Well, that was a lengthy pause. I can only blame the lack of home Internet access. Anyway, this weekend, to my great excitement, I managed to make friends with my spinning wheel. Since it arrived in August 2007 in my suitcase from California it's been sitting unattended in a corner, making me feel guilty every time I look at it. A few times, I've managed to pull it out and try my hand at spinning, only to end up frustrated and tearing my hair. Whatever I did, I could not get the yarn to wind onto the bobbin. Admittedly, I couldn't draft. Admittedly, I was hanging onto the yarn rather than letting the wheel take it up. Even still, there seemed to be no pull from the wheel. Like it had no desire to help me. Several introductions on other wheels allowed me to identify what I was doing wrong, but still I made no progress on my own wheel. I was stuck.
In the meantime, I picked up a new spindle and learned to spin on that, and I was starting to make progress-- enough at least to spin and ply the yarn for several small Christmas knitting projects. But it wasn't the same. Over the holidays a friend generously plied some of my spindle-spun singles, and it was so much quicker it made me want to weep. So on Saturday, in a jetlagged haze, I sat down one more time to see if my new spindling skills were any use at all.
They are. First I discovered that if I worked hard, I could get a ball of commercial yarn to wind onto the bobbin, so I tried that. Then I decided to see what would happen if I changed the bobbin. And then I made my discovery. I'd been playing with the tension on the bobbin, but not on the drive band. The knob down below? That controls the drive band that controls how much pull there is on the wheel and on the bobbin. Oh. Suddenly, I could hardly hold onto the yarn. Did it take up on the bobbin? Did it, hell. It was swallowing the stuff faster than I could spin it.
And so I sat down and began spinning the bag of roving I got two years ago with my very first cheap drop spindle. I spun and spun. The first bobbin was underspun, the next one overspun, but I didn't care. By Sunday night I was through most of the roving and had filled three bobbins. So I plied them. A couple of hours later, I had 155g of three-ply yarn skeined and ready for washing. I did a quick estimate-- 137 metres. Not bad for a couple of days' work.
It's not even yet, either in the plying or the spinning. And it's not nearly as beautiful and professional as so much of the stuff I see turned out, even by novices, on the UK Spinners group on Ravelry. But I've gone from turning out this:
To this:
And I'm proud of that.
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My wheel needs a name. Since it was made in Norway, it needs a Norwegian one, and female, I think. Suggestions in the comments please!
