From Irregular Yarn To Irregular Systems | Wool, Flax & Learning Through Structure

Learning New Physical Systems

Something shifted this week, although it is difficult to locate the exact moment it happened.

Earlier spinning sessions had largely been dominated by trying to make everything function simultaneously. Treadling, drafting, tension, joins, posture, twist, breathing, and coordination all seemed to compete for attention at once, often leaving the wheel feeling less like a tool and more like a system that exposes every instinct I have towards overcontrol. Even producing a short length of yarn could feel physically and mentally exhausting, particularly during the first days of practice when my shoulders locked forward, my grip tightened unconsciously, my jaw clenched, and every small inconsistency immediately registered as failure. Part of the difficulty seemed to come from trying to form entirely new neurological pathways while the body still defaulted towards tension and correction. Certain movements needed to become rhythmic and instinctive at the same time, as my attention kept interrupting them. The harder I tried to consciously control each movement, the more unstable the process often became. Earlier that week, I had been reading Amy Tyler's writing on movement science and spinning, where she notes that 'as charming as the term "muscle memory" may be, it does not accurately depict the physiology of learning.' Sitting at the wheel, exhausted by the concentration required simply to keep treadling, drafting, and tension functioning together, I found that observation increasingly true.

The wheel exposed impatience almost immediately. Small mistakes accumulated fast. If the concentration drifted even slightly, the yarn thickened, snapped, overtwisted or tangled around itself.

Over the past week, repetition has begun to alter my relationship with the process.

Back home again, I moved into the small shed studio to continue practising after the weather turned miserable, making it impossible to spin outside in the garden, with the washing line acting as both a backdrop and a quiet companion throughout the earlier sessions. The shift indoors immediately altered the atmosphere of the work. Rain hammered against the roof while damp air gathered outside, and the wheel, fibre, treadling rhythm and repeated movements of drafting became compressed into a more enclosed and concentrated environment.

Inside that smaller space, a different kind of progress gradually started becoming visible. The yarn still thickened and thinned unpredictably, joins still failed, and moments of drafting collapse continued appearing without warning, yet the sessions themselves were beginning to feel less dominated by panic whenever irregularity emerged. Instead of reacting immediately and trying to force the yarn back towards control, I found myself pausing for longer, watching more carefully and making smaller adjustments in response to what the fibre was actually doing. Increasingly, the learning seemed to be developing not through mastery exactly, and certainly not through achieving technical consistency, but through becoming more tolerant of irregularity and more attentive to the quieter adjustments taking place inside the relationship among body, fibre, pressure and rhythm.

I had started wondering whether some of the drafting difficulties and persistent nepps I was struggling with might partly be connected to the condition of Diane's rolags after travelling back and forth stuffed inside bags and luggage. The fibre often felt compressed, flattened and uneven in the hand, and during drafting, I frequently found myself dragging compacted knots and tangled sections forward rather than allowing the fibres to open and flow naturally. I became increasingly curious whether remaking the rolags with more air, alignment, and loft might change the spinning experience entirely and finally give me a fighting chance to draft more smoothly. The problem was that I had never hand-carded fibre or made a rolag before. I returned again to Anne Field's Ashford Book of Hand Spinning (which is quickly becoming a sort of spinning bible) for guidance before attempting the process myself, slowly working through the unfamiliar rhythm of loading the hand cards, distributing the fibre and rolling the wool back off into loose cylinders.

Carding demands a different form of concentration entirely. Fibre density changes quickly depending on pressure, handling, and the amount of air trapped within the rolag structure. Since I had only bought the smaller hand carders for transport reasons, the rolags themselves remained fairly compact, which seemed to encourage me to overload them with too much fibre at once. Several times, the teeth jammed together completely, forcing me to stop and carefully pull the fibres back apart before continuing. Some rolled softly and openly, while others became denser and more compact without me fully realising it until I began drafting them later at the wheel.

The process has increasingly connected back to wider reading surrounding systems thinking, embodied learning and contemporary textile practice. Earlier in the project, I had been revisiting Stephen Willats' systems diagrams alongside broader questions around relational structures, adaptation and how individuals negotiate instability within larger environments. I'm curious about how quickly those same ideas begin to appear materially within spinning itself. The wheel never functions independently of the body using it, the material it controls, or the environment in which it is used.

