Learning To Be Irregular | Spinning, Embodied Learning & Contemporary Textile Practice
- amanda haran
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
I thought confidence would arrive before I began spinning. Instead, I found myself sitting in temporary accommodation in Swansea with an Ashford Traveller spinning wheel balanced awkwardly amongst hotel furniture, trying to understand why loose wool fibres would not stay together long enough to become yarn. The wheel felt strangely exposing from the beginning. My shoulders jerked each time the treadle lost rhythm. My jaw tightened. My thumb and forefinger gripped the leader yarn too hard in an attempt to control the twist. Every tangle and collapse carried far more emotional weight than seemed reasonable for a few strands of fibre. It became clear very quickly that I was not simply learning to spin. Something much more revealing was happening through the process itself. The wheel was exposing how my body responds to uncertainty.
The practical setup already carried the shape of the learning. The spinning wheel had been transported in the back of the car and needed to be reassembled in the hotel room before I could even begin.
Parts of the threading process had slipped from memory. YouTube tutorials balanced on an ironing board became part of the setup. At one point, I realised I had misplaced my orifice hook and improvised a replacement from whatever was available nearby. Nothing about the process resembled the fantasy of uninterrupted studio learning or calm artistic mastery. The wheel entered ordinary life exactly as it was: temporary, fragmented, adaptive and slightly unstable from the start.
Earlier this year, I made the 'shitty committee' collage during Lean On mentoring as a way of externalising the noisy, contradictory and often absurd internal criticism surrounding creative work. Set against the backdrop of the Chernobyl nuclear control room, the collage now felt strangely connected to the escalating systems behaviour unfolding around the spinning wheel itself. Sitting beside the wheel on the ironing board amongst tangled yarn, YouTube tutorials and improvised tools, the committee no longer felt symbolic. They had become active participants within the learning process.
Sitting with that realisation unsettled me more than the technical difficulty of spinning. Within community practice and creative listening, I would never expect participants to arrive fully formed, immediately competent or already confident before taking part. I would never respond to awkwardness, hesitation or partial understanding with criticism or impatience. Yet, sitting at the wheel, I could feel an internal voice insisting that, because of my textile background, years of material practice, and existing skills, I should already be able to do this well. The pressure I was placing on myself sat physically in the body. It was there in my jaw, my shoulders and my hands. The spinning wheel quietly challenged that logic repeatedly throughout the day. Smaller wisps of fibre worked better than large handfuls. Softer hands worked better than gripping harder. Observation worked better than force. Pausing worked better than panic. The yarn itself became more coherent as my body did.
Earlier attempts to spin had been dominated by the idea of producing yarn, but gradually the focus moved elsewhere. The wheel became less about outcome and more about relationship. Twist travelling through the fibre. The tension between grip and release. The moment when overcontrol caused the yarn to kink back on itself, storing too much energy. The stop/start rhythm between treadling, panic, pause and return. I began to notice that I could not fail as long as I remained attentive to what the material revealed. Even the tangled sections contained information. Over twist became evidence of held tension. Interrupted rhythm became evidence of bodily uncertainty. Nothing was wasted if it was noticed closely enough.
Although I have not yet started spinning my own flax, this first week of practice using wool fibres carded for me by Diane Fisher at Masson Mills has already reshaped the conceptual direction of Irregular Thread. Somewhere between the tangled yarn, uneven take-up, and repeated attempts to understand twist and tension, the project itself began to change shape. More accurately, the wider network of enquiry surrounding my practice began subtly reorganising itself through the process. Threads connecting flax growing, creative listening, socially engaged practice, women's labour, bodily tension, participation, and Ursula Le Guin's non-heroic structures no longer felt like separate lines of enquiry. They began behaving more like overlapping root systems or mycelial networks beneath the surface, feeding and reshaping one another through the act of learning itself. Irregular Thread has started to feel less like an isolated project and more like a living knot within the wider interconnected ecology of my practice.
Earlier, I had connected strongly with Ursula K. Le Guin's idea of the carrier bag through vessels, holding structures, and non-heroic forms of storytelling. Sitting at the spinning wheel, I began to understand her writing differently.
The wheel did not reward domination, certainty or control. It responded far better to responsiveness, adaptation, repetition and relationship. The learning emerged through participation rather than mastery.
