Spinning Cotton!

Thanks for following up on yesterday’s post. Yesterday I shared with you the growing stages of a cotton plant. And as promised today I’m going to tell you what I did with my homegrown cotton.

I spun my cotton into yarn!

The thought of collecting so so much cotton just to use as a filling was very uninspiring. With just two plants it would take ages and I think it’s such a waste. So I went to trusty Google and YouTube to find out what people did with cotton. They made yarn!

I went through video after video, over and over again for days! There are so many versions out there with different types of spinning wheels. Getting hold of a spinning wheel was out of the question. I had to find another way to spin cotton and I did. The drop spindle!

I have two sisters living in the UK who come back every summer so I found an affordable drop spindle on Amazon UK and asked one of them to help me buy it. OMG! Never ever did I dream that one day I was going to spin cotton! 😱🤗

^{my drop spindle}
There were a couple more tools that I needed which I didn’t want to buy because they were expensive. But as usual some innovative and generous YouTubers taught us what alternatives we could use.

I need 2 hand carders to comb through the cotton to remove knots and clumps. An alternative was flicker brushes! So I went to the petshop and got a flicker brush (I already had one). After removing the knots and clumps I rolled the wool into punis. This is only one of many methods of preparing the cotton for spinning.

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^{my flicker brushes and punis}

Once the cotton is ready it’s time to spin!

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I’m afraid this has turned out to be a 3-part series! 😰 I like keeping my posts short and this is getting a bit long.

The other tool that I needed was a niddy noddy (what a silly name 😂). Find out tomorrow what a niddy noddy is and how you can make one 😊