cotton spinning spider

My father recently noted I've become a spider, he might be right. Across the table from him, I am spinning a fine white line from cotton fluff.

Since spring, cotton has become one of my favorite fibers to spin. While at a handweaver's conference last March, I had the good fortune to meet an incredible spinner who specializes in spinning cotton. At every opportunity I sat at her booth, surrounded by mounds of the softest cotton roving, and watched mesmerized as she spun by turns on her spinning wheel and takli. Fluff turned to thread in long stretches, little slubs deftly smoothed out into fine lines as if by magic. The process from the outside is mysterious and the effect hypnotic. Joan, the spinner, wore an exquisite blouse made from cotton grown in her garden, hand spun and handwoven. She explained that while the spinning wheel was essential for speed, the takli was her preferred tool for spinning warp threads because they could be spun more finely and then plied for strength at the same thickness as a weft thread spun (and used as a single) on a wheel. In just the span of a couple short days, I had become the student of a Spider.
For months since, I've carried this little spindle, a lap bowl, and cotton fluff everywhere. When the opportunity arises, I sit and draw a fine fine thread from the tips of my fingers on one hand as the other flicks the spindle to spin. It stretches up and out as far as I can reach before I twist it onto the shaft of the spindle. Whenever visiting friends, watching movies, waiting for a table at dinner, or riding in the car it comes out and spins. My teacher, Joan, warned me simply to not to use it at auctions, as she inadvertently agreed to purchase a cow once. The takli sat in silence for a time after I managed to break it, but I've since replaced it and have been spinning again.

Months after that first little flick of the spindle, I've spun just a couple of ounces of tiny thread which I'll ply together for warping my own loom someday.

spun drawing

208
thread 208 feet
drawing 22 x 30

A record of spinning string. Made with a newly constructed tool; a drawing spindle.
Eventually it will be a series.

For now a larger project is in the works (to be completed in May) so much of my studio time is spent spinning on the wheel.

a list

In spinning I have become a connoisseur of fiber, their names a litany of possibilities.

Merino,
Finn,
Blue-faced Leichester,
Coopworth,
Icelandic,
Gulf Coast Native
: just a few of the sheep.

Then exotics:
camel,
angora,
cashmere,
qiviut,
yak,
alpaca,
llama.

Then bombyx and tussah,
one a silk taken before emergence of the moth,
the other taken after.

Bamboo,
tencel,
seacell,
and milk,
the fibers born through a chemical broth, broken and remade;
the fibers squeak between the press of my fingers.

Plants;
[bast and fruit]
cotton,
hemp,
ramie,
and
linen.

It's an ever expanding list.

An induction to the fiber world is not unlike being taken under the wing of any other epicure. There are steps to take. Look first. Does it gather light in softness or shine like silk. One tastes fiber with a squeeze and a small roll between the thumb and forefinger. Is it soft like merino? Slick? Sproingy? Does it squeak? Is it stiff or lighter than air? Raise it to the soft underbelly of your chin and decide if belongs there for long. Is there a whiff of the warm breath of a grazing animal or the bite of vinegar in a dyebath?



side note: My local yarn store, Hanks has been fostering such activity.

stored

A spun thread is a thing of energy. Each turn of the spindle is trapped in the fiber, it collapses the chaos of a puff, stills it, stores the turn. The spindle's weight holds the tension, the whorl's inertia carries through assisted occasionally by the flick of fingers, twist upon twist upon twist.

The wool fed to it lengthens the thread and the ever turning spindle lowers to the ground. When spun beyond the thread's capacity to store energy the spindle's whirling slows and the finished thread is raised to be wrapped around the shaft. If the thread is let loose it meets itself with glee, wrapping swiftly into a ply. Playful and new. An active line.

When newly spun and measured into a skein it twists in a hundred places, loopy and wild. Some tame it with hot water and soap, but sometimes it should just be.

*my first wheelspun, merino wool*

thread harvest

April planting of five Upland Cotton seeds.
September harvest of fourty-five bolls.
A boll is made up of four to five sections holding four to eight seeds.
Attached to each seed surface are many many fibers each of which is an outgrowth of a single cell that develops in the surface layer of the seed.
In the beginning the fiber cell elongates to its full length as a thin–walled tube. As it matures, the fiber wall is thickened by deposits of cellulose inside the tube, leaving a hollow area in the center. When the growth period ends the living material dies, and the fiber collapses and twists about its own axis.
Each boll may hold up to 500,000 fibers.

Some prepare all those fibers before spinning by removing the seeds one by one and combing the fibers to roll them into little pencil sized punnis.
With my handspindle I spun directly from the soft seeded mass. The fibers tearing from the seed bit by bit.
What will one boll make?

