Spinning: January 2006 Archives
I'm a little late with this post this morning because I want to show off color. I find that whenever I really want to give a good impression of color, I need to take pictures in natural light. I get decent color representation under my Ott light but it just isn't the same as what my camera likes to do under true sunlight. As it turns out, waiting wasn't a bad thing, because it's a blue skies and sun sort of day here in Chicago. And it isn't even all that cold, so it was no problem to step out on my balcony and let my camera get a good look at my latest small spinning project.
Unfortunately, I didn't remember to take a picture of this roving before I spun it up, but if you want to see what it looked like, you can click here and scroll down to the last picture. It's the roving on the left where the browns and yellows are emphasized instead of the red. Not surprisingly, this yarn has a very different character from the version with the strong red presence (if you want to see the first version spun up, you can click here). And it does remind me more of the idea I was trying to go for, which was autum leaves after they have fallen from a tree (if you've ever seen the leaves from a non-red maple tree after they've fallen, then you know what I was trying to capture).
I really like the way that the brown in this colorway softened up the other colors without making them just look muddy. In fact, it's almost hard to see the brown areas for me because my eye wants to re-evaluate them as an earthy purple
Now I am finally finished with all the rovings I dyed up with Julie. I'm not sure I really have a favorite, but I am definitely going to be playing with all three color sets (Blue Hawaiian, Sunset and Fall Leaves) some more to find ways to avoid the constant striping action. I originally thought that it would be easy to take a couple of different color ideas and get what I wanted and then move onto another batch. This experience makes me realize that it is not so hard to pick colors that go together well, but it is challenging to get them to result in a yarn or a yarn concept that you really like.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
A million years ago, in August, Julie and I did our last dyeing experiment. We were hoping to do some more dyeing, but it's a bit more challenging to do it on a larger scale without being able to open windows to help deal with vinegar vapors. Between that and both of us being on the busy side, it's been tough to get back to it. However, I realized this afternoon that I haven't even finished spinning up the roving we dyed then.
The whole point of that session was to start to establish some colorways that made us happy. We actually recorded the colors we used, the percentages and the saturation so that we would have some hope of repeating them. Then we were each going to take what we dyed and spin them up to see whether what was lovely in the fleece turned out to be equally lovely or appaling when spun. I tried painting the roving in a couple of different ways. The ones I've spun up to this point (all on my drop spindle!) all had horizontal bars of color. What I discovered with that, given the way that I spun it up, was that the long stretches of color give you stripey yarn. In fact, none of my hand-dyed rovings have yielded anything but stripey yarn. And while I like stripes as well as the next knitter, a girl cannot live by stripes alone. I also wanted something that was a little more sophisticated.
In the course of dyeing, I decided to try an experiment. Instead of horizontal stripes I would try vertical striping. Well, striping probably isn't the right word for it. But I would try to distribute the color more randomly in a vertical rather than horizontal orientation.
I used my "sunset" colour pallette, which is composed of a rosy purple red, a rich gold and a lightened purple with a bit of a reddish cast to dye this roving. Today, looking for a little project to play with on my new wheel, I pulled it out, pre-drafted it and spun it up. Then I created a two ply yarn from the singles. It wasn't the most fun thing to spin up (even with the pre-drafting, there were a few areas where the fibers really didn't want to let go of each other), although it did go better when I realized that the staple length in BFL is quite a bit longer than the merino/silk blend I just finished spinning. And it's really hard to complain about spinning up a half an ounce of fiber in an hour or so instead of the two days it would have taken me on the drop spindle. Did I mention that I like the process but am really ultimately about product?
I am pleased with the final result, and will definitely be playing with this color set more (I spun up another Sunset roving with horizontal stripes earlier, and you can see the result here). There's plenty of color in this little skein, but it's much more subtle than the previous roving I spun, I suspect because of the predominance of purple red base. Also, I think these colors were much more similar in terms of the depth of their hue, and as a result, nothing stands out quite as sharply, creating a softer effect. I think it will be interesting to try the dyeing again, using each of the three colors as the dominant color with smaller blotches of the other two. I'm thinking that I will get three very different yarns, each with a character I like. I've got to soak and set the twist in this skein and do a little swatching, but I am almost positive that the striping effect is going to be much less prominent in this little skein.
I know I promised a little spinning wheel poll summary today, but that will have to wait until Monday, I think. Believe it or not, there's still a Christmas tree to take down in our house...
