Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself VISUALLY Handspinning

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I am so grateful to have this book. Now things are making so much more sense! I learned to spin but there were lots of details and things which I didn't know. For instance, words like Worsted and Woolen. I'd heard these terms many times before but I was clueless what they meant. This book explains it all!

All the steps are included to set up a spinning wheel (single drive wheel and double). As well, how to use a drop spindle to create fibre is covered. All the steps for both drop spindle and wheel are fully covered.

Tools and gadgets like swifts and distaffs are covered and a tool called a Diz which I'd never heard of before.

There's a chapter on the different kinds of fibres, how to wash fibre and all the different ways to prepare it - from combing, brushing or drum carding.

The sections on how to spin, body position at the wheel, how to draft, how to use a spindle, how to ply your fibre on both the spindle and wheel are all fully illustrated.

How to spin fibre with the woolen and worsted method is covered as well as how to make a slub yarn. There's a really good section on troubleshooting which showed me very quickly what I was doing wrong.

That's just the first half of the book - There are chapters on creating cables, novelty yarns, boucle and textured yarns.

The section on preparing exotic fibres - from washing to spinning to after care (fulling) are invaluable (alpaca, angora, plant fibres such as flax and hemp, etc., camel and dog hair, silk, bison and quiviut).

There's a large section on dyeing and even a section on how to create your own loom for weaving.

I'm just loving this book and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a treasure trove of information. (If you can only get one book on handspinning, this is the one to get!)

This is a clearly written instructional book with great pictures to help guide the beginnger spinnger along. I really found it helpful and refer back to it frequently.