As the sessions accumulated, the work also started generating a more complex relational structure around itself. Earlier Stephen Willats influenced diagrams began expanding into a wider mapping system connecting bodily learning, fibre behaviour, flax ecology, emotional states, repetition, social context and material decision making.

Tension in the yarn shifts with tiredness, concentration, breathing rhythm, grip pressure, and confidence. Humidity changes it too, alongside traces of pressure already carried within the fleece itself from the sheep's environment and handling long before it reaches the wheel. Some irregularities may also emerge later through repeated passes by the shearer or flawed mechanisms during factory processing, where fibres become strained, broken or compacted before they ever arrive in the studio. The material keeps recording states rather than hiding them. What I find intriguing within my wider socially engaged textile practice, as a contemporary community textile artist working in Derbyshire, is how spinning begins to expose textile production not as a neutral craft technique but as a network of bodily, environmental, emotional, and material relationships.

Plying, Stress & The First Skein

By the end of the week, two uneven bobbins sat side by side holding yarn made from four rolags each. Some sections had absorbed too much twist, while other areas opened out more softly, where drafting had relaxed. Certain joins remained visibly awkward, while elsewhere the yarn briefly found a calmer rhythm before losing it again. Earlier in the process, I would probably have focused almost entirely on correcting those inconsistencies. Gradually, the irregularity stopped behaving like failure. The yarn had started recording process rather than concealing it.

Reading about fibre preparation and wool structure had introduced the possibility that nepps can sometimes emerge partly due to stress held within the fleece itself. Sitting at the wheel later that evening, struggling through dense areas, uneven drafting and changing tension, the yarn no longer felt neutral. It seemed to carry traces of multiple bodies, environments, and pressures simultaneously, rather than simply existing as raw material waiting to be controlled.

Plying introduced another completely unfamiliar layer of coordination. Without owning a Lazy Kate yet, I mounted the bobbins directly onto the spinning wheel itself and fed the yarn back through the orifice in the opposite direction to the original spin. Almost immediately, the process exposed further systems inside both the wheel and my own body. The yarn repeatedly jumped free from the flyer hooks, tension shifted unpredictably across the bobbin, and some areas absorbed the opposing twist more readily than others. Sections gathered unevenly while thicker slubs resisted control altogether. Yet somewhere inside that awkwardness, structure slowly began emerging. Two unstable singles started holding one another together. Thick sections balanced thinner areas. Softer drafting sat beside tighter overtwisted passages. Instead of being an interruption, the irregularity gradually became part of the yarn's structural language.

Afterwards, the yarn was wound into my first skein using a niddy noddy, another tool I had never used before this week. The moment felt unexpectedly emotional, not because the skein represented technical accomplishment, but because the material had visibly crossed a threshold. Earlier fragments of yarn had existed largely as disconnected experiments, samples and failed attempts. The skein held together differently. It carried visible evidence of previous sessions inside its structure. Hotel practice, snapped joins, overtwisted sections, calmer treadling, changing posture, slower drafting and gradual bodily adaptation all remained embedded inside the yarn simultaneously.

Washing the skein introduced yet another unfamiliar process. Rather than aggressively cleaning or correcting the yarn, I followed a gentler washing method using only water so the fibres and twist could settle naturally without stripping away the lanolin entirely. Sitting quietly beside a bucket of water in the kitchen sunlight, the skein darkened slightly as it absorbed moisture, becoming heavier and softer in the hand. There was something strangely moving about that stage, too. The yarn seemed to relax visibly once saturated, the fibres opening slightly while still retaining every inconsistency, thickened area and uneven passage formed during spinning and plying. Nothing disappeared. The washing process did not erase irregularity. If anything, it revealed the structure more honestly.

Close up, the yarn now carries a strange mixture of fragility and resilience. Some passages remain tightly wound while others drift open softly with visible fibre bloom emerging after washing and drying. Looking closely at the skein, it becomes difficult to separate the technical process from the bodily process. The yarn appears to carry evidence of changing concentration, shifting confidence and gradual physical adaptation inside its structure. Rather than becoming embarrassed by those irregularities, I am starting to understand them as part of the conceptual language of the work itself.