Looking closely at the yarn later, I realised the thread was functioning almost like a physical seismograph of the process itself. Fear, hesitation, rhythm, grip pressure, overcontrol and adaptation had all become materially visible within the structure of the yarn. Some sections tightened beautifully while others collapsed into tangled loops, storing too much twist and tension. The irregularity was no longer simply aesthetic. It had become evidence of a bodily response and of the ongoing negotiation between fibre, wheel, rhythm, and nervous system.
As the day went on, another misunderstanding slowly became apparent. I had initially believed the twist should remain outside the drafting zone rather than entering it. In trying to prevent the twist from travelling upwards into the space between my hands, I was repeatedly collapsing the very area where yarn forms. The spinning wheel seemed to reveal the same pattern repeatedly:
...overcontrol was preventing structure from forming.
Once I began allowing controlled twist into the drafting zone, the yarn changed immediately. Not into smooth or consistent thread, but into something more alive. The irregularity shifted from complete collapse towards unstable negotiation. Looking back over the day's samples, I realised the yarn was functioning almost like a physical diagram of changing bodily understanding. The thread visibly recorded hesitation, gripping, release, panic, adaptation and gradual moments of continuity.
Another feedback loop also became visible through the process itself. Whenever the treadling rhythm faltered, my drafting hand left position in order to restart the wheel. The drafting zone collapsed, twist behaviour changed suddenly, panic increased, grip tightened, and the yarn destabilised further. The more the system fragmented, the harder it became to reconnect smoothly. At some point during the afternoon, I realised the learning was no longer simply technical. I was beginning to observe an interconnected system of material behaviour, bodily response, rhythm, interruption and nervous system escalation unfolding simultaneously through the spinning process.
My recent research into Stephen Willats' systems-based diagrams and relational mapping began to resurface quietly during the session itself. By the end of the afternoon, I found myself sketching the spinning process almost diagrammatically, tracing the relationships between treadling interruption, bodily tension, drafting collapse, panic escalation and material instability. The spinning no longer felt like an isolated technical exercise but part of a wider ecology of practice, where ideas, observations and forms of knowledge move between projects like mycelial networks beneath the surface.
Creative listening, socially engaged practice, women's labour, embodied irregularity and fibre process all seemed to feed into one another through the act of learning itself, while Le Guin's carrier bag theory quietly resurfaced through questions of holding, repetition and non-heroic return.
Questions began emerging alongside the yarn itself. Was I learning to become a creative listener to myself? What happens when observation replaces self criticism? What becomes possible when we stop expecting mastery before participation?
Over the course of the week, four emerging states of irregularity began forming within the project:
Material irregularity through uneven yarn, unstable structure, variable fibre and hand process.
Embodied irregularity through tension held in the jaw, shoulders and hands, nervous system responses, breath, rhythm and bodily adaptation during learning.
Temporal irregularity through stop/start learning, collapse, repetition, interruption, recovery and gradual coherence emerging over time rather than through linear progression.
Social irregularity through participatory practice itself, where community processes rarely move neatly or predictably and where meaningful engagement often emerges through adaptation rather than control.
The experience also brought forward thoughts about women's labour and the long history of creativity being fitted around the practical realities of ordinary life. This week's spinning did not happen under uninterrupted studio conditions or in a protected creative retreat. It happened around travel, temporary accommodation, practical adaptation and fragmented concentration. Historically, many women have made, repaired, stitched, spun, and created within the spaces available to them rather than waiting for ideal conditions to appear. Creativity has often coexisted with caregiving, domestic labour, emotional labour, paid work, and constant adjustment. Returning repeatedly to the wheel despite interruption began to feel significant in itself. The stop/start rhythm of the spinning seemed quietly connected to wider questions about care, endurance, adaptation, and the invisible negotiations many women continue to make to sustain creative practice at all.
I also found myself thinking repeatedly about The Nettle Dress, which I have watched several times over recent months. The film stays with me because of its commitment to duration, repetition, and a continued return to the process despite setbacks, uncertainty, and slowness. Sitting at the spinning wheel, I realised I had not initially shown myself the same patience. Why should I expect to understand spinning quickly simply because I wanted to do it well? Motivation does not remove the duration required for embodied learning. If anything, deep commitment may require an even greater willingness to remain inside frustration, repetition and gradual adaptation over time.
Somewhere within that repetition, another thought began emerging alongside the yarn itself.
It is ok to be irregular.
Not as resignation, but as a different way of understanding how coherence, learning and relationship actually form over time.
Continuity is not the absence of breaks. Continuity is the capacity to reconnect after them.
I cannot fail if I continue to notice.