I got to play with both of my wheels to finish up the hand-dyed Merino and Tussah from Blue Moon Fiber Arts. I did all the spinning on my Ashford (mostly because I started spinning it on this wheel and I thought it would be good to be consistant) and then did the last two batches of plying on my Lendrum. I absolutely love my plying head and being able to create skeins with a little heft to them.
This head is actually big enough that you have to put a bigger drive band on the wheel to use it. And the orifice is so large that you don't need a threading hook at all. You also get quite a work out treadling to keep that big bobbin spinning! But the end result is very much worth it. I'm a big fan of plying on a wheel in general, though. Compared to when I was doing this on a drop spindle, I feel like it's easier for me to tell when I have just the right amount of twist in the yarn. In fact, almost all these skeins were pretty well balanced after plying (just a little bit of over twist) so I haven't really bothered to dunk any of them in the sink yet. I will eventually, just to make sure that the yarn doesn't want to give up any dye. But for right now I've just put the yarn into hanks..
All 5.75 ounces spun into 663 of two ply yarn. The last skein (the one farthest to the left) is a little bluer than the others, but I expected that given the way I worked with the roving and the way the roving was colored. 663 yards seems like a pretty respectable amount of yarn to me. So now I just need to figure out what to do with it. I'm thinking maybe pillows made with mitred squares? I know it's going to stripe quite a bit. I guess I just won't know until I swatch a little bit of it up.
Finally, I wanted to cap this off with another closeup of the last skein. My spinning is beginning to get a bit more consistant, I think. My concerns about consistancy brought out a few interesting comments from people reminding me that handspinning is not completely about making perfect yarn that looks like it was millspun. With this, I completely agree. I'm not really striving for perfection at all. However, I am striving to develop greater control and, to me, being consistant and getting a single of the diameter that I want is part of the control development process.
Right now I am just learning, getting my hands and feet to co-ordinate, understanding what cool things can be done with a wheel. Learning what things work best for me. I'm happy with almost any yarn I get and I am not worrying all that much about what the final yarn turns out to be. But, ultimately, I want to be able to look at some fiber, say "I want a two ply DK weight yarn" and be able to spin that yarn. So my interest in achieving more consistancy is more about me getting to a place where I can create what I envision than about creating perfect yarn. And about understanding about how spinning really works.
So, ready or not, here I come with a little more spinning!
This is the first hank of the Blue Moon 50% Merino/50% Silk blend dyed in the "Eclipse" colorway. It's about 147 yards (according to my niddy noddy) and 1.25 ounces and it's just as soft as all get out. Not sure how much is on the bobbin yet. Definitely less than is on the skein, so I probably have a total of 250-275 yards and I still probably have over half of the roving left to spin up.
Did I mention how soft this stuff is?
My spinning and plying are still a little bit uneven, as you can see from this closeup:
but I'm definitely improving. I'm finding that, compared to the drop spindle, the wheel gives me more time to think about what I am doing with the fiber. I also find it a little easer to stop and tweak as I go along. Even so, there are some places in my singles where they got a lot thinner than I would have liked or a little bit too thick. But nothing that involves hand eye co-ordination improves without practice. Hopefully as I spin up more of this stuff and other things I'll get better at keeping things more even. What was very cool about this skein was after I pulled it off my niddy noddy, it didn't twist at all... not one bit! So even if the gauge fluctuates, I did a good job at balancing the yarn. I had real concerns about that happening.
You see, this skein also comes with a learning experience.
I had just finished spinnin the second bobbin's worth of singles and decided that I just couldn't wait to see what was going to happen when I plied this stuff up. So with the help of my homemade lazy Kate I got everything all set up and started plying. I'd been spinning all day, so I had a good rhythm going, but something didn't seem quite right. No problem with the plying, but the yarn wasn't poofing up quite as much as I expected it to. Didn't seem that bad, though, so I kept spinning along, not quite able to put my finger on what was bothering me.
And then my wheel threw it's drive band (it does that periodically, just to test me and my newly developing spinning wheel technical service skills) and after I got the band back on and began to start spinning again, it suddenly dawned on me what was wrong. I was spinning the two-ply in the same direction as I had spun the singles. And I had about a third of a bobbin's worth of the stuff. Clearly, sometimes the speed of the wheel can be a double edged sword.