Around the same time, I had also been reading Alanna Wilcox's article 'Bits and Pieces: Using Special Scraps in New Blends,' where she writes that

The phrase made me laugh immediately, partly because my small collage of the 'shitty committee' still hangs beside the spinning wheel in the Derbyshire shed studio, quietly observing every session. Earlier in the process, those internal voices had become tangled up with every thickened section, broken join and uneven passage of yarn. The idea that experimentation, irregularity and awkwardness might not require immediate correction or justification felt surprisingly liberating. The work had started to feel less about proving technical perfection and more about learning to remain in relationship with uncertainty long enough for structure to emerge.

What is gradually changing is not simply my ability to produce more consistent yarn, but my relationship to consistency itself. Earlier sessions were dominated by efforts to eliminate irregularity as quickly as possible, often tightening the body further each time the yarn thickened, twisted unevenly, or drifted out of control. The goal now feels less connected to perfection and more connected to fluency. I want to become technically competent enough to recognise when irregularity is structurally useful, emotionally honest or materially significant, and when it genuinely weakens the yarn beyond what it can hold. The distinction feels important. Certain inconsistencies still emerge from inexperience, panic, or physical tension, while others now seem capable of carrying information, texture, memory, and evidence of process in ways that polished uniformity cannot.

Flax, Neighbours & Material Memory

Outside, the flax beds continue growing simultaneously. Some areas remain visibly thinner where seedlings were repeatedly crushed earlier in the season while climbing in and out of the car beside the front garden beds. Initially, those flattened patches were frustrating, particularly after the effort of sowing and protecting the young flax. Gradually, they became connected to the wider logic emerging across the whole project. The work keeps resisting fantasies of perfect control. Growth changes through ordinary life. Bodies become tired. Fibre behaves differently from day to day. Attention drifts. Systems fail. Material records pressure.

This year, the flax also appears shorter than last season, perhaps responding to extreme weather fluctuations and deep cracks that have repeatedly opened in the heavy clay soil during long dry spells. Watching the stems develop under these unstable conditions has begun to reveal further connections among environmental stress, material response, and irregular growth patterns within the wider project. The bed itself increasingly feels as though it is recording conditions physically in much the same way as the yarn records tension, hesitation, over drafting, collapse, fatigue and recovery.

The front garden is also starting to change visually as the flax rises taller amongst surrounding planting. What began earlier in the year as bare soil and scattered seedlings is gradually becoming a visible fibre landscape embedded directly into ordinary domestic space in Derbyshire. Neighbours walk past it daily. Conversations continue emerging around the beds. Indeed, one neighbour recently told me he had been speaking to another neighbour about the folk tale I had shared earlier in the season about sowing flax with no pants on. Questions about linen, flax, spinning and textile history keep surfacing through small encounters at the edge of the pavement. The project now feels less like a separate studio activity and more like an interconnected ecology of growth, learning, conversation, bodily adaptation, and material experimentation unfolding simultaneously across multiple spaces.

Alongside the spinning itself, I have also found my attention repeatedly returning to vessels, carriers, and rough agricultural textile structures. Ursula K. Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory has continued to sit quietly in the background of the work while I look at images of worn, woven containers, suspended baskets, and repaired flax sacks. The long-term direction of Irregular Thread now feels less connected to polished textile surfaces and more closely aligned with structures shaped through use, adaptation, repair, and continuation. Wool spinning has largely served as a way to learn the physical language of spinning itself, since several people advised that wool would be a more forgiving material to begin with, while developing coordination and technique at the wheel. The next phase of the project now feels rooted in beginning to spin with the flax I have been growing, allowing the material at the centre of the work to move directly into the making process itself rather than remaining separate from it.

The washing stage also shifted something psychologically within the work. Lifting the skein carefully from the water and hanging it outside to dry in an old pop sock felt unexpectedly connected to the wider logic of the project itself. None of the solutions emerging through these sessions has been polished or idealised. Many have come through adaptation, improvisation, and careful work with whatever was available within ordinary domestic space. The wheel sits in a shed office. Rolags travel in bags. Skeins dry beside vegetables, paving stones, and flax beds compressed through ordinary movement around the car. Increasingly, the work feels less concerned with separating art practice from daily life and more interested in allowing those systems to visibly overlap.

At this stage, the most important shift has probably been learning that irregularity is not simply a technical problem waiting to be corrected. The goal now feels less connected to producing perfectly controlled yarn and more connected to reaching a level of competency where I can consciously choose when to retain irregularity, when to reduce it and when to work collaboratively with what the fibre itself is doing. Competency is beginning to feel less like mastery and closer to responsiveness.