About Us – PLY Magazine

About PLY Magazine

PLY Magazine was initially funded in 2013 by the spinning community via a very successful kickstarter.com campaign. In fact, with PLY’s very limited advertising (less than 15% instead of the normal 40-50%), PLY is still funded by the community — without subscribers and writers, it doesn’t exist. With its very small staff of 5, there is a lot of work and passion in this magazine and we hope it shows.

PLY’s mission as a primary source for spinning knowledge, technique, and opinion is to do the following:

Support, reflect, and respond to the worldwide handspinning community
Provide in-depth material for intermediate to advanced spinners
Inspire new spinners
Celebrate the diversity of spinning and handspinners
Project and reflect an anti-racist value system and one that also supports LBQTIA
Give a voice to spinners everywhere
Record the rich history, report on the vibrant present, and inspire the hopeful future of spinning by creating a themed, archive-worthy document of the spinning community’s aspirations, activities, and achievements
Support indie businesses and craftspeople via affordable advertising, fair compensation, and return of intellectual property

We love to read about spinning.

In fact, we read everything we can about the craft, the fiber that goes into it, and the people who love it — there are some great publications out there and we (urge you to) support them all. We seek to help fill out the spinning magazine world by adding to that list of greats our robust magazine full of in-depth articles. Focusing on the intermediate to advanced spinner, we collect and reflect technical, intuitive, historical, and theoretical knowledge from handspinners the world over with the intent to inform, reflect, and inspire and to stretch skills.

We want to support our amazing and diverse spinning community (spinners, fiber producers, indie fiber artists, writers, designers, and others who love fiber as much as we do), gather and share the information we all need and want, and also reflect the community in a real way. On the pages of PLY, you can expect to see names you easily recognize, names you might have heard before, and altogether new voices as well. You can even add your own voice to our efforts — everyone has something to say; consider contributing some content!

PLY Magazine’s purpose is to serve as a kind of encyclopedia of spinning knowledge,

A stamp of the current moment in spinning time, as well as a record of the evolving line of knowledge stretching out behind us. Each issue is printed on quality paper with a printable spine so that, well into the future, you’ll be able to easily access the information within. Issues are themed so we can dig deeply into a topic, get to its core, explore different viewpoints and issues, and learn all we can about it. In the interest of diversity and a never-ending quest for knowledge, we go out of our way to find new and interesting things, old and important things, and delve as well into things we might take for granted. How it works, why it works, where it comes from, who’s doing it: these are the things we’re interested in — the things we ask our writers to explore.

Spinning is an ongoing journey;

We aren’t looking for an ultimate answer. In spinning, there’s often no such thing. To that end, you’ll find PLY Magazine exploring various approaches to the same concept, technique, or project and encouraging spinners everywhere to find themselves in their spinning. It will not be uncommon to find divergent opinions in a single issue of PLY because that’s how the (spinning) world really is. We’ll do our best to carefully present the available facts and opinions so you can find among them the truth that works for your own spinning hands.

We’re excited about spinning and we know you are as well — we hope you’ll join us in our exploration of everything it has to offer!