Spring is springing

The weather is beginning to warm which means that I'm able to return to my studio. I'm really excited about some wheel thrown spindle whorls that I've been working on. They're time consuming, but I have fallen head over heels with each and every one of them even though I'm sure that they're not saleable. (Of course this means that I'll be making a lot more of them...)

It's more than a month since I had hoped to have the Etsy shop back up and running. I mentioned in my last post some interpersonal drama. No sooner had it passed than our house was hit with some form of awful plague. The coughing has lasted more than a month and we ended up taking Sprout to urgent care where she was diagnosed with bronchitis. It's hard to believe that at 3 1/2 years old, we had never been required to give her any kind of medicine. We'd given her some infant tylenol when she was first teething, but she quickly decided that she didn't want or need it. Unfortunately, this meant that the antibiotics they prescribed for her illness were grounds for quite a few contentious battles.

I really do intend to re-open the shop. I have realized that I'm really not a business woman. That said, I have said before that I'm afraid of being buried alive by my own work. In the interest of seeing that work into the hands of those who will love and care for it, I will post pictures of the items I'm planning to list here on the blog at least a day or two before I update the shop. If you see something that you are particularly interested in, leave a comment, or drop me a note and let me know. When I list the item, I'll list it as reserved for you and give you 3 weeks to finish the transaction before removing the "reserved" label.

Well, I'm only awake and typing because of hellish leg cramps. In spite of my desire to stay up and watch the end of the PBS Masterpiece Theater presentation of Sense and Sensibility that I taped on Sunday, I must get some sleep. Tonight is "Night at the Museum" where I will be playing the role of a frontier woman spinning the night away as her babes sleep. More on that later...

The best laid plans

New Spindle - Old Whorl
Originally uploaded by MysticSpiral

Obviously, in spite of my desire to do so, I did not re-open the shop on March 1st. To explain the delay, I need to go back to some of the circumstances that led me to close the shop in the first place.

I've mentioned (once or twice) that I have been diagnosed and am being treated for major depression. I've learned that I'm vulnerable to downward spirals. When I sense that one of those spirals is approaching, I need to take the time to address the underlying issues. In this case, the issue is one that started 2 1/2 years ago with the loss of a significant friendship. I was devastated by that loss, and would have given a great deal to "fix" things.

A few weeks ago, this lost friend contacted me out of the blue. In the last 2 years, she has moved and has dealt with a lot of personal trauma and some major transitions in her life. I kind of admire her for doing it. She had no way of knowing what to expect when she contacted me. She couldn't have known whether I would even respond to her since I honestly didn't know myself when I saw her email.

There have been a lot of things going on in my life that I couldn't put on hold. My parents have had some ongoing health problems. They were offered a rather unconventional (and perhaps extreme) opportunity to address several of those problems simultaneously with "minor" surgery. There was quite a bit of uncertainty as the date for the surgeries approached. My sister was going to come "home" from Germany to help take care of our parents. My mom's sisters came up from the Louisville/Southern Indiana area to help care for them. It was a really scary thing for me, but they're doing great and if everything works the way that it should, their health should be dramatically improved and their life expectancy extended.

While all of that was going on, Sprout and I were both a bit sick. It's like everything happens at once. It's not so long ago that all of this would have sent me into some kind of dark pit. Instead, I took a look at what was going on in my life and identified some things that I didn't **HAVE** to do deal with right then. The biggest thing that could be postponed was getting the shop set up. I've got everything that I need to start taking pictures when the time is right. I've got a couple of new designs that I'm about ready to launch and a little extra time gives me a bit of a chance to refine them a bit further before they debut.

My parents are recovering fine. Sprout has been diagnosed with bronchitis and we've started a course of treatment. (she's not very cooperative and I hate forcing medicines onto her but we'll do what we have to to make her well) I have a book review that got lost in the shuffle and should be ready to post in a couple of days. Etc...

The situation with my "friend" appears to have reached its conclusion. For the sake of my mental health, I just came right out and asked to put all the cards on the table. My request was met with a passive-aggressive "Sorry I bothered you." and I have decided to just let it go.

