Yay! Yarn stash busted and I’ve picked up my spinning again! But oof. Taking a month off to reduce the yarn backlog definitely took the edge off the skills I had built up. It is taking a bit for my fingers to remember the magic.

I have motivation though! My sister bought me a beautiful rosewood ring distaff, and I’m figuring out how to use it.

The purpose of a distaff is to provide a way to keep the source fiber organized while spinning. It is quite frustrating to have the wrong bit of roving wrap itself in the yarn twist as you spin the spindle. A distaff keeps the excess fiber up and out of the way.

The first thing I did was load up the distaff with lots of roving. Oops. Nope. I read some more, then pre drafted my roving (thinned it out), and tried again with much less.

As I am learning, starting off with smaller amounts of fiber is much easier. In the picture above, I am holding the spindle the way I think it was designed to be held. When I wasn’t paying attention, my grip would switch and my finger would come out of the ring, as pictured below.

The distaff definitely helps with fiber management, and as I became more comfortable with it, I was able to load more fiber. There are many different kinds of distaffs as well as other methods of fiber management. So exciting! More experiments!