I bought a drop spindle at the NY Sheep and Wool a few weeks back and the lady I purchased it from demonstrated how to use it. I bought one that you can use to spin from both sides. One has a hook and the other has a groove in order to make the hitch around. I practiced for about an hour today and it is slow. I am attempting the park and draft technique and have attempted from both sides. This is going to get some getting used to. I think I get the basic concept but knowing how to let loose the roving and keep it even is proving challenging. My 'yarn' (which is this gorgeous pale peach merino roving I got at the previous year's festival) is also still pretty thick at this point. I'll let you know when I have a skein done. And, if you have any advice for me I'd love to hear about it.
4 comments:
Your yarn looks exactly like my first yarn did. Park and draft is a perfect way to start.
Pre-drafting your roving can help. You divide the roving up vertically into thinner strips then draft each strip out a little bit. Or you can just draft the original roving. Just pull gently to loosen it up all the way along. Then wind it back up like a ball of yarn. You will still have to do extra drafting as you spin.
Sometimes when you buy roving it can be a bit dense and difficult to draft so it's hard to draft and spin at the same time. I almost always pre-draft my roving before I spin, even now I'm more experienced.
It's also a way to divide up the colour variegation, if you divide the roving vertically each strip will have the full sequence of colours.
In this post you can see pictures:
http://needlebook.blogspot.com/2010/04/spinning-singles.html
I divided the roving up into thinner strips then drafted out each strip. You can see in the top photo, there's a softer fluffier looking ball of roving that I'm spinning from. The photo with all the balls of roving is how they looked after I divided them but before drafting them.
I hope this helps!
p.s. I love your spindle!
Claire -
Thanks so much for your advice and for taking the time to write that down for me. I think the pre drafting and diving it into thinner strips will certainly help. I'll let you know.
No advice, but I did drool a bit over the color. YUM!
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