Coil Spinning

I attended a beta coilspinning class yesterday at Meridian Jacobs, a sheep farm a few miles away where I’m a farm club member. Rachel, our teacher, had prepared a massive quantity of fiber and inserts for us to choose from.

I had found a kaleidoscope viewer in the bottom of a bin when I was searching for a rarely-used flyer for my Lendrum spinning wheel. My favorite place to spin is in the second fastest gear of my fastest flyer, not the slow loop-a-doop of the so-called plying flyer, but this latter has a large orifice and is excellent for art yarn, which we were attempting yesterday. This kaleidoscope allows you to look at colors and see what might work well together and in what proportion without having to commit to anything beforehand, which was especially helpful since we had such a wealth of materials to choose from.

I ended up making a batt to match the royal blue singles I’d spun on a spindle to demonstrate at the Sheepmowers event on campus last month. I threw in some complementary coral colored wool and some analogous green. Coilspinning means wrapping fiber around a central yarn (thin mohair, in this case) by means of controlling the entry angles and literally winding the fiber around until the core is covered.

I’d done this before so I took it a step further and pushed the wrapped fiber into little beehives which then get fixed in place by the tighter coils that follow.

It was a great day especially playing with the Ashford 4” Wild Drum Carder.