards,

And images from gardening magazines.

By the way, I drove down on the Friday evening and stayed with Kent Guild member, Valerie Selden and her husband John, who own a lovely B & B in Mersham called Glebe Place.  So if you’re wanting to explore Kent or stop off on the way to France their hospitality is worth sampling.

Dineke's inspiration, yarn and some design work

Alet's inspiration, yarns and some design work

This past week has been busy and exciting. I have had two Dutch friends, Dineke and Alet, studying creative spinning with me and they both produced some gorgeous yarns.

We started with an image – one each – and then I asked them to undertake various exercises: isolating the colours, making a collage, then we photocopied th e original and collage or drawing in black and white. This helped enormously with structure. By the end of the second day we had some stunning yarns.

All this activity took place in my studio at the Duchy Square Centre for Creativity in Princetown. On their day of rest (!) the ladies did a monoprinting course with David Lister, another Duchy artist, and they have more ideas about design. Then a day admiring Lesley Prior’s gorgeous fibre animals, Bowmont sheep, angora goats and cashmere goats, then then another day spinning and finally they joined in with an indigo workshop that I was running.

 

Jane

I’ve just completed two bobbins of singles yarn spun as I was shown at the workshop run by the Guild of Longdraw Spinners at the Derbyshire Guild a couple of Saturdays ago.

I spun part of a beautiful Portland fleece which has loads of crimp, which I hope you can see here.

Being very fine and crimpy, I realised, as I was spinning, that I might just have a few problems with this method of spinning as it has a tendency to stretch the fibres and I felt that I might just have a problem with the crimp wanting to relax once plyed and off the bobbin.

You will see from this image just what I mean! I have seen worse, but there is a fair degree of relaxing of the crimp that causes the yarn to be rather unruly, to say the least!

Once I realised what was happening, and remembering how Margaret Stove described how she relaxed the crimp before allowing any twist into the drafted fibres, I began to modify my spinning technique. If you don’t know this technique, Margarets book is “Merino – Handspining, Dyeing and Working with Merino and Superfine Wools”, ISBN 0-7090-4711-8.

Although this isn’t a good image, you will see that the plyed yarn, at the top, is not wanting to relax and crimp up again.

So what have I learnt! Well, this method of longdraw is not to be used with very fine, crimpy fleece. Rather, is should be spun using Margaret Stoves method, only allowing the twist into the drafted fibres once the crimp is relaxed. I will try a small sample using my usual longdraw technique, where I prepare the fibres into rolags first and see if that produces a smoother less unruly yarn. I’ll let you know anon!

Alison

On Saturday I went to my guild for a lovely workshop with the Guild of Longdraw Spinners. Three lovely ladies, including the Chair, Pam, gave an interesting talk on how the guild formed, followed by a very informative workshop on longdraw spinning.

I’ve been using the longdraw method for quite a few years, mostly with very short fibres, silk noils, cotton, downland fleece, etc., where I prepared small tightish rolags before spinning. However, we were shown how to spin directly from fleece using the longdraw method, so this was something new to me. Pam was very passionate about longdraw and so was an excellent teacher and started by showing us how to twist a lock of fleece before drafting by hand without our wheel! This gave everyone the confidence to add the wheel into the “mix”.

By the afternoon we were all spinning with the longdraw method and Pam and her collegues showed us how to us her “Tool Box” to improve our technique! By the time I left the workshop at 4pm I’d just about spun a whole bobbin of my lovely soft Portland fleece, now I’ve just got to knuckle down and finish spinning the rest of it! Using longdraw of course.

Two things Pam said were that longdraw was quicker than semi-worsted spinning because you get an arms length of fleece at a time which is quicker, but I would dispute that, as you have to ensure you have enough twist in the arms length before allowing the yarn to be pulled on to the bobbin. Her other note was that you should spin “in the grease” for best results. I’m afraid I’m not an advocate of that, I feel you get better results from washing as any dirt, etc., is not trapped in the yarn and is cleaner as a result. She did say, however, that each to there own and there is no right way or wrong way to spin and I do, whole heartedly, agree with that!

If you’ve always been a little afraid of longdraw spinning, do attend Pam’s workshop, it will really give you confidence to have a good go at it. r

Tomorrow I’m off to my local guild, the Derbyshire Guild, for a workshop with the Longdraw Spinners. It should be a really interesting workshop and am very interested to see which method of Longdraw they teach us or it they teach both.
Jane and I wrote about Traditional English longdraw in our book, but there is an American version, which isn’t “true” English longdraw and usually uses pre-prepared fibres such as tops where the fibres remain parallel when spinning and is more of a worsted/semi-worsted method of spinning. Whereas, “true” English longdraw uses shorter fibres, prepared in rolags and the drafting method ensures the fibres remain in their haphazard arrangement trapping air in the spun yarn and ensuring plenty of loft!
You will find the instructions in Creative Spinning on page 18.

Alison

Alison had a very enjoyable week end with the Oxford Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers. She gave a talk on the Saturday afternoon on how she and Jane wrote the book and on Sunday they had a mini Creative Spinning workshop.
There were some wonderful yarns produced and here are a couple of images of the work that was achieved in just one day!

It was really difficult to decide which images to use here, and the ones chosen were picked at random, as every yarn reflected its inspirational image beautifully.

In real life all the yarns were so beautiful that the images can’t show so well.

Alison and I, together with our good friend Amanda Hannaford, were invited to The Hague. Alison and I gave a Masterclass in Creative Spinning and Amanda taught cotton spinning and using English wool combs. We had a wonderful time with a group of really excellent students and some delicious yarns were produced.

The class was surprised that we could start with a design source (photo, object) and, using a few straightforward techniques, produce a yarn that was not a copy of but relates to the original source.

After working with yarns and fibres for a few years, I

developed a “tech” sheet to help me keep a record of what I do. Here, on the right is the front of one of my sheet.

Below you will see the back of the “tech” sheet with it’s wrapping of the blended fibres.

This isn’t a particularly fancy yarn, just a play at blending the correct colours, really!  There is space on the back of the sheet to show elements of each yarn, from singles right through to the different plys.

If you’d like a copy of these sheets please fill in the comment form below and I’ll email a pdf copy to you.

Alison

Alison and Jane have started this blog to encourage you to be creative in your spinning.  They hope you will all enjoy reading about their exploits in the world of spinning creatively.