What are some good spinning blogs?

Oh no! now I'm blogging about blogs -- run away, fast! ROTFL. gapingvoid.com said this would happen to me with their Evolution of A Blog.

OK, back from checking out the cartoon?

So, if you don't see my blog page that often (Amelia waves hello to people with RSS readers!) you don't know I have some "fun links" on my blog to fun places on the internet -- some blogs, some not. I also have topics so you can browse, for example, all the entries on spinning Singles Yarn or all the entries about Felt.

But even if you do go there, you still don't know one thing -- which spinning blogs do I read? Well, I subscribe to a variety of blogs: knitting, spinning, blogging (!!), and life. That pretty much sums up my interests, LOL. But you know, there really aren't a whole lot of regularly useful spinning blogs -- that's one reason I started up this one. That, and I had a whole lot I wanted to tell people -- just in case they didn't know, wanted help, or had an unanswered question.

So it's not a huge list, since it's blogs that primarily blog about spinning and offer tips/advice on spinning as well, but here it is:
Abby's Yarns!
Spinning Spider Jenny
Leigh's Fiber Journal
masterspinner wannabe
Intrepid Fiber Wizard
Habetrot (historical pictures/info mostly; cool!)
Yarn Harlot (she's funny, so what if she 'only' spins once in a while!)
YouTube Group Handspinning (OK, a YouTube group, not a blog and not even RSS-able, but a fantastic online resource)

(I have a muuuuch longer list of nice-to-reads ... but the days are only so long, so there are two categories in my reader; and my must-read list has knit bloggers on it too, so the above list isn't exhaustive and it's likely I've even overlooked one or two that haven't posted recently... )

Whew. That aside -- RSS feeds abound! I have my reader (reader.google.com) set up to feed me new updates to a variety of flickr groups: bobbin porn, fiber love, handspun, yarn museum (on flickr!!), yarn cakes, ... and the spinner's housecleaning pages have an RSS feed too ...

And here are some recent finds I'm checking out:
Twosheep
Woven Thoughts
The Independent Stitch
Sheepwreck

As a corollary, someone asked how you can get wider text for blogs. One thing you can do is "subscribe" to the blogs with a (free) service like reader.google.com or bloglines.com and read it from their site; you'll see the new entries, typically formatted to the width of the screen (less the list of subscriptions over on the left hand side).

Although this isn't perfect -- sometimes all you get is summaries, sometimes photos don't download too, and you can miss new things folks put in their sidebars (if that's important to you). Luckily, the readers let you click on the title, typically, to bring up the whole blog (in its skinny-text glory).

One interesting side-effect on bloglines is that you can see how many people subscribe to a blog (according to bloglines -- this isn't _always_ accurate ... ) and if you click on that, you can see the "public" subscribers, and then see what other blogs they subscribe to (via bloglines, anyway) ... this is how my full list went from www.yarnharlot.com and askthebellwether.blogspot.com (hey, you gotta subscribe to your own blog, right?) to 223 subscriptions (eek, I could spend all day & night catching up) ... which is why I now focus on a must-read list (currently around 50, so typically 10 have new content on any given day) and "visit" with the others as whims and time permit me.

Whew! Back to the spinning/knitting/fiber tips now! But, if you know of an interesting, useful, or fun spinning blog -- comment here or email me! I'm always up for a new read! (The picture is me, pausing mid-demonstration on a Russian Spindle, to answer a question.)

(based on my posts to Spin-List April 2007)