a long spinning story.... 0.o'

Today is my day off and I want to work on some spinning. Although I learned how to spin a very long time ago I have just so to speak " dabbled" with it. At the time that I learned to spin.. spinning in the raw or in the grease was all the thing.. and I did learn on a drop spindle. But since that time I have never really liked using the drop spindle and I pretty much suck at it. And come to think of it I have really bad spinning technique.. even though I did take lessons that back in the day were very expensive. The teacher would show me what to do.. watch me for a few minutes then go do stuff and come back like 20 minutes latter and see how I was doing.. so.. in that time I developed some bad habits and never did pick up the correct way to spin.. I was missing the pinching part and for some reason I never heard her say anything about pinching.. just drawing the fibers..that part I could do..I then purchased my own Ashford traditional spinning wheel and some how produced decent yarn...but I continued to spin the same way until recently.. a series of events transpired that led me to watch spinning on youtube.com and noticed that I was missing a step in my spinning.. you are probably wondering why I haven't noticed this before.. part of the reason is that most of my life I spent crafting alone. Back when I was learning there wasn't anyone close by that spun or knit(no internet!!).. there were a lot of quilters and yes I did that too.. So up until the last couple of years I didn't really know that I was spinning incorrectly.. because I was producing some nice yarns..I first noticed this in one of my knitting groups when Jody brought some of her spinning with her to do at the meeting..this inspired me to spin again and I then noticed that she spun a little differently than what I had been doing.. ok..enough rambling on and back to the series of events...Elaine from my knitting group wanted to learn how to spin and I suggested she bring her supplies to the next meeting but that I wasn't the best person to show her.. so.. I brought my spindle with me and proceeded to demonstrate how to spin telling her that maybe someone else should show her how because I had poor technque .. well this rekindled my desire to spin with a drop spindle again.. and I started to practice with it more and decided I would like to get a nicer drop spindle at this point.. this is my drop spindle in the picture below.. yes.. it is the same drop spindle I learned with and is probably and antique by now.. most definetly..This led me to look online for some pretty drop spindles.. and man I dont remember them being so pricey..which led me to ask my son who just started wood carving to see if he could make me a pretty one.. which led me to send a bunch of pictures of pretty spindles to him .. then he wanted to see how it was used.. which led me to watch a bunch of youtube spinning videos .. which after seeing them over and over a little light went off... so I went back to my anchient drop spindle and we started to get along better and I'm actually spinning the correct way now which is way faster and for some reason.. It's like learning to knit continental after knitting the throw method.. So today I'm devoting to some spinning both on the drop spindle and the spinning wheel.

















I purchased this fiber a while back and haven't touched it because I got caught up in Christmas knitting so I want to complete a skein today if I can. I was thinking of adding a little angora here and there on the second spool.. sounds interesting to me..