After a little bit of judicious cursing I decided that there was nothing I could do but unwind it all off the bobbln and start over, making sure that my wheel was turning in the right direction. I watched it turn into a bit of a tangled curly mess as I unwound it. And got a pleasant surprise when re-spinning it in the reverse direction (albeit a good deal longer to remove the twist in the wrong direction and add new twist in the right direction) -- it actually worked and gave me the results I wanted. So spinning in the wrong direction is not fatal. Frustrating, but not fatal. At least not with this yarn. Of course, when I plied it in the right direction, I got that nice bit of poofiness that I wanted to see and the colors even looked a little different together (not sure if that is a trick of the light or if the orientation of the fibers really does matter for the perception of color).
I haven't yet measured the WPI on this yarn, but this yarn is probably the first thing I've spun and plied that I could say approaches DK weight. I'm assuming that the merino content helps to give it a lot of loft.
I'm still not sure what to make of the colors. Or what I will make out of this yarn. It's certainly soft enough to be used in a skin-touching garment, but I'm not sure beyond a scarf what kind of garment that would be. And I'm not sure I could handle that much wild color variation. I'm trying to decide if it would make up into a nice pillow cover or two -- something that will still be enjoyed for being soft. Once I get a little more spun up, I'll swatch it and see.
In the meantime, I'm going to keep it on my desk to pet. It's hard not to be happy when you're touching something so soft!
It's a bit "all spinning all the time" around here right now. I'm not sure if it is generally interesting, but I find that I have days that I just want to spin all the time, or days where I want to knit like a fiend and do nothing else. I actually find it hard to have a day where I do both, even when I have a whole day to tackle several projects. And lately, inspired by the thought of a new spinning wheel, I am finding it hard to pull myself away from the spinning.
I did solve the "spinning wheel chair" problem by drafting my trusty desk chair into service. When I lower it to it's lowest level, it works well with my Ashford Traditional and gives me a comfortable angle for both working with the fiber and treadling. Thank you to all of you who suggested I see what my desk chair could do for me! Once I got myself all comfortable and situated, I proceeded to make a small dent in my pound of natural colored fine wool/silk noile.
As it turns out, washing this stuff makes quite an impact on it. It's much brighter after a little swim. Although you can't tell it by looking at the roving, there must be some light dust in it. The tags are a little trick that I stole from Leigh after I saw them on her blog. You can buy them at almost any office store and they are pretty handy for labeling yarn. I'm not very good at remembering fiber details when the ball band is gone and since I'm likely to spin many things at once, it seemed like a good idea to make sure that what I did spin up got labelled for future reference.
I also took the time to swatch up a little of this yarn, to see if swatching would give me some inspiration as to what this yarn is supposed to become. As it turns out, those little tags are also handy for labelling swatches. I used my wraps-per-inch tool to figure out that the yarn is about 16 wpi. That puts it right on the border between fingering and DK. So I decided to try swatching on US size 5 (3.75 mm) needles (mostly because I couldn't find a pair of size 4 needles, which was what I wanted originally). The result is about 5.5 stitches/inch and 8 rows/inch, and a swatch with just a little touch of a rustic quality, which I like. While I like the feel of the fabric, it looks a bit open to me, so I may try another swatch on the 4's, just to see if it I like it better (and to justify the new size 4 Addis that I purchased over the weekend).
So far, the yarn still hasn't told me what it wants to be. But I'm beginning to get a teddy bear vibe from it. Looking through Amazon, I came across two books on Teddy Bears that look interesting to me:
Anyone have any experience with either or both of these books and have an opinion about the quality of the bears and the patterns?
Wow! Y'all had a lot to say about your wheels. When I stop and think about it, it's really great that there are so many different kinds of wheels out there to suit all the different kinds of spinnners in the world. It was interesting to hear all the different opinions and to hear more stories about different kinds of wheels. It certainly doesn't make my decision making process any easier knowing that there are so many great choices. But it does make me feel good to know that probably no matter which wheel I chose, I will get something I like -- and a wheel that others are familiar with. And there's nothing better than knowing there's a community of people out there who can share their wheel wisdom with me!
The trip to Marengo, combined with bonding a little more with my Ashford Traditional has gotten me into a very spinning oriented mood. After I finished plying up some more of the natural colored wool/silk blend I got from my mother, I decided that I needed to spend some time spinning some of this:
This was the first time I found the merino/silk blend at the Fold and I just had to leave with some of it. It's soft, and reminds me of the Cormo and Tussah Silk blend that I bough at MS&W last year that was such a dream to spin on my drop spindle. This is something of an unusual color choice for me, but I was drawn into the lovely yellow and spring green in the mix and curious about how that would blend with the blues and greys when all plied up.
