This is the best tool I’ve made since I started spinning / spindling.  The one thing that confounded me, was the plying.  Oh, I could ply alright.  I could Andean ply. I could wind my single onto a bobbin or into a center pull ball.  I could take two or three balls of singles and wind them yet again onto a felt ball and ply from that.  I could do it many ways, but ALL of them required extra time and extra steps and extra frustration.  Why?  Why, when I could do it in one step and ply back onto my spindle or onto a wheel. 

That means no more little tiny skeins of yarn to splice together.

Who’d want to do that to cashmere and silk?

At least once a day, I find myself reaching for a spindle to try a bit of this or that.  Maybe it is some fiber I have blended and want to see how it spins up.  Last week, while spinning at a local fair, I bought a bag of beautiful grey alpaca fleece.  It hadn’t been touched but was fairly clean and mostly free of vm.  I pulled a spindle from my bag and spun a small sample to "see" it.  Lovely.  I tried a 2 ply, then a 3 ply…. 

When I got back home I tried carding it, alone and with some merino and silk. 

   wow!

2,3,4 ply and a thicker softer 2 ply

Tuesday, a small package arrived containing a note holding a bit of flax and some hemp.  Out came a spindle. 

Here’s the hemp as a 2 ply.  It is coarse.  Of course.  I use twine in the garden, sisal probably.  Hemp is much

finer, not nearly as hard.  My first thought was to use the single with a lucet to make a bit of braided rope. The lucet wasn’t handy so I Andean plied.  It’s not soft enough to want to do a lot of it that way, wrapped around the soft parts of my hand.