Distaff Day 2022 - where I dress sticks in wool

We look at the past and forget.  

It's easy to do.  We forget that the spinners of years gone by didn't spin yarn for fun, or to save money or for sentimental reasons.  They did so because, without yarn, they were bloody cold!  

Yarn is survival.  

All the incarnations.  Be it string, twine, rope, thread, yarn... all was made by hand and without it humanity couldn't thrive in the extreme environments that we do today.  Yarn binds us together as a species.  

What amazes me most of all is how universal yarn production is.  Every culture that makes yarn has three steps (draft, twist, stash).  Sometimes these are done by different people (Cowichan Nations and Ancient Egypt), but always the same three steps.  Draft, twist, stash.

And almost universal is having something to manage your fibre source.  Often this is a distaff.  

If it was as clumsy as it feels to my modern hands, people would have given it up long ago.  And yet, even well into the 20th Century, handspinners who are connected to their cultural roots and a time when spinning yarn was a survival trait, still used distaves (plural of distaff).  

Last year, I set out to perfect my distaff spinning skills.  I got pretty good at it, but I also learned that one year is not long enough to master this skill.  There is so much more to learn.

But... I did learn lots and here are a few methods I found work well for me for dressing a distaff with wool.

There are as many ways to dress a distaff as there are spinners who use them, so try lots of things and find out what works well for you.  There is no wrong way so long as it gives you the results you seek.