Fifteen Minutes

Fifteen minutes is not a large portion of time to take out of your day, but it is really important in learning how to do a new skill. Especially if that skill involves nothing more than gaining muscle memory. Adults have the hardest time learning new skills simply because they can't remember having a difficult time learning how to do many things that we take for granted today. Such as learning how to walk or learning how to eat solid food. We simply can't remember what it took to learn how to do those things because of how our brains work, but because we have been doing them for so long we expect that everything should come as easily to us.

I have found that in the spinning community, beginners are discouraged from learning how to spin on "more challenging" fibers such as cotton and bamboo. When I first read about this as a beginner, it made me have the opposite knee-jerk reaction that many teenagers have. The "I can do anything that you tell me not to do" syndrome. I won't lie. I had a really hard time learning how to spin cotton and even gave it up for a while in favor of spinning wool. After all, I had just gotten a spinning wheel and I wanted to play with that instead of struggling with a little spindle and a bunch of raw cotton.

I came back to spinning cotton for the simple reason that I have eight ounces of the stuff plus some expensive hand carders that I haven't been using and four ounces of recycled sari silk and recycled denim waste. I have a lot of stuff for spinning cotton and I want to be able to use it.

So I decided to take to heart some advice that I read a long time ago: spin for fifteen minutes a day.

That fifteen minutes has become one of the most important parts of my day. Since I try to make my spinning time first thing in the morning right after I get out of bed, it has helped to focus me and relax me at the same time. I found that it helps me get into the same place that meditation or yoga would so I feel mentally stimulated and mentally relaxed at the same time.

And since I am getting lots of practice in, that fifteen minutes a day is also helping me even out my spinning. I find it so much easier to spin now that I have been working on my fiber preparation and my long draw for cotton. I even spun my first ever cotton single that didn't break when I wound it into a ball to get it off of my spindle. The only bad thing about spinning more cotton is that now it is the only thing I want to be spinning!