quietly creating

I sold my Ashford Joy this spring. For a variety of reasons, I believed I needed to move on from my interest in visually exploring spinning fibre. Previously, I had gifted one of my Turkish spindles to a lovely, masterful spinner in Europe. And, I bought more printmaking ink – which I will admit, has yet to be opened.

This spring, as I do, I also undertook gluing 82 string mobiles together for a grade 1 painting project. When I handed them back and explained that they were mobiles, one of my students exclaimed that she knew the word “mobile” and it means “phone!”

As my body ages and rails against taking it for granted any longer; I am looking at ways to maintain physical, mental and creative mobility throughout the day. I want to find avenues to do that without that constantly pesky tool: the mobile (phone)!

I’ve been spinning this July on these three beautiful tools: two drop (suspended) spindles from Crafty Jaks and one from Snyder Spindles. For me, a spindle takes two hands to manoeuvre and hence there is an inability to attend to anything else with one’s hands while spinning – including fully operating a digital mobile device.

Inspired by Diana Twiss’ advocacy for making small batch yarn, I created some hand carded mixed fibre collected from leftover wheel spun scraps, botanical dye experiments and a silk hanky I purchased from Lily & Pine years ago. (I fully understand the suspect quality of this mix. I am a Dabbler.)

It will become a small skein of 3-ply yarn and I am spinning again for the joy of it – a way to stay physically mobile and mentally creative using small increments of time.