Here's the first two bobbins full. This hank of fiber is only 5.75 ounces, so I don't think it will take me too long to spin up the whole thing. I wish my spinning was a little more even but I think that will likely only come with time and practice. That said, I did learn a few things as I spun these two bobbins up that made my life a little better.
1) For me, it seems like things wind on my bobbins better if I start with the single going through the hook closest to me and work my way towards the hook on the opposite end as I fill up each area. When I start from the hook furthest from me, the single seems to move towards the middle and wind on a bit unevenly. Not that this is a big deal, but it makes it easier for me to judge when the bobbins have about the same amount of single on them when the single winds on more evening.
2) Merino and silk are well paired for spinning. The short fibers of the merino are complemented by the long silk fibers, giving the feeling of having a much longer staple length than if one were spinning merino alone.. When I first started spinning this stuff though, since I was remembering only about the short staple length of the merino, I found that I was fighting myself a bit when I was drafting out the yarn from the main part of the roving. Why? Because my drafting hand and my roving guiding hand were just too close together. I found that the best positioning was actually to have my guiding hand be 3-4 inches back from my drafting hand. In that position, the fiber flow was very natural and easy. So now I know another reason why it is important to understand the staple length of the fiber I am spinning with.
3) I now understand why wheels come with more than one, as I think of it, "gear ratio". The finer the yarn I spin, the more twist I want to put into it to hold it together. That means that I have to either treadle faster or make the bobbin spin faster relative to the main wheel. Unfortunately, my makeshift twine drive band doesn't allow me to switch ratios easily, but at least now I understand the principle. I suppose that is the sort of thing that should be obvious, but there's nothing quite like hands on experience for me to get a grasp on this kind of obvious. And, in a strange way, I'm feeling pleasantly self-satisfied that I did figure this out by myself by actually thinking about what I am doing and about the equipment I am working with.
So what will this yarn look like when I ply it up? Will it be attractive? Will it be ugly? I'll have to solve that mystery tomorrow.
Saturday was official "spinning wheel testing day" for me. Julie and Bonne Marie and I all headed out to the Fold in Marengo, Illinois. For those of you who have never been to the Fold, this is definitely one of those stores that is worth he hour and a half drive from the city. So much great stuff and friendly people to help you with it. Even if you're a knitter and not a spinner, there's something here for you, since there's a fair amount of nice yarn stocked in this store -- besides the "proto yarn" that you have to spin for yourself. Some of my favorite proto-yarn greets you at the door:
How could a girl not like a bookcase full of Blue Moon hand-dyed spinning fiber? So many good colors!
But I did't spend too much time with fiber. I was there to try out wheels. I have no issues with the Ashford traditional that I have been working with (in fact, it's been a nice wheel to learn on -- the fact that it has a few "personal issues" means that I've learned a little bit more about how wheels work), but it's not meant to be my wheel forever. Ultimately, it's supposed to go back to Ann Arbor with my mother, its true owner. Thus, I'm out looking for a wheel to call my own.
And let me tell you, there's a lot of wheels to choose from! At the Fold, alone, there are at least 6 different wheel brands to try, and each of those brands has a couple of different wheels. It can be a little bit of wheel sensory overload for a newbie spinner. I would have loved to try them all, but there were a few criteria that I used to determine whether I sat down in front of a wheel.
1) Could I figure out the basics of using the wheel without a lot of assistance? I figure if I can't figure out how to get spinning on it in about a minute or less, I'm just going to end up frustrated in the long run. Probably anything I can't figure out easily would be better left to my spinning future.
2) Was it in my price range? I'm willing to make a reasonable investiment in a good piece of equipment, but since I'm a new spinner, and many things are likely to change as I grow, I want a wheel that isn't going to break the bank but will still give me a good experience.
3) Did I find it aesthetically pleasing? Realistically, any wheel that I own will probably sit out in someplace that I will have to look at it a lot. So it would be nice if it was easy on the eyes as well as a good tool.
4) How portable? Idealy, it would be nice to have a wheel that wasn't too hard to move around the house, was easy to store, and could occasionally make the trek over to Julie's house
.
Criteria number 1 eliminated two whole wheel manufactureres: Majacraft and Winsome Timbers. I don't want to create the wrong impression here -- I am sure these companies make great wheels and that I was likely missing something obvious about them that would have made them simple to spin with. In the case of the Winsome Timbers wheels, however, they were somewhat complex and out of the price range I was looking in. For the Majacraft, I just couldn't, for the life of me, figure out the bobbin/flier mechanism and how to feed in the fiber. I figure they just don't use the paradigm I'm used to. They make awfully pretty wheels, though.
