Spinning is a laborious craft: the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin will vouch for that.

So will Belinda Gredig, the student knitwear designer from West Germany, spinning gold not

from straw, but from yesterday’s news. 

 

Gredig starts by shredding the newspapers that have been left to wilt on the tube into strips;

before sitting down at the spinning wheel in Central Saint Martins’ weave workshop. Slotted

in the corner, an old rickety thing, the spinning wheel looks as if it might keel with a sigh or

the slam of a door. Its power is deceiving. 

 

Unlike the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin, Gredig isn’t shackled to the spinning wheel or locked with it between four blank walls; though for all her dedication, she might as well be. ‘The fast fashion problem would not survive if everyone would place more value on traditional crafts,’ she tells me. Not least because spinning is painstakingly time consuming. If the studio is open, Gredig is there. ‘It’s good for me,’ she justifies. ‘I find spinning very calming; especially with all the stress of this project. Without it I would probably have gone crazy by now.’ Though she reasons, ‘Now I understand why you pay so much for hand woven yarns in shops!’ 

 

Gredig estimates that she uses 2 ½ pages of newsprint per small spool. She takes two loose fibres (she has experimented with cotton, recycled cotton, silk, lurex and tencel) and twists the newspaper around it. The rigidity of the newspaper will often mean it snaps; leaving her back at square one. Unlike the yarn design techniques used in industry – machines that allow for measuring width and number of twists per 

inch – there is no way of measuring on the spinning wheel. ‘The newspaper cuttings are all cut by hand,’ says Gredig; ‘So they can’t all be the same, meaning the yarn is uneven.’ Luckily, it’s exactly the effect she’s going for. The spinning wheel goes back to around 500 C.E. (‘I’m old, just like a spinning wheel,’ Gredig jokes when I ask her age) but spinning newspaper is an untapped niche: a new art on old ground. When, exactly, was the spinning wheel last used in the Central Saint Martins studio? 

 

‘It’s been quite a few years since a student last used it. Belinda is an exception,’ says specialist weave technician Linsay Robinson. ‘The last time it was used, I believe, was by an actor with a South London theatre company. There was a scene in a play they were doing involving a spinning wheel, so I taught the actor how to spin.’ 

 

Yarn designers are not using the spinning wheel because of its lethargic pace. Current students at Central Saint Martins are not taught to spin because it is complicated and outdated; besides, the number of tutors at the college who know how to spin are as thin on the ground as Belinda Gredig’s newspaper scraps nearing the end of a twelve-hour day. The spinning wheel, it would seem, is on its last legs. 

 

Why, then, does Gredig do it? ‘It’s not about saving money at all,’ she tells me. ‘It’s the time that’s expensive. I’m just fascinated by the idea of conjuring something from nothing.’ Like P.T. Barnum? I ask. ‘Exactly,’ she laughs. 

 

Though using a spinning wheel to make yarn is probably the worst business model possible in a thoughtless fashion climate, it’s a small step in thinking through the 

industry’s pace problem. ‘It would be horrible if the industry tried to make traditional crafts faster,’ she considers. 

 

In spinning her own yarn, Gredig is adding an extra step for herself. As Linsay Robinson reminds me, ‘Fashion houses would never have spun their own yarn. Yarn design is a completely separate industry.’ But for Gredig, understanding each level of the supply chain is what makes a good designer. ‘It’s important to me,’ she says. ‘For example, I’m interested in weaving, rather than just buying woven fabrics. The film screenings and lectures on sustainability we had in the lead up to this project made me rethink everything. I think about sustainability every day. It is something that is impossible – especially for me as a designer – to ignore.’ 

 

She lines up five spools of paper yarn in front of her, shining and neatly coiled in bronze, blue, purple, and soft pink. She plans on putting them into a jumper. ‘People just need to start thinking about everything more,’ she surmises. ‘The whole system and its values need a rethink. Otherwise change isn’t possible.’ I’m glad that someone is thinking about it.