Dear Spinning Circle,

I have been on the fence about doing a Make Nine this year – there has been a lot happening in the background that has had me a bit paralysed about creating a set of ‘goals’ or aims for the year. Usually, I have a word for the year that I find myself coming back to again and again but I haven’t had word come to me just yet. I’m being patient and know that the word will come to me as the year unfolds.

In the meantime, I’ve started to embrace the idea of taking on a Make Nine for the year. Rather than individual projects, which I’ve done in the past, I thought about creating a Make Nine that was based more on ideas. Because I have overarching projects that will guide my making throughout the year, I thought I would take a page out of Felicia’s recent Taking Back Friday vlog to focus on a Discover, Develop & Deepen exploration instead.

Discover

For Discover, I want to continue working through my cotton explorations. I’ve talked about my continuing development of a Spinning Cotton course for the School of SweetGeorgia. Throughout 2024, I’ve been on a steady journey to discover cotton, blending it with wool and spinning it alone. This path of discovery is one that I plan to continue throughout 2025 so it became a third of my explorations this year, including wanting to continue spinning up my stash of cotton, experimenting with some handspun cotton in weaving and continuing with my blending experiments that I started last year (see Develop for more).

Discover is also a commitment to a 30-minute daily practice that is purely for myself and myself only to sit quietly spin cotton (of some sort, in some preparation). I’m not going to commit to any other daily practices this year – not even a spindling practice. This will be my only one for the year.

Develop

Develop was an interesting idea for me think about because I have projects that were hang-overs (as my Dad used to say) from last year (2024) that I’m still steadily working on, including my Shetland/Corriedale/Cotton/Angora preparation & spin. Overlapping with my Discover plans because of the interest in cotton-wool blending, continuing to blend and work through big fleece preparation projects is a main focus of my work going forward. I’m excited about that work and looking forward to continuing to figure out how best to streamline the process.

This particular blend was an opportunity to draw out the yardage of some beautiful but slightly felted from scouring (not by myself) Shetland that was in my deep stash. To blend nicely with the cotton, I added some Corriedale that just created an amazing blend, along with some luxurious and local-to-me angora. More on this yarn as the year unfolds (the final sample I’ve settled on is the far Left skein in the above photo)!

Deepen

This ended up being the most difficult of the three to hone in on as I explored my Make Nine for the year: Deepen. I felt that I was already on this Discovery and Development path for the year that Deepen felt like too much! ha! I was already going to be going into the weeds with so much that Deepen felt like a journey to the depths … like the deep deep depths. How could I honour the idea of deepening my practice without overwhelming myself completely?

Deepen began to take on a different meaning instead – the idea of deepening my practice in general, rather than going into another rabbit hole (or warren, as is often the case in our handspinning practices). I wanted to commit to continuing to learning more about how to engage in my practice throughout the year, creating yarns that I’m excited to create with (here, weave with post-spinning).

To this end, I decided to focus on finishing my Cotswold-Peduncle silk hand spinning project that I started sampling last year with the aim to weave beautiful fabric with this yarn. Whether I create a throw or stole (depends on yardage), this will be amazingly warm and luxurious, with some drape (hopefully) and lustre.

My commitment to my Make Nine this year is simple: Discover more about a fibre I’ve already started to learn a lot about, Develop my fibre prep and hanspinning process even more for fluidity and ease, and finally, Deepen my hand spinning practice in more general terms: How to make this sustainable going forward? What works? What needs to go? How can I create amazing fabric?

That’s it! Sounds simple, right?! ha.

I would love to hear about your goals for the year – What are you thinking about? What intentions are you setting for yourself (if any)? Are you a goal setter? I’ve really gotten away from setting specific goals the past couple of years because it seems life continually gets in the way but I have an pretty clear idea of the direction I want to be moving in overall. I would love to hear more about that from each of you! Please share below.

Happy New Year! Have a wonderful 2025!