So what did that leave me with?
The first wheel I tried out was the Lendrum Double Treadle -- it's not a "true" double treadle, but you still use both feet to treadle. This wheel has a very smooth mechanism and it's very comfortable to spin from (Julie seconded my opinion of spinning on this wheel). It also has the added benefit of being fairly portable (it can be stored almost flat, which means it can live under a bed or futon sofa when not in use. I also like it's simple lines and the clear finish on the maple. I also really like the flier and the mechanism that moves the yarn along the bobbin -- it's basically a pinch clamp that slides along one side of the flier instead of the hooks that are on my Ashford. The reason I like this better? Well, those little hooks can break off in the wood, and then you've got no easy way to put another hook in and you have a part of your bobbin that you can't reach. This pinch clamp thing looks like it would be pretty easy to replace. One last nice feature? The orifice hook has it's own special place attatched to the wheel. You never have to worry about losing or putting it somewhere out of reach since it's stowed in the wheel itself.
The second wheel I tried was the Louet S-75. I'll admit right up front that it is the only Louet that I tried because I really just don't like the way that most of the Louet wheels look. Once again, I'm sure they're perfectly great wheels, but their styling doesn't appeal to me, they're just too spartan And a tool that I'm going to look at a great deal needs to appeal to me visually. The S-75 has a more "traditional" spinning wheel look. It's also a "fake" double treadle like the Lendrum. But I just didn't bond with this wheel. For one thing, I didn't think it was as smooth the Lendrum (to be honest, I don't think it was even as smooth as my single treadle Ashford Traditional) -- I could tell almost every time the drive shaft reached the top of its circle and that disrupted my flow a bit. I also though the treadles were too narrow. It was light weight and easy to move around, though.
The third wheel I tried out was the Schacht Matchless -- a wheel with a true double drive mechanism. I have to start by saying that I do think this wheel is lovely. I really liked the details in the wood. I also loved the big treadles that the rather large bobbin and flier assembly -- you can go a long time with this wheel without having to stop to change bobbins. And I really enjoyed spinning with it, too. It was very smooth and effortless to work with. The only negative for me with this wheel is it's size. It's a pretty good-sized machine and there's no way to fold it up and get it out of sight when you need extra space. And it's not a tiny wheel. It takes up at least as much space as my Ashford Traditional. It certainly won't fit in the trunk of my car easily if I want to take it to visit Julie! But, otherwise, from my perspective, the Matchless was a thoroughly lovely wheel.
The last wheel I tried out is the Lendrum Saxony. I'll be honest, I should have eliminated this wheel based on both the price and lack of portability criteria alone -- I never should have even sat down in front of it.. But this wheel, especially in it's walnut incarnation is really a thing of beauty. I could easily imagine it living in my living room. Both Julie and I were drawn to this wheel. And this wheel isn't just another pretty face, either. I think it was my favorite wheel to spin on of all the wheels I tried. So smooth and effortless -- both in the spinning and in getting the spinning started. That big wheel starts and stops easily and it's equally easy to reverse directions on it. This wheel comes in both left handed and right handed styles. I'm a lefty when I spin, and the way this wheel is set up, you sit in a very natural position and work with the fiber in a very comfortable position as well -- you draft almost perpendicularly to your legs (as opposed to the rest fo the wheels that I tried, where you draft parallel to your legs). This wheel is not very portable due to it's size, but that is about the most negative thing I could say about it. I think it's going to fall into the category of my "dream wheel" for a while. But if I get to the point where it is time to get a second wheel, this one will most definitely be high on my list!
The only wheel brand that I wanted to try that isn't at the Fold is Kromski. I love the look of both the Mazurka and the Minstrel, and given my husband's ethnic backround, I also love the idea of having a Polish spinning wheel. But there's only one place in Illinois that I could probably try one out in. I'm not sure I'm going to get a chance to try one out before my birthday arrives (which is the major catalyst for this wheel shopping expedition).
My first choice after the testing I did at the Fold is the Lendrum. It meets most of my criteria and is a pleasure to spin on. The Matchless is a close second, but it's lack of portability puts it out of the running until I start thinking about a second wheel (which isn't likely to be for a while). Julie tells me I need to try out the Ashford Joy again (my first attempt was before my first spinning lesson and I was having real problems co-ordinating my hands and feet), which is fabulously portable. I must admit, though, that I like the look of the Lendrum a great deal. But I am hoping that I can take a little trip out to Julie's house sometime just to make sure I give the Joy a fair shake.
