MysticSpiral Update: All the news that's fit to print

Stoneware Knotwork Wrist Distaff - with fiber
Originally uploaded by MysticSpiral

The health problems which prompted me to close the MysticSpiral Etsy shop are still unresolved. While frustrating, this fact has also encouraged me to try to look at what I can accomplish within the limitations that I'm forced to work with. What it comes down to is, I am not capable of spending extended periods of time *NOT* making things. My production rates may be way down, and it may still be a challenge for me to get things down, but I'm slowly building stock that I'd like to be able to send to new homes. This means that I will be re-opening my etsy shop sometime in the near future.

The image above is a bronze and ceramic wrist distaff. It's a spinner's tool to hold the fiber from which you are working. When you're spinning on a drop spindle, you're not tied to one place the way that you are with a spinning wheel. For a lot of drop spindlers, walking and spinning go hand in hand. There are different ways to manage your working fiber. Many spinners simply wrap the length of top or roving that they're working with around their wrist and wear it like a bracelet. (I've always found that this is itchy for me... I have some weird sensitivity in the area around the scars from my hand/wrist surgeries and even things that don't bother me anywhere else drive me nuts there.) Others make a wrist distaff from yarn and beads that they can wrap their fiber around. (I find the clicking of the beads distracting and I've managed a few times to get my active spinning close enough to the fiber supply to grab a bit which isn't really helpful.)

For most of the winter, I have tucked my spinning fiber into the cuff of whatever long-sleeved top I've been wearing. This works great in cooler weather but prompted me to think about how much I was *NOT* looking forward to going back to the trailing fiber getting entangled with my work, or working with short lengths and an endless series of delays caused by grabbing more fiber and joining it to the spinning. Joining is an important and valuable skill but that doesn't mean that it's so much fun you want to do more of it than really necessary.

All of this prompted me to start trying to figure out a wrist distaff design that would work for me. Then one evening, as I snuggled with Sprout trying to get her to sleep, I started to visualize exactly what I needed. Once Sprout was asleep, I headed downstairs and out to the (unheated) studio to sit at the torch and make the first prototypes of my wrist distaff.