Spinning is a way to get exactly the yarn you want to use when doing another craft method. Unless you buy additional equipment for cleaning and preparing raw fiber, the fiber that you buy ready-to-spin has a comparable cost to buying equivalent yarn. (Hand carders are around $100, and a drum carder is $600+; raw fleece can be $1-10/lb compared to prepared high-quality fiber at ~$30/lb.)
Supplies
There are three major types of spinning tools: drop spindles, e-spinners, and spinning wheels.
Drop spindles
Drop spindles are compact, easy to travel with, and affordable. You can purchase one for around $20, but there are also free designs and models that enable you to make your own if you have access to a laser cutter or 3D printer.
- Laser cut drop spindle: created by FABfiber, with several fun designs for you to download along with a blank one. Includes a video tutorial. The materials cost around $2.
- 3D printable drop spindle: on Printables.com by Jazznow (also available through apps like Bambu Handy); warning: the description prose veers sexist.
- 3D printable Turkish-style drop spindle: available on Thingiverse, by kg6gfq
E-spinners
I learned to spin using an e-spinner. They can cost less than spinning wheels and are fairly compact. I keep one on my desk to use when I’m writing. One of the downsides is that, since you use a dial to set the spin speed and direction, you lose the connection between treadling and the amount of spin you’re putting in the fiber, which can be a major component of spinning instructional materials.
Major spinning wheel manufacturers (like Ashford) also make e-spinners at a price point comparable to traditional spinning wheels, and there are also dedicated manufacturers like Daedalus spinning wheels at a similar price point. All of my spinning wheels have been Electric Eel Wheels from Dreaming Robots, and much more affordable at $150-300.
At Stanford
YarnLab has an Electric Eel Wheel 6.1 in good working order and a moderately wonky Ashford Elizabeth wheel. If you want to do a spinning project, talk to Quinn about getting some bobbins set aside for you. The nice thing about spinning wheels is that you can put individual bobbins on and off the machine in between projects or spinning sessions so other people can use the machine.
Spinning wheels
Spinning wheels are large, typically made out of wood, and come in numerous styles. A new spinning wheel costs around $600-1200. You can find them used (if in uncertain condition) around $200 or even free in estate sales, though it may take some skill and spare parts to get them up and running.
The Woolery has a relatively accessible guide to choosing a spinning wheel without a lot of jargon. JillianEve has a Guide to choosing a spinning wheel video on YouTube.
Resources & tutorials
- YouTube: Drop Spindle for Beginners - by JillianEve
- Book: Respect the Spindle: Spin Infinite Yarns with One Amazing Tool - by Abby Franquemont
- YouTube: Spinning Yarn for Absolute Beginners - by Ashlea Schumaker, uses an Electric Eel Wheel Nano
Spinning & Data
Spinning offers a lot of potential for conveying data, and the more skill you develop with this craft method, the more options you have for using spinning to represent aspects of your data.
The easiest to start with is color. You can spin singles in different colors (e.g. if you map different qualitative data values to different colors, and you have four columns of values), and ply them together to create a 4-ply yarn that represents one or more rows of data that share the same values.
Example project
In the first Data Visualization with Textiles class at Stanford, Connor Yankowitz collaborated with Quinn to spin singles in all the different colors Connor had used to dye their hair over time. They plied the singles together to represent the color combinations Connor made in their hair, with the yarn quantity representing the number of months Connor had their hair that color. The plan was to use a Circular knitting machine to create a scarf out of the yarn.
Plying gives you a lot of potential choices that you can map to data. For instance, the number of singles you ply together can vary to represent ranges of values. Once you have more control over spinning, you can also create singles (and resulting plied yarns) of variable thickness that you can use to represent different ranges of quantities.
There are other spinning techniques that you can use to convey meaning. For instance, you can spin Beehives or slubs at different intervals to represent some aspect of the data, leveraging yarn texture.