Old Dog, New Trick

Day 144: Who says you can't teach an old dog a new trick? While poking around in YouTube for something else entirely (a recipe, I think it was), "Fractal Spinning" cropped up in recommended videos, and since I'd never heard of it under that name, I decided to watch it. As it turned out, the technique followed almost exactly the same method used for making tweed yarns, but the name had been brought up to the current era (I rather like the new one). However, the spinner was holding her wool differently than I'd seen before, so I checked her other videos and found one which referred to "spinning off the fold." Now I learned to spin before I entered kindergarten and have always held my wool the way my grandmother taught me. There are other ways to get the same results, certainly, and the draw method (long or short) is largely a matter of personal preference. That said, spinning off the fold, i.e., bending the wool fibers over a finger and allowing them to feed from their centers, intrigued me. I happened to have some nasty Coopworth wool on the wheel, hanging fire because it has been so unpleasant to spin, so I said, "Why not? It'll do for practice, and maybe I can get it out of here so I can spin that nice Corriedale in the cupboard." I pulled the wheel out of its corner and ripped off a chunk of Coopworth roughly as long as the wool staple (the length of a single fiber). Within the first few inches of spinning, I could tell that I had greater control over the amount of fiber being fed into the drafting triangle. Not only was I able to spin with a more consistent diameter, I could spin a finer strand even with the coarse Coopworth. Half an hour later, I was halfway through my alloted length of roving, which also told me that spinning off the fold was going to be significantly faster by virtue of not having to fuss with it so much. The Coopworth is nearly done but for plying (a quick job), and I will never, ever buy it again. And I am so impressed with spinning off the fold that I may just turn some of that lovely soft Corriedale into two-ply fingering weight for socks.