Spinner's Alphabet: What Begins with F?

By Amelia © April 20, 2026

Me, spindling in the Olympics

F

is for Fiber Artist. When people call me a fiber artist, it makes me a bit uncomfortable. I don’t instinctively feel like an artist. I tend to think of myself as an artisan. I’m drawn to the craft itself — the methods, the repeatability, the satisfaction of using tools and technique to reliably achieve a specific result.

I suppose this goes back to my background as an engineer, where the goal is to design a process and then execute it well. We use our tools to get results, and there’s something deeply satisfying about refining that process until it behaves the way we want it to.

Over the years, I’ve seen that fiber artists come in many stripes and colors, and that the label can apply to me too. There are fiber artists who focus primarily on the art of what they do. They create unique pieces, rarely the same item twice, because they’re working to embody an idea or concept.

My own path has been different. As an artisan, my focus for many years was sock yarn. That was a ten-year journey. I embraced the idea that I could refine my process until I could reliably produce the sock yarn I wanted, while still exploring different variations within that framework.

Another aspect of my skills is analytical. I’ll encounter a commercial yarn, love its feel, and then work to copy it. Often I end up improving on it, because I can choose the breed of wool, the fiber content, and the structure. I can make deliberate decisions that shape the final result. I don’t see that as plagiarism or copying. I see it as using my skills to reach an intended target. It’s part of the craft — understanding something deeply enough to recreate it, and then making it my own through the choices I make along the way. This harkens back to my background as an engineer, where what we are doing is working to get results, and we use our tools to get those results.

I embrace the art and craft of spinning and am happy to be recognized as an artisan, teacher, writer, and yes, even artist in this space. I'm excited to see where the next decade takes my spinning — cotton, perhaps, as my looms call to me for new projects.

A table of spindles from my Spindle Tricks presentation

I had originally considered having F stand for fiber, since that is the heart of what I do as a fiber artist, and then building you a beautiful taxonomy of everything fiber, the animal, plant, and manmade fibers, and all the subcategories below them. There's just so many!

I would love to hear about your fiber artist journey and about the fibers that you love to spin.

What's your spinner's F?

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© April 20, 2026 by Ask The Bellwether, posted at http://askthebellwether.com/