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.