One spool of course.
The cotton still blooms and a second harvest has nearly arrived.

tangled year

When this blog was begun over a year ago, I was moving into a new studio(house), trying to reorient myself in my art practice, and wanting to record and share my makings and thoughts with others. What was found through musing and making was a thread, or more precisely thread. From a tiny scribble on a bed drawn three years ago, blossomed a tiny mattress sprouting thread, a thread drawn round a bracelet, a thread unleashed from a bird's cry, Toru Okada's plaintive desire to unravel a tangled thread mirrors my own (see my sidebar), embedded thread, the crisscross caresses of powerline threads, and just now I am exploring the origins of thread by making some of my own. Spinning and untangling, I gather, will keep me busy for a while still.

In honor of the year of making and writing here and the community I've had the pleasure to meet, I'm giving away one little drop spindle's worth of hand spun wool thread. This is spun on the spindle I made with the wool of a sheep that lives locally. I find it a simple beautiful object, and as I consistently find myself wishing that others could touch the things I make, now seems the perfect opportunity to share. I'll choose at random one person who leaves a comment here between now and Friday July 4th. If you've never commented here before, please do, I'd love to hear what you think of my threads or the other work I've been making this year. Be sure to leave an email address if you don't link to a blog so I can reach you.

Cotton

Driving up through the state of Georgia last November was to experience a different kind of economy. In western Georgia industrial agriculture holds royal court and Cotton is king. November is the end of cotton season, and between towns and patches of forest the fields are white. Tractors tear through them at high speed, leaving a wake of naked stalks. Mysteriously this process ends with cotton bales the size of freight cars patiently awaiting pick up. They prissily wear plastic cover proclaiming farmers names, while leaking their essence at the corners. White fluff litters both sides the highway all through the state. A small sliver of unharvested stalks beckon at the edge of the road, and I jump out to pluck bolls from them and fill my shirt. They have the smell of green pecan hulls, acrid and slightly sweet.

My dad used to pronouce "Oh lordy pick a bale of cotton" after a hard day landscaping another client's yard, and it's not till I get home with my meager cotton pickings that I look up the song sung by slaves and then by Leadbelly in 1945. ( I watched that video at least four times, with my mouth hanging open, it's beautiful: the video's color, his singing, playing a twelve string guitar, his educational spoken bit right at the beginning, there's joy and desperation and sadness and family running all through it.)The bolls sat for weeks in a corner of my studio, the husks turning brown and exploding in white puffs on the floor. Pick them up and mining for seeds is the game. Each boll has three or four sections similar to an orange made up of tightly packed fibers huddled around as many as eight or more seeds. There are three parts used from the cotton plant: the inch long fibers that pull away from the seed fairly easily are used for spinning into cloth, the short fibers still attached to the seed are called linters, which are used for making paper and the seed itself is pressed for oil. Many cotton handspinners insist you must pick out the seeds and vegetable matter and card them on very fine carders (cat combs work well) lay little sections side by side and roll them around a pencil to make cotton punis. A few drop spindle users spin off the seed itself. The former method seems a little tedious and so I have been following the latter using a supported spindle I made from a wooden toy wheel and a dowel. Though this method is hard to get a perfectly even or thicker thread, the feel of the cotton pulling in tiny pop pop from the seed under my fingers is satisfying. Five of the seeds I have spun in this way are the ones growing in my garden now, the first bloomed yesterday a small cream hibiscus flower that today closed and blushed a shade of purple while tiny skeins of cotton thread await the next transformation.

spin(dle)

Everything is spinning these days. Living in a college town means feeling its pulse quicken at the end-of-semester, exam stress and excitement of summer plans reach through all of us and quicken our own, regardless of our associations with the school.

Taking a tiny break this week from watching the wheel spin to notice the caterpillars on my snapdragon flower arrangement consuming only the blossoms, decided to raise them up to see what kind of butterfly they'd be, feeding their voracious jaws more snapdragons from my garden hoping they'd spin too. Instead most of them disappeared, save one, who mysteriously declined to make a cocoon and burrowed into some cheesecloth near the flower vase, laid there for a few days bloating until I looked again and it had cast off it's soft green skin in exchange for a hard brown one. When touched, its tail wiggles an ineffectual protest. Looked up this mysterious behavior of digging and it seems it may becoming a moth. Apparently butterflies tend to make cocoons while few moths like to burrow.
Hopefully handling it this way won't kill it. Strange isn't it? The deep black eye stares, and while that delicate strand of antennae and wing veins emboss the shell. Fully self-contained and carefully packed, its wings grow, pleating and folding, perfectly aligned parcels. When it exchanges this skin for the next, it will pump nearly all of the body's blood into the wing's hollow capillaries stretching them out until dry, when it will pull its blood back into the body and swim in the air. Until then it lays buried, sleeping, changing; meditating on what it will become as it's cells respond.

