Generous gift from serendipitous stranger

[triskellian]

One of the more minor of the plots and schemes I was talking about the other day has come off already :-)

Back in October, I bought some unspun wool fibre at the Knitting and Stitching Show, but failed to acquire any tools or instructions for what to do with it. Then for my birthday, kauket and my MiL both bought me spindles and more unspun fibre, and with the help of the interwebs, I started teaching myself to spin yarn on a drop spindle, and spent quite a lot of essay-crisis time spinning while thinking about what I was going to write next. It's pretty good as new hobbies go - I'm getting better all the time, and producing yarn I can use, and enjoying the process.

On Christmas Eve, I wore a hat I'd spun and knitted to a party chez bopeepsheep and narenek, and subsequent conversation led to one of their neighbours offering to give me the unused spinning wheel she had in her garage and for which she was trying to find a new home...

I tried not to get too excited. People don't, on the whole, give largeish and expensive items to strangers they've just met at parties, and I didn't technically need a wheel, and don't really have anywhere to keep it.

But yesterday, I went round to see bopeepsheep to collect the scarf I'd left there, and a while later, I came home with a dusty cardboard box containing various inexplicable bits of wood in strange shapes (eight, I think, of these inexplicable bits make up the picture below; there are other bits which are accessories to the wheel rather than parts of it).

I'm not sure I'd ever seen a spinning wheel before in the flesh, and had only the vaguest idea of what one was supposed to look like or how it worked, but with the help of a picture of 'parts of a spinning wheel', I cleaned it up and put it together:



I had to read up on how to actually use the thing - it took me ages to work out where the yarn actually went, but I've made my first attempt (which isn't very good). It's a different sort of thing from spindle spinning; my current spindle project lives on my desk, and I take it up and do a bit while thinking or reading. The wheel takes up much more space (we haven't completely decided where it's going to live yet), but I can do it in front of the TV, although it takes more set up time and demands longer stretches to be worth doing. It's lovely. I keep looking at it* and grinning :-)

*Or at photos of it, since I'm currently at work and it is not.

Comments

[lathany.livejournal.com]

It looks very fairy tale-ish. Can you prick your finger on one or was that just story-dressing?

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

I saw a discussion about this somewhere recently, and I can't remember where. The consensus seemed to be that spinning wheels don't actually have sharp bits on which you could injure yourself, unless they're broken, and that the most likely origin for the story was either that she got a splinter (which is a bit prosaic), or that she was actually using a drop-spindle, althouigh even those tend not to be particularly sharp or pointy.
(Disclaimer; this is just my memory of what other people said; I have no knowledge of spinning devices at all!)

[triskellian]

Nope, no sharp edges at all. From the reading I've been doing, I've learnt that the bit she probably pricked her finger on was the distaff, not the spindle, but my wheel doesn't have a distaff (it's used for spinning other kinds of fibre, I think). Not that I have any idea what one is, only that sometimes they have sharp pointy bits ;-)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

That doesn't sound right to me.

I prefer this explanation of sharp spindles:

"While we're on the topic of automatic take-up: Sleeping Beauty did not have a modern spinning wheel -- there's nothing on it to prick your finger. She had the pre-flyer wheel, usually called a Great Wheel, with a spindle being driven by the wheel. The spindle can be quite sharp at the end and is ultimately prickable. My great wheel's spindle is protected with a cork when not in use."

[triskellian]

Oh yes, I've heard that one, too, but had forgotten about it ;-)

[dr-bob.livejournal.com]

Drop spinning? You should have spoken to us re-enacty types (specifically cuthbertcross) on how to do that!! 'Though from the sounds of things you've picked it up pretty well with just the intarweb to help.

If you want a really time-consuming way to process home-spun wool, you should take up naalbinding!!

[triskellian]

you should take up naalbinding
Thanks, but no thanks ;-) Since I've no need to follow any rules other than the rules of what I like, I'll stick to knitting please. Naalbinding sounds slooooow.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

It looks fab! Did it need much cleaning? I was trying not to look too closely into the box in case of sp*ders... :)

[triskellian]

It's lovely, isn't it? It was dusty, but fifteen minutes with a jay cloth and some kitchen spray was all it needed really.

There were spiders in the box <shudder>, but I squished the big live one with my boot, covered the big dead one with something and pretended it didn't exist, and the others were small enough that I could overcome my revulsion with spinning!squee :-)

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

Not sure I understand it... where does the flux capacitor go?

[(Anonymous)]

Enjoy