Spindles Ate My Brain

Perhaps its a common failing of spindlers to get a little obsessive with their spindle collection. Maybe its because unlike wheels they're small and (comparatively) inexpensive. Maybe its because they're easy to make (Its somewhat harder to make them *well* but that's a post for another day).

I think it might be related to that knitting phenomenon whereby suddenly you wake up and have sixteen sets of size 1 DPNs (and five circulars) and its not entirely clear how that happened.

Like yesterday I was staring at some blue and green roving I dyed a few weeks ago and it was staring back at me and just wanting to be spun. I had no appropriately weighted spindles that were not otherwise engaged which is why it made perfect sense to me to make a new one.

Now, I am not a talented spindle maker. My abilities with wood working consist mostly of being able to sand something (and have it wind up only slightly lopsided for the treatment). But I have superglue and chopsticks and dowel rods and whenever I am in a craft store I wind up with odd things to be used for whorls that I take home and occasionally they turn into something that makes yarn (Occasionally they even make yarn well).

The hang up with making your own spindle(s) is that just about everything you use to construct them comes in sets of at least two - sometimes more like 10. Partly this is a good thing because, especially when it comes to the shafts, I'm pretty good at screwing them up but more often than that it just results in half a dozen spindles. Of which, if I am very, very lucky, perhaps one is the right weight and style for what I needed it for to begin with.

Since it can take me a week or two to put all these various attempts at spindle genius together the fact that it meets the weight requirement is frequently inconsequential by the time all the spindles are finished. By the two week mark I've often given up and ordered a new spindle (usually very pretty and at least twice what I originally told myself I could spend on one) or, more rarely, finished whatever was on the spindle I wanted to use originally.

Which leaves me with a heck of a lot of random drop spindles that I have no idea what to do with.