Ask Jacey: Commercial Yarns as a Supporting Ply for Art Yarns
As featured in PLY’s December 2023 newsletter, the Ask Jacey column answers a question about commercial yarns and how they can help create art yarns!
Posts
The Devotion of a Handspinner: Donna Jo Copeland
At seventy-three-years-young, there is no stopping Donna Jo Copeland from keeping a small flock of sheep, a few quirky angora goats, and about eleven English angora rabbits on Breezy Manor Farm, located in Mooresville, Indiana. After over five decades of shepherding, she is still fascinated by her fiber animals and loves working with the gift of their wool. Let’s learn more about Donna Jo’s flock-to-sweater process, which proves that you are never too old or too young to enjoy fibers.
Jacob & Company
As is the case with many others before me, the more I knit the more I wanted to know about wool. For years I was attracted by the rainbow of colors available. I’d done a lot of dyeing, but a real game-changer for me was seeing a heathered yarn for the first time. After studying it, I realized it was not something I could dye; rather, it was something that had to be spun. I had to learn how.
Ferrara-Pisani: A Fiber Journey through Emotional Places
A clap of thunder brought me back to the moment. Sitting in front of my wheel, I looked hard at the wool in my hands. It had been cold, gray, and rainy for the past week. A few hours earlier, I’d pulled out my drum carder and decided to make a few batts from some of the beautiful Jacob fleece I had washed and separated into piles of grays, whites, blacks, and even a pile with tan overtones.
Finding Awe at a Spinning Retreat
It was September 2022. Here in the Pacific Northwest we were just beginning to come back together. The small groups with masks had begun to yield to larger groups outdoors without masks. It was still precarious, but my husband, Greg and I, had decided to hold our first Guanaco Spinning Retreat.
Spinning in a Public Space: The County Fair
In a things-are-somewhat-back-to-normal-but-not-quite year, 2022 became not just a time to reacquaint myself with society, it also became a year to carve a new identity.
2022 International Wool Challenge Back to Back Competition
Featuring: The Granite Web Makers of New Hampshire.
How a Trip to Shetland Made Me a Better Spinner
A dream trip to Scotland in 2019 culminated in a visit to the 10th annual Shetland Wool Week. After an eventful 12-hour ferry ride from Aberdeen, we arrived in Lerwick, Shetland at the beginning of our 9-day visit to the lovely Shetland Isles.
Placemaking
Mni Sota Makoce rests on unseated Dakota and Anishinaabe people’s land and recognizes eleven federal tribes within its borders. I am currently residing near Wakpá Tháŋka (the Mississippi River), just a few miles upriver from Bdoté, the place where the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers join. I am joyful to be living in this land with three natural watersheds, where farming and shepherding are a piece of our robust state economy.
