Third Thursdays Guild Tip

Tonight is the PLY Spinners Guild Third Thursday foundational spin-in! Here’s a tip to tide you over until the spin-in! 

After you’ve jogged for two and a half hours and you’ve exhausted your muscles, what do your legs feel like the next day? Are they sore? Do they feel weak? How about when you’ve been lifting weights (not something I know from experience, but I’ve been told)? How do your arms feel the next day? Sore, right? 

Hand exhaustion is different. When we exercise our hands, it doesn’t always present as soreness.  

The first sign of hand exhaustion is clumsiness. We lose fine motor control. If you are using a drop spindle, you might notice after spinning for a long period that you start to drop your spindle more frequently. On a wheel, you might let your yarn slip through your fingers and have to rethread the orifice. You might also start to get a less consistent yarn.  

While you should take frequent breaks during a spinning session, once you get to the point of clumsiness, stop for the day. Rest your hands for an extended period. This is the hardest thing to do, because you’re usually in the zone when the clumsiness hits. However, this rest is what gives our bodies time to repair and rebuild muscle.  

We don’t usually think about the muscles in our hands, but it takes muscle to control fiber and twist. And it takes time to build up those muscles. Pottery and spinning use the same hand muscles, but very few other crafts use these muscles. Shorter spinning sessions on a frequent basis will help you build hand muscle far better than one marathon session.  

Neat! Now that you know something new about hand muscles…if you haven’t signed up for the Spinners Guild, you should check it out to learn all kinds of important facts from some of the smartest spinners out there! 

Meagan Condon is an internationally published writer and fiber artist with extensive experience teaching the gentle and not so gentle art of making yarn. Her areas of focus are microscopy of fiber, breed studies, plant fibers, natural dyes, digital community, and the science behind textiles. Since 2014, she has been teaching at fiber retreats and conferences across North America, and she is the director of marketing for PLY Magazine. You can follow her at www.luthvarian.com.