Simplicity

So much about creativity is about simplicity. The most elegant, simple tool of creativity that I know of is the humble spindle. 

The spindle is one of man's earliest tools and has for millennia been used to clothe and shelter and convey people, young and old, living and dead. 

In ancient Egypt, some mummies' burial cloths have been found to be almost 300 yards in length, worked at 80-90 threads per inch on the warp (vertical) and 30-40 threads per inch in the weft (horizontal). That's, at a median, 61,500 feet of handspun linen or 20,500 yards of linen spun on a simple spindle at an astonishing fineness. Don't believe me? Go look at an inch and imagine 90 threads fitting flat in that space. 

Spindles were used to spin cotton and linen, coarse wool and fine wool, alpaca, bison, yak, llama, vicuña and hemp. Anything that could be made into a string was spun with a simple spindle which at its basics is a piece of wood with something to give it some weight to help it spin fast enough to accommodate the fiber it was spinning. Sometimes the whorl (the heavy bit) is at the top, sometimes the bottom but the principle is the same. 

(Image from Pacific Wool and Fiber website -http://www.pacificwoolandfiber.com/drop-spindles.html - a fabulous place to find fiber and tools) 

Spun and woven fiber has been used for clothes, sails, burial cloth, tents, paper and more. 

Tools for creativity, whether it be a spindle or a pencil, don't have to be fancy or expensive (although they sometimes are). Sometimes the more fancy a tool is, the more it can stifle creativity because it makes decisions or assumptions for you that limit where your thinking or making or doing might otherwise take you. 

Try doing something creative with something simple today. Me?  I've got my spindle with me and that makes me happy.