(Photo above is yarn spun for Spinzilla 2016)

Spinzilla – the monster of a spinning contest, started in 2013. Since then it has grown in size in terms of the number of teams participating and the number of miles (kilometres) spun. It is a fun, wild week.

I have participated every year it has been held – spinning for Team Sweet Georgia. Over time I have learned some things that have made my spinning week more pleasurable. And here they are:

1. Spin for a project: this is a great time to spin up a huge amount of yarn. So if you have been wanting to spin up for a sweater or to weave a blanket, now is the time. This year I am spinning for a sweater I want to knit. It’s in the Down issue of Ply Magazine. It is a good time to get it all done, and to ensure that it’s the same weight and grist.
2. Add some fun, wild spinning moments into the marathon of project spinning. Last year, I spun for a weaving project. It was grey Romney, yards and yards and yards of it. After a few days of that, I took a break and spun a two-ply thick and thin yarn. It was only 100 yards or so, but it also only took 1 1/2 hours and gave me such joy to be doing something with colour and something different with my fingers.
3. Spin on days 1 – 5 and ply on day 6 and 7. Or some variation on that theme. I learned that my yarn benefits from sitting a bit. The twist relaxes and this makes plying a bit easier. This means you have to have a lot of bobbins, but it’s a good excuse to get more. Or borrow some from non-Spinzilla spinning friends.
4. Skein and measure yarn when Spinzilla is over. As curious as I am about how much yarn I’ve made, taking the time to skein and measure is time away from spinning. So unless you desperately need those bobbins, don’t waste time on it. You will have time after the event is over, a couple of days, to skein and measure.
5. Have fun. Seriously, everyone says it, I say it.  And then I put my head down to my spinning and get all competitive and lose track of things. Feel resentful when I have to work, make dinner or do anything else beyond spinning. It’s taken a few years, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I enjoy this more when I re-focus the competition. For me this is about how much yarn I can make in spite of the busy life I lead as a woman in the twenty-first century working full-time and involved in my community.

So this morning I was up at my regular time – 6am. Got a cup of coffee, took a few sips and then sat down at my Ashford Traditional to spin some lovely wool into a sweater. Just starting the day spinning is the thing that makes this competition worth while.

And now I have to get down to work and move away from the wheel. So enjoy the week, enjoy the attention spinning is going to get this week and the role you will play in drawing attention to the wonderful activity of making yarn.

Happy spinning!

Last week I participated in my fourth Spinzilla event. Spinzilla is a monster of a spinning contest that lasts an entire week. Starting at 12:01am on Monday, October 3 and ending at 11:59pm on October 9, teams of as many as 25 spinners spin like mad and submit their yardage to their team captains. It’s all done on the honour system – anyone who lies about their yardage will be plagued with snapped drive bands and shattered spindles.

Much to my surprise I am a very competitive person about some things – seems that a spinning contest is one of them. So for the first three years of the contest I worked harder and harder to spin as much as possible. Even booking three days off work last year so I could maximize my spinning time. I was rewarded in year 3 with a spinning total of 8,672 yards. That’s nearly 5 miles of spinning.

This year I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take the time from work so my spinning from Monday to Thursday was limited to lunch hour spindling and wheel spinning in the evenings. As I have an early start to my day, I couldn’t stay up late or get up too much earlier to get in some spinning.

So I resigned myself to simply doing my very best with the time I did have, and not to fret about what I couldn’t get done. Here’s the photo story.

I started Spinzilla spinning some lovely grey Romney/Crossbreed fibre that I washed and combed over the summer. My aim is to make a fingering weight yarn for a friend’s weaving project. By Thursday evening I was tired of spinning fine and grey, so I switched it up, grabbed a bag of Mardi Gras by Kinfolk Yarn and Fibre. I took this lovely yarn and spun a two-ply thick and thin yarn. It only took about two hours to do both bobbins. Spinning slubs really chews into the fibre. It wasn’t going to give me a lot of yardage, but it was such a treat to make that yarn and play with colour and texture for a while.  Here’s a photo of what I had spun by Friday morning.

On Friday I finished spinning all the grey I had prepped and started plying.

On Saturday I pulled out some Clun Forest roving from my neighbour. Talk about 100-mile wear – this yarn is from sheep living one mile away. I spun this woollen — using a long backwards draw. Here’s the first bobbin.

And I spun for most of Saturday, in between making vegan cabbage rolls, pumpkin pie and apple crumble for Thanksgiving dinner. This is what I had by the end of the day.

On Sunday, I plied all the singles I made. Spun a bit more to finish up a bobbin and plied that in between stuffing and roasting a turkey and getting other items for the meal prepared and eaten!  By 9pm I was done. Really done. Unlike last year where I stayed up right until the last minute wildly plying hyper-energized singles into a three-ply yarn, I was ready to pack up my wheel. And so I did.

Here’s my total production for the week. Eight skeins of two-ply yarn and two mini-skeins of singles yarn from my spindles for a total of 4,661 yards.

It’s a decent amount of yarn. Yarn that I am very happy with and have plans for. It was a good week.