Through all of this, my spinning has been a constant comfort and an act of meditation. Remind me to post soon about the spinning demonstration that I'm doing at the Springfield museum. It's forcing me to dust off the wheel and explore an interest in historical re-enactment/re-creation.

My new spindling book

DSCF2059-A-book-spindle-11-17-2007
Originally uploaded by MysticSpiral

Ok, maybe that's deceptive. It's not like I've written a book on spindle spinning. Instead, I've turned a small, otherwise useless book into a drop spindle. I found the book at the annual Planned Parenthood book sale held at our local fairgrounds. I had fun making it and am thinking about doing a tutorial, if there's any interest.

I've been doing a lot of spinning recently. Between that and the sweaters that I've unraveled, my yarn stash is getting out of control. It doesn't help that I haven't been doing any knitting or anything with the yarn. I'm currently taking my first uneasy steps toward using some of the incoming yarn.

A series of sock tutorials is being posted on Lime & Violet's Daily Chum. I'm working through the first tutorial using yarn reclaimed from a Gap sweater in a truly unfortunate color. There are 4 skeins total and I'll probably overdye the other 3 but I was so anxious to get started knitting my first pair of socks that I decided to jump right in with the eye-poking really should glow-in-the-dark yellowish greenish yarn exactly as it came off the hanger after washing and blocking.

The only down side to spending time over at the Daily Chum is that if I hadn't stopped by I would have been blissfully unaware of this.

Fold, spindle, mutilate

I've been dragging my feet on this post for a while. To be honest, I don't like the uncertainty of all of this and it's taking so long to figure it all out that I'm feeling very adrift.

The status of things so far... I've had 3 physical/occupational therapy appointments. She gave me 6 pages of exercises intended to help with carpal tunnel syndrome, cubital tunnel syndrome, de Quervain's tenosynovitis, and trigger finger. In subsequent visits, we've discussed modifications and variations of the exercises to relieve some of the discomfort and other problems that I've experienced doing the exercises as illustrated.

Last week, I met the orthopedic surgeon to whom I've been referred. Since appointments almost never start when scheduled, I brought my drop spindle to the appointment with me so that I could spin while I waited. I managed to spin for about 45 minutes in the waiting room before being escorted back to an exam room where I spun for another 20 minutes while I answered questions for the patient history and then waited for the doctor. (Met an interesting woman in her late 60s who told me with tear-filled eyes that she hadn't seen anyone spinning since visiting her grandmother as a child.)

When the doctor looked at my hands, I had the weirdest impression that he was disappointed. He reminded me so much of a young boy who opens the door to go outside after the first snow of the year only to find it disturbed by someone else's footprints. He performed a quick physical exam, gave me some instructions while he tapped on my wrists and elbows and then ordered a nerve conduction study and EMG.

The test is scheduled for next week and sounds like a laugh riot. I can't imagine why people aren't lined up around the block to have teflon coated wires poked into their muscle tissue so that electrical current can be zapped directly into the muscle to simulate nerve commands.

Between doctor's waiting rooms and my weekly depression support group, I'm getting quite a bit of spinning in. Enough that I felt justified in purchasing a "real" spindle instead of the CD drop spindles I'd mostly made do with until now. (I have a spindle that I made using a toy wheel and a dowel. It works quite nicely, but still feels somehow illegitimate.)

My new baby is an Ashford Turkish Spindle. What I love about this, and the reason that I just ***HAD*** to have it and managed to justify the purchase to myself and anyone else who would listen, is that Turkish spindles break apart leaving the spinner with a center pull ball from which to ply or knit. After spending more hours than I care to think about hand-winding 300 and some odd yards of handspun singles into a center pull ball using a make-shift nostepinde fashioned from disposable chopsticks from Sprout's favorite Chinese buffet, I realized that my hands/wrists are not equal to the task of regularly winding singles for plying. I know that I could just use my ball winder, but I have found that I lack the patience to wait that long to move forward with the next step of my spinning.

The next addition to my spinning arsenal... A Golding Aromatherapy Spindle... I've heard nothing but good things about Golding spindles from other spindlers and I can tell myself that this one has therapeutic benefits on top of the meditative benefits of the spinning itself.

