long time no post... i got my spinning wheel four weeks ago tomorrow! that long already! i absolutely love it...
it took me over twenty minutes to remove all the tape that held the cardboard together - apparently the company i ordered it from couldn't find a box that was big enough for the other boxes... it arrived all whole and save and sound.
hard to believe the entire spinning wheel fit in there. it took me about two hours to assemble it - but i guess it would not have taken that long had the kids not wanted to help so much, as it was not difficult at all and the instructions were very clear and straightforward. but R kept running off with the hammer, to hammer everything within reach, and T was excited to help screwing in screws and taping in wooden dowels. once he noticed there was going to be some building he ran off to fetch his toy hard-hat and put it on. (it doesn't fit very well and kept falling off his head so he kicked it away after a while...)
isn't it lovely? it's an ashford kiwi 2 and it cost 315€... (see the abandoned hard-hat in the back corner...?)
T was (and still is) very interested in it. he likes treadling and it has already been a helicopter, a ship's steering wheel, a high speed train and some other fast and powerful vehicles... sometimes i have to remind him not to be too rough with it and not to treadle too furiously though. i suppose it is quite sturdy and can take it - but i don't want to find out how sturdy it is and how much it can take quite yet...
i ordered these fibers along with the wheel so i could start right away. i could not believe how soft these were. i had never touched anything like that before... i would have loved to start on one of them right away but the first thing i did was to just sit and treadle for a while (reminding the kids not to touch the wheel while it was turning or any other of the moving parts for that matter...), getting a feel for it and practicing starting and stopping without the use of my hands and without the wheel rocking back and forth... then i took a little scrap ball of yarn and let it run onto a bobbin while playing with the tension knob to get a feel for the uptake and the twist.
the very first thing i spun was a little 25g fluff of rainbow felting wool i had picked up at the craft section at the hardware store (it was on sale). i pre-drafted it quite a bit to test the staple length.
i realised later that i had way too little tension on the break band and of course the yarn i spun is far from perfect with lots of overtwist in some places and big chunks of fluff in others, but all in all for my first attempt it went much better than i had expected.
(i don't really count the time we (my sisters and i) tested the old spinning wheel we found in the attic that had some missing parts and was in desperate need of oil. also we "spun" raw sheep's wool that had maybe been washed - if even that - and that was it... it was fun to do but the results were for the garbage and the excitement ebbed off rather quickly... i think i was maybe ten or eleven...)
i also held the fiber much to tight. i needed some time to relax and let go... a couple of weeks ago we were at a medieval fair and i saw a woman spinning on a wheel. i watched for a while and we chatted a little and i told her i wanted to get a wheel for myself and she said to me: "spinning is all about letting go - just as raising children and life in general is." i have thought about that a lot and after having spun for a while can totally relate to that. when i hold on too tight - be it the fiber, the do-s and don't-s or whatever may vex and annoy me - it will all go wrong... odd that it took a spinning wheel to point that out to me... but that's another story...
anyway - the two little fluffs of 12,5g wool (i split the long 25g strand) spun themselves quite quickly so i plied them right away to see how that worked... it worked great! (a little overplied but i didn't expect anything else...) i like plying - it's the first time you get to see what the finished yarn will look like and when spinning and plying gradient yarn it makes that nice candy cane effect and you never know what colours are coming up next...
there we go! one tiny little skein of handspun yarn! i'm so ridiculously proud of it... and i love the colours. it's not particularly soft because the fiber was intended for kids' crafting but it was nice for the first try because it was so little. and i won't be knitting anything from it anyway. no - i will keep it forever to remind myself of my very first handspun yarn... and how beautiful it turned out...
next time i'll show you what else i have spun so far...