Of course, I didn't buy a wheel on Saturday. But that didn't mean that I left the shop empty handed...
I guess sock yarn is just like eating potato chips for me -- I can't buy just one. The Austerman Step is a yarn I am really curious about, because it has both Lanolin and Jojoba Oil in it -- you can tell when you pick it up. I'm wondering if it lasts beyond the first wash or if it's just a nice treat for your hands. The Trekking XXL is more grey variations for the husband -- for whom there can never be enough grey sock yarn. The Blue Moon Seduction is a Merino Tencel blend that I think is meant mostly for sock yarn, given the 400 yards in the put up. The Black Onyx is clearly for John, and the Carbon Dioxide is for John, but it's probably wishful thinking on my part that he will ever select it. Finally, the Blue Moon Sock Candy is a Cotton/Elite yarn that I think will be perfect for my sister in law who lives in Houston. I love the colorway and the "Elite" must be what gives the yarn the stretch it needs to be an acceptable sock yarn. It's also pretty soft, so I am hopeful that the resulting socks will be liked by the recipient.
And, given my renewed spinning excitement, I just couldn't leave the store without a little something special to spin up -- just under 6 ounces of a Merino/Silk blend in springy colors. This reminds me a lot of the Cormo/Silk blends I bought at last year's MS&W and I'm thinking it's going to be a real pleasure to spin up!
If anyone has anything they want to share about their own wheel buying and owning experience, I'd love to hear it!
Remember that big ball of natural colored wool and silk that I showed off not too long ago? Well, I've been using it to get a little work out on my wheel. After all, how can I go to Marengo this weekend (home of The Fold) to try out new wheels if I can't really spin comfortably? So I decided that my mother's gift was going to be a gift to her friendly old Ashford Traditional as well. And whenever I got a few seconds, I worked on spinning some up.
This single is definitely a little bit rustic looking. However, I think that that is just the Tao of this yarn, given my current state of spinning experience. In general, I'm spinning something a little less fine than a lace weight single -- I'm not sure what my deal is, but I have a hard time not spinning fine weight singles, no matter what fiber I'm working with. (Clearly this is an area in which I need to improve my technique -- if only so that I can make the yarns I want to make). The bits of silk in the yarn create small areas of resistance and that ends up making the yarn have some thicker and thinner areas. But it doesn't really bother me all that much. It's still a pleasure to spin with.
But once I got one bobbin finished, I realized that to ply the stuff and make a skein, I probably needed to spin up another bobbin. I learned the true power of a wheel when I spun an entire second bobbin's worth of single in a couple of hours this afternoon! But then I realized I had another problem. I don't have a lazy Kate to ply from. So I had a fiber MacGuyver kind of moment and jerry-rigged myself a lazy Kate out of a unsuspecting shoebox and a pair of US size 7 metal knitting needles.
Not surprisingly, plying turns out to be a lot faster on a wheel, too. And I enjoyed watching it happen because unlke when I was spinning the singles, when I was plying, I could really see what was happening with the twist, and that made it a lot easier to get a relatively even amount of twist throughout what I was plying. I loved watching the yarn plump up as I added more twist. The final result?
It is really remarkable, after spinning a lot on a drop spindle, to see how much I could spin in a relatively short period of time on my wheel. I'm not really sure how much yarn I have here (it's all I could fit on one bobbin -- and I still had enough single left for about 2/3rds of a second bobbin) but if feels like a real skein-sized amount that one could actually take on a project with. The cool thing? I haven't really even put much of a dent in the whole pound of fiber that I have to play with. Were I to actually keep spinning relatively consistantly, I could actually have enough of the stuff to make something substantial. I knew, of course, that wheels had this potential, but now I've gone from imagining the potential to seeing the actual. And that's a powerful transition, indeed!
Although the yarn is still a little on ther rustic side, I'm actually quite pleased with the result:
This is the yarn before getting a little bath. It clearly has areas where it is thicker and thinner or has a little more or less plying, but when I skeined it up on my niddy noddy before dumping it into the bath, it seemed to hold together well, be quite soft, and to be pretty well balanced. Not bad for my first major effort, I think!
I did learn something else on this outing as well -- I need a better chair for this. I think I was sitting too high in the chair I was using, because my back started to hurt from leaning over a little bit. Maybe I'll have to talk to my wonderful wood-working father about building the perfect spinning chair...
