Reimagining Tradition - The ornate italian drop spindle
The Italian drop spindle is the very first spindle that found my hands, and that planted the seed for my love of spinning.
I was around 8 or 10 years old, it was a boring summer day, and my Grandma told me: I teach you to spin!
She wasn’t an experienced spinner, only did it a while when she was a young girl at the farm, but I suppose she thought it would keep me busy for a few hours.
She grabbed her old spindle, we emptied one of those old pillows that were still filled with real wool, made a distaff with a branch from a tree…and I fell in love.
She was very jealous of her spindle, she wouldn’t let me use it on my own, but I was so fascinated that I whittled one out of a piece of wood and spun all summer. I spun that scratchy, ugly, uncarded wool, and I was so in love with the process.
When the summer was over, spinning was forgotten. The internet was way too young for online shopping, I wouldn’t have known where to find spinning wool. Besides, I was 10 years old :p
I picked up spinning again in my late 30’s. It was one of the main tools that helped me calm my mind during the worst of my anxiety and panic attack.
And I fell in love all over again, with the act of spinning, with the fibres, and with them, the tools of the craft…the beautiful, magical spindles.
So much that I decided to use my little savings to buy a very - very - very cheap lathe and learn how to turn them. My teacher was Youtube and an insane amount of trial and error.
I am definitely NOT a woodturner. I am just a spinner who loves spindles so much, and enjoys creating them, modifying them, fiddling with their looks and features to achieve just that sweet spinning spot.
Which leads to this. I was sitting with my little self thinking…hmmm…The antique italian spindles that I find and collect and treasure are fascinating and all, but could I take them a step further?
As you can see from the picture above, the common antique italian spindle (on the left) has quite a simple body. Also, it has quite an important bulb at the top, that you use with a half hitch knot so that you can keep the spindle suspended.
I love to spin thin, and that bulky tip for me means that the spindle is necessarily slower.
When I make supported spindles, I try to make the flicking end as thin as I can, because that allows the spinner to have a faster rotation with minimal effort. But how to make it happen for the Italian drop spindle?
Cue me at the lathe. Prototypes. All the prototypes.
I ended up with the spindle on the right.
The body is all ornate, to me it looks like something out of a fairytale, I love it. The notches are also handy to wrap the yarn around, especially at the start.
I modified the flicking tip shape, stealing a page from some of my favourite Turkish spindles, Jenkins. His spindles to me are amazing because he makes the flicking tips so slender, they are fast and just great spinners.
I made a reasonably slender end, and slightly carved the notch in it, rather than creating a proper traditional bulb.
The result is good, as you can see I could spin a fine yarn and the speed was a joy!
If you are curious to see the details on how to spin on an Italian drop spindle, I made a little video that explains the basics (this works both for the traditional italian spindles, that I will keep making, and for my ornate version)