You know that big wad of cotton that is stuffed in the top of vitamin jars? I don’t see it as often anymore, I guess manufacturers are getting better at making tougher capsules that can withstand shipping, but there was a double dose of cotton in one of the last bottles we purchased. It usually heads to the trash with the bottle seals and packaging. But not this time. I picked it up and thought: “Can I spin this?”

So I meandered over to YouTube and flipped through a couple videos. Cotton is a short staple fiber, and I’d read that drop spindles are usually too heavy to spin cotton (I only had a drop spindle, and a fairly big one at that). I saw a video on how to spin cotton balls on a pencil. I tried that, but with a large knitting needle, but didn’t have much luck.

I saw a few more videos of people using supported spindles. So I made one. Well, really I Frankenstein’d one together. I took a metal afghan hook (because these are fairly easy to come by, and crochet hooks usually have a flat bit in the middle), and cut off the end and sharpened it with a belt sander. Then I took the whorl off the first spindle I made (which was made of the bottoms of two aluminum cans and some playdoh), and drilled the hole large enough to fit my new afghan hook shaft. I used a small ceramic dish as my support bowl.

This setup worked better, but I did have some fits and starts. Turns out the aluminum can whorl is heavy, putting the total weight for this spindle at over two ounces. Yikes! That is even heavier than my Turkish spindle. But I muddled through and was able to produce a single ply yarn.

I used my Turkish spindle to chain ply the single into a three-ply yarn. (It turns out that I can use this as a supported spindle as well because of how I made it. Oh well, sometimes I get caught up in an idea.) Then, because it was such a wee bit of yarn, I crocheted a small motif. Because… why not?