I have been thinking about how things have changed with the internet in how we learn things. I learned to spin about 15 years ago before the internet was full of good stuff like Facebook and Ravelry. So I learned from guild members and from books. Yesterday on another group someone posted a very basic question and in the heat of the moment I responded sarcastically about how maybe reading a book would be a good idea and got, probably rightly, flamed. I made the point that not everything you read on Facebook, and on the internet in general, is true. Unfortunately I see a lot of bad information being given out to new fibre artists that will not help them. There are some ideas on the internet about fibre techniques that have been started by one persons opinion and now are thought to be what everyone should do. I am a spinner so I will give a couple of examples of spinning techniques. The idea that you need to predraft your fibre down to the thickness you will spin it at comes from one video that was posted by a woman who was just learning to spin. For some reason it caught on and spread and many newbies thought they must predraft all their fibre all the time. The person who posted the original video later learned this was not true and posted other videos but the idea has still stuck. There are whole discussions on Ravelry about this and there was an article in Ply Magazine too if I remember right. Another idea that has spread via the internet is the idea that you must thwack your handspun yarn after you finish it by soaking in water. When I learned to spin 15 years ago the only thing you thwacked was short fibres like angora or qiviut that you wanted to bring out a halo on. Nowadays new spinners are told to thwack all their yarn to even out the twist. Sometimes a new method is discovered that improves spinning but I am doubtful that thwacking all your yarn is necessary if it was never mentioned in thousands of years of spinning. The virtue of a book is that the information in it is likely to be true. I guess my point is that as we share ideas here we must be careful that what we say is accurate, not just something we heard someone say once. If I see once more that vinegar is a mordant I think I will scream.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 15:54:25 +0000
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