#handspinner

I appreciate that past me was really determined to fit every bit of that 1 oz bundle of brown rooed Shetland that I could onto this spindle, along with some of the second 1 oz bundle too.

Teaching myself to spin on drop spindles (with only minor guidance from a couple youtube videos), I naturally let twist into the drafting zone to keep from breaking my yarn and dropping my spindle as much, and got used to ONLY spinning that way. Now when it comes to spinning on my wheel and keeping twist out of the drafting zone I'm over here smacking myself on the forehead, like dang... how tf do I hold the fiber loose enough between the fingers of my front hand to be able to slide my hand back over my drafted fiber without the pressure from my fingers bunching it up and making it weird, but also hold it firmly enough at the same time that no twist gets past my fingers into the drafting zone???

I understand enough to know that it's mostly a problem with my treadling speed (cuz spinning on a wheel feels so painfully SLOW when I treadle at the "right" speed for my skill level for this drafting method) and uptake tension. Adjusting those two things to try to find the sweet spot in between "I can't seem to keep this dang fiber in my hands or stop all this twist from creeping through my fingers into my drafting zone without gripping the hell out of my fiber" and "well now my yarn isn't being taken up by my bobbin at all" or "now there's not enough twist for how thin I'm spinning" is a bit harder than I thought it would be lol

Also I could definitely be pre-drafting and splitting my fiber bundles more most of the time until I get more used to it, like I did when I first started spinning on my drop spindles to give myself one less thing to manage while I built up my muscle memory for that kind of spinning. I'm just impatient and my brain resents what feels like taking a "step backward" in skill level, I guess, so I stubbornly keep NOT doing that even though I know I should, oops.

It probably doesn't help either that I have tense death-grip hypermobile hands/fingers that tend to always make my fiber supply messy and harder to draft than it should be. That definitely affects my ability to keep consistent pressure with my fingers on the fiber passing through my drafting hand too, because my thumbs and fingers are prone to overextending backward at the knuckles and "locking" if I hold even light pressure with them for a while without stopping. My habit of regularly releasing pressure on the fiber to let twist travel into the drafting zone generally helps mitigate that issue, but it's something that quickly becomes annoying (and then painful) if I'm attempting to maintain pressure with my fingers to hold that twist out of the drafting zone as one does when spinning worsted.