Survey Says!

I had a lot of fun watching the numbers on the spinning wheel poll that I posted last Monday. I should have asked these questions before I bought my wheel, but even afterwards I was interested in knowing what choices other people had made and how many visitors to my blog actually consider spinning amongst their current interests. So, without further ado, here are the results (as of yesterday around noon) of my two polls.

How Many Spinning Wheels Do You Own?		Votes
None (I need another fiber-related hobby like I need a hole in the head!)	31%	103
None (But I can feel the spinning bug beginning to bite...)	25%	83
One	30%	98
Two	9%	28
Three	2%	7
Four	2%	5
Five or More (There's no such thing as too many spinning wheels!)	2%	5
	329 votes total

Initially when I set up this poll I didn't have a "none and I am not interested in owning one" category. But I realized that I actually was interested in the rough distribution between spinners, non-spinners and the curious about spinning. The result surprised me a little bit. 43% of the folks that responded have wheels and another 25% are interested in them or would like to have one some day. Which means that 68% of everyone who responded has an interest in spinning or is spinning.

That's a lot higher than I expected. Granted, this number could be artifically inflated by the fact that more spinners than knitters chose to read that post because of its content, or that more spinners decided to play along with my request for poll information, but it was still an intrigueing number to me. And it seems consistant with some of the numbers Spin Off has been seeing (as reported here in a recent New York Times article, which, unfortunately I can't link to anymore because it's in their archive). I think they have seen a doubling in their subscribership since 2000. Clearly a lot more people are beginning to include spinning in their leisure life.

The other thing that surprised me a little bit was that most people have just one wheel. Given my random blog readings, I was expecting to see most people hover around 2 wheels. Clearly, this means that my sampling of spinning bloggers is biased in favor of those with a few more wheels Either that, or those reading who have more than one wheel are so busy spinning that they don't have time for blogs and polls. It also suggests, although this may be self evident that the investment in a wheel is a significant one (in terms of both money and space in our homes), and that most of us don't end up with more than one -- or that most of us haven't advanced in our spinning hobby to the point where we would feel the need for more than one.

And you folks that have over three, I'm both jealous and intrigued! Did you get them for a specific reason or are they just sort of a lucky accumulation?

Which leads me to the next set of poll results.

What Kind of Spinning Wheels Do You Own?		Votes
Ashford	29%	60
Golding	1%	2
Jensen	4%	8
Kromski	6%	13
Lendrum	15%	31
Lennox/Winsome Timbers	0%	0
Louet	10%	20
Majacraft	9%	18
Schacht	9%	18
Antique Wheel	5%	10
Other	12%	25
	205 votes total

Given the spinners I've talked to and the people who have left comments for me here on the blog, these results don't really surprise me all that much.

It's clear that Ashford makes many good entry level wheels (my mother's old Ashford traditional is a perfectly serviceable wheel, even though it's over 20 years old) and the prices of many of their wheels can work for a number of budgets. They also make a fabulously engineered portable wheel (the Ashford Joy is really an impressive little wheel when you realize all the work they had to do to get it into such a compact form) and a beautiful upper end wheel (the Elizabeth). Clearly there's a reason why these folks are the General Motors or Toyota of the spinning wheel world. They have something for almost everyone!

The Lendrum came in a fairly distant second (although since I really don't know the confidence intervals for these polls, it's hard for me to know how distant). Lendrum is clearly a younger company than Ashford (there's a good article about them in the Spin Off, but I can't remember the issue now, if you want to read more about them). I also think that stylistically you either like the wheel or don't. I received a number of comments about how the tilted angle of the wheel made some people uncomfortable or was too easy to knock over. I suspect they also may a be a little bit harder to find and try out. Most people with Lendrum's that I know/talked to, do really like them. And I can second the fact that they are a very smooth wheel. Also, you get a lot of wheel for the money. The other wheels that I tried that spun like this one were 30-80% more expensive than this wheel.

The Louet, Majacraft and Schacht wheels have a roughly equal following, with Kromski wheels not too far behind. I hope to get to try a few more representatives of each of these wheel types in the future to find out more about them. I suspect that, in the long term, I will invest in a "parlor" wheel that won't travel with me. My own experience with these wheel types is that it is a little harder to find dealers who have them to try and (in the case of the Majacraft and the Schacht) they are definitely more expensive than the entry level Lendrum and Ashford wheels). Could this have an impact on the popularity of the wheels? Possibly, although if I really wanted to know this I should have asked another question about what wheels you tried before you bought or how much price had an impact on purchasing decisions.

The last group includes Golding, Jensen, the Antique Wheels and "Other". Why do I put "Other" in the last category even though almost as many people have "other" wheels as have Lendrum wheels? Well, I'm making the assumption that the "other" category does not have an overwhelming concentration of one wheel type (i.e. I just forgot some major brand of wheel). It probably includes Columbine wheels, specialty wheels from master wheel-wrights or wheels that were hand made by someone who doesn't make many, and wheels from other small manufacturers such as as Robin that only show up and fiber shows). Those of you with the Golding wheels, I am jealous and if you live in Chicago and want to share a few minutes on your wheel, I'd love to know! I hope I encounter Jensen wheels somewhere in my journeys and I am looking forward to seeing some of the more special wheel opportunities at Maryland this year (I understand that Robin wheels can only be found at sheep festivals like Maryland and Rhinebeck). Clearly, the less mass-market a wheel becomes, the fewer people will have it, presumably due to both price and availability.

Overall, this poll tells me that as a group, the readers of this blog have very diverse tastes in spinning wheels. I'm betting if we could all get together in some room (with a group this big it might have to be a high school gymnasium!) we'd all have a lot of fun trying out each other's wheels and seeing and feeling the differences and similarities. Clearly, most of us probably don't have access to a retailer who sells many kinds of wheels to try (I feel lucky to be only and hour or so away from the Fold, but Toni is just about the only store I know in the northern Illinois area with such a large collection of wheels), so I am imagining (once again, pure speculation not directly supported by poll results) that a lot of us also make our wheel decisions (especially our first wheel decisions) by what wheels we can try or that have been recommended to us.

Okay. That's it for the bars and % signs for a while. I'll be back to my fibery pursuits tomorrow!