Thoughts dwelling on my little moth drawing I made after my mom died- moth(er).

Finally started spinning the wool washed and carded in November. The staple of the wool is short, maybe 2 inches and my tendency is to spin it thin, not yarn but thread really, its thickness wavers a bit like some of the powerlines I watch so carefully, both undulating heartbeats whispering stories about the creation of civilization as we know it. This beginnning from the most raw material building toward the destination, even when unknown, suits me, I love knowing and controlling every step. My tiny garden now includes cotton and flax seedlings to explore this more. The cotton seeds are from cotton bolls I picked in Georgia in November, the flax are from my local grocery store. They were planted on a whim, so a bit late on the cotton and maybe the wrong season for flax.
cotton seedlings 3 1/2 weeks old
flax 3 1/2 weeks old
white acre peas 4 days old (not destined to be fiber, just food)

Baa, Baa black sheep have you any wool?

Three years ago when I lived in the country I managed to wheedle some free wool out of a farmer neighbor, well really all I had to do was ask. The farmer was in fact, also the co-owner of the local hardware store, Reddick Bros., where I would frequently wander about cooing at all the baby chicks, ducks and rabbits and running my hands over ancient farm equipment sold "used" again and again over at least the last eighty years, and before I left would happily purchase the odd ball of twine, handful of rough nails, or once a mysterious old tool that resembled a wooden handled iron with a ridge down the center (I'd later discovered it was a tool for masonry work). On one such trip, knowing the brothers had sheep, I finally gathered the courage to ask if I could purchase some wool. Looking a smidge surprised the brother behind the counter bid me to call his other brother who would likely give me a bit of old wool. After making the proper arrangements, I was show to an open barn where said wool languished on an decrepit Cadillac, both covered in a fine layer of dust, mold and hay. A good country girl and fearless about bugs and dirt, I recklessly filled up and proudly waddled away with three bags full. I imagine the farmer later told his incredulous wife the story of the odd little artist girl who wanted half rotten wool.

A few weeks later I washed a bit of it to spin a bit of clumsy yarn that my ancestors would have scoffed at as an embarrassment, but I still find inordinately pleasing. I'll call it worsted if need be. The rest has been sitting filthy in a shed, forgotten, until "the move" six months ago and had to tote it to my new home, where it has been living on a side porch ever since. A quick inventory reveals about a half a fleece of beautiful brown wool and an entire fleece of yellowish brittle wool, that I am mostly avoiding, I have heard yellow wool dyes well, so maybe it will be indigo or charcoal grey someday. Today I have finally undertaken the task of washing another batch of wool. It's not high quality and hasn't been well taken care of, so it's not good for spinning. If it ever was I wouldn't know, I suspect that the herd of sheep kept by the Reddick brothers is not for wool production, but perhaps they are kept for food, hence the free wool. Whatever the case it seems to felt just fine, which incidentally is exactly what I desire. Washing has been put off for several reasons, one being, to put it lightly, it is a disgusting chore, the fleeces are filled with dirt, bugs, grease, and other "barnyard ephemera." The process is ancient, and it smells of ancient women's tasks and I revel in that despite the filth. My mind wanders. Are these tasks somehow part of our memory, carried out for so many generations, the techniques are so easily lost, but is the essence of it forgotten too? Who washes the Fates wool? Do they spin it directly from mythical sheep, or is our fate spun from our very hair, or is the strand as fine as our dna?

Alas onto technicalities most of us do not remember. . .
My cleaning method is loosely adapted from a few different sites, and I am very inexperienced in cleaning wool, so I suggest if you want a proper instructions don't follow mine. That said, my basic method involves filling a bucket or large metal bowl with hot, hot water in my bathtub (my hot water heater is really hot, so I don't have to bother with boiling water to get it to a good temperature), adding a big squirt of dish washing liquid, then dunking a net bag used for washing lingerie filled with the wool into the bowl. I poke it down with some sort of long utensil because the water is too hot for comfort and then let it soak for 15 or so minutes, I sometimes press the bag down, but don't stir because I don't want felt just yet. When I wash the brown wool the water turns an opaque black, I can see the white bag poking out of the water and then nothing, it's fairly gross. Drain the wool for 10 minutes, then fill up a bowl with fresh water rinse in bowls of clean water first hot, then subsequently cooler, until the water runs clear.
Then it must dry and be carded before anything else, I initially tried "carding" it just by pulling apart locks longways and brushing them with a comb, and that gets most of the leaves and dirt out, but I found it too daunting to do a lot that way, so I saved up for some wool carders, which I'll use on the new batch. Hopefully tomorrow will find me on my porch carding heaps of wool. . .