On a completely unrelated note... to balance my whining about medical stuff... here are the results of an online quiz that I stumbled across thanks to Ravelry.

What Kind of Knitter Are You?

You appear to be a Knitting Apprentice. You've got the basics down pat and you might just be falling in love with this hobby. Big needles, funky yarns and simple shapes are the name of the game shudder, but it doesn't mean you don't experiment a bit, here and there. As an apprentice, you probably fall back on other people to get you through those rough spots, and if you don't know anyone who knits, you probably have a few books or online sources to tap.
http://marniemaclean.com
Take this quiz!

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Galvani%27s_legs.gif

My head is spinning

RavSpinOctChallenge
Originally uploaded by MysticSpiral

I'm currently working on spinning up about an ounce and a half of black superwash merino which I've blended (in the loosest sense of the word) with glow-in-the-dark spiderweb from one of the 1,000,000 Halloween stores that has suddenly opened in the greater Dayton area. I've visited more of these stores than is my usual custom (I generally try to avoid them) because I specifically wanted phosphorescent spiderweb rather than black light spiderweb. On some level, it disturbs me that these shops spring up to sell fetish costumes to 7-year-old girls and then they pack up and disappear for another year on Nov. 1st. I actually tried to find what I needed at one of the Foy's stores in historic downtown Fairborn, Ohio. I always kinda liked Foy's and I like that they are a small, locally owned company with strong ties to the community in which they're based and that they operate their stores/businesses year round instead of only seasonally.

I've learned that glow-in-the-dark spiderweb doesn't draft well at all. Spinning with this stuff is a little like wrestling with a toddler while you attempt to brush rubber cement out of her hair. (or at least that's what I'm guessing, so far Sprout has stayed away from the rubber cement...) I don't think that I've ever spun anything this inconsistent. Heather may joke that i'm some kind of spinning prodigy but I'm tempted to post pictures of this stuff, once I finish it and get it posted for the spindling challenge, to the beginning spinners forums as an example of the kind of drafting challenges that will be overcome with practice and well prepared fiber.

Don't get me wrong... Part of me looks at the masses of this stuff that I'm going to have left over (I bought two bags of the stuff when I finally found it at the 5th Halloween store that I went to) and thinks, "Surely this would work better if I had access to a drum carder and could incorporate it into a nice fluffy batt."

I should write something about the results of my hand adventures but since I'm still processing and I won't actually meet the specialist until Wednesday, I don't really feel like I have much to report.

Likewise, my adventures in random psychopharm roulette have yeilded a combination/doseage about which I feel mildly optimistic but I don't want to say too much too soon. I've been attending meetings of a support group for people dealing with depression (including family, friends, care givers, etc although none of those have shown up yet...), but don't really feel like I can blog about that except to say that if I get nothing more out of these meetings than an uninterrupted hour to spin each week it will be better for my mental health than almost anything that I have yet tried.

Psychopharmacology Roulette

I've written a bit about rants recently and I guess that's because I'm in a bit of a ranty mood. I'm easily frustrated right now. I seem unable to concentrate for very long on anything. My current knitting project is a perfect example. It is an extremely simple pattern, a 2 row repeat. The first row is knit a certain number of stitches until you get to a place where you're supposed to have a bead. Purl one, slide the bead into place, purl again, and then knit until time for the next purl/bead/purl combo. The second row is knit, knit, knit, until you get to the stitch marker that tells you that it's time to do the first row again. The problem is, I keep forgetting and either purl/bead/purl-ing in the middle of the knit row, or knitting two or more rows and then I have to go back and unknit the portion that I've messed up.

On one hand, I can't help thinking that spinning would be the perfect answer to my current lack of focus. I've got quite the stockpile of wool around here (and my alpaca roving finally arrived from Wooly Knob) to play with and a new double drive band on the wheel. The only problem with this plan is that I don't want to abandon my knitting in the middle. (Although I did decide that I needed to experiment a bit with the pattern and -- after visiting 2 craft stores looking for suitable beads -- am playing with a more involved pattern with a somewhat less decadent yarn and the only 8/0 beads that I could find... In other words, I have 2 projects on DPNs right now!)

Sprout and her daddy are both asleep and I should be too, but my mind is going at light speed. Thoughts are popping in and ideas are building on ideas at a rate much faster than I can seem to process. (Certainly a lot faster than I can type!) This is the bulk of the reason that my concentration is so poor right now. I don't know if I process it all better when I'm sleeping or if I just care less that I can't keep up, but once I get to sleep, I don't want to wake up. My psychiatrist and I are about to launch another round of psychopharmacology roulette. We're adding another drug to the staggering dose of anti-depressants I'm already taking. If it works, I should be able to reclaim roughly 1/8th of my life. (That being the portion of my life that I spend sleeping beyond what would be considered normal...)

In studio news, the image in this post is of the first piece in my Technological Artifacts series from 2001. I have decided that the time has come for me to let go of these pieces and will be listing them for sale in my Etsy shop. I'm going to be working on the images for the listings in the next couple of days.

In parenting news, we took Sprout to the Y today so that she could swim. At one point, while she was crawling around the perimeter of the pool, she lost her "footing" and tumbled into the pool. Her daddy and I are never further than arms length from her at the pool, so there was really no cause for alarm, but it happened so quickly that she ended up completely underwater before her daddy could scoop her into his arms. The experience startled her and she came out of the water crying a little bit. This is such an unusual thing for her that I was pretty alarmed. This is a child whose first reaction to a fall is to stand up and say "I'm okay!" or "I'm fine." She almost never cries about falling. As usual, she got over the experience quite rapidly, but I was pretty shaken for a few minutes there. It wasn't the tumble or the submersion in the water. I was just so unaccustomed to seeing her upset by it that I was sure that it must have been worse than I thought.

Etsy Love

As I'm sure you already know, Etsy launched v2 in mid-November. The process was not without some problems. At least one of my images has never shown up. I love the new Etsy and have been busily listing stuff in the MysticSpiral Etsy Shop for the last two weeks.

For those who are interested, there are new Raku Spindle Whorl Pins listed. I've also listed a couple of sets of the scribble pins. Keep the set together and wear them as a group, or break them up and give them as stocking stuffers. I'm loving the scribble pins. I have a couple pinned to my knitted/felted/fulled purse to use as emergency safety pins as well. I've also listed a few of the Facing Forward pins (as I've decided to call the pins with the faces on them) and will be listing more over the next week.

I'm starting to get a little nervous about the holiday. But it is a happy kind of nervous. The best kind to be.

I love the internet

Plant life pendant
Originally uploaded by flowergurl4eva.

I just finished watching a slide show of artisan ceramic beads in the Beads-of-Clay Flickr pool. (The image shown is just one of the amazing examples of handmade ceramic beads in the group pool.) I can already tell that the BoC Flickr group is going to be a source of much inspiration for me. (I hope that others find it to be as well.)

I spent a quiet evening watching television in my bedroom while spinning. (I got roughly 2 ounces of space dyed roving spun into a very pretty single. I have about 2 ounces more of this roving to spin up.) This is newsworthy because we've had a television in our bedroom for roughly 4 years that we've never plugged in. As Sprout gets older, her daddy increasingly interrupts my television viewing with statements like, "I don't think that this is noodle appropriate viewing material." When I decided to put the spinning wheel upstairs in the bedroom, I thought that I would mostly be using it while Sprout napped. Instead, it would appear that my spinning time will be spent watching crime dramas (think CSI or SVU) while my husband and daughter watch pre-school appropriate DVDs or play downstairs... Whatever gets the spinning done will work for me.

Birthday Update

My frantic search for spinable fibers in the deapths of my needle felting box yeilded a small section of Arlene's space dyed roving, precicely one ounce. I've been afraid to touch the handpainted roving I bought on Etsy until I was sure what I wanted to do with it. I figured that a lace weight, 2-ply yarn would be ideal but I'm still not sure whether I want to ply it back on itself or if I want to ply it with a solid contrast single.

In either event, I knew that I wanted the final result to be somewhere in the 18 wpi range. The space dyed roving from my needle felting stash proved to be the perfect practice medium. Based on a little trial and error, it drafted very similarly to the handpainted roving. So, I pulled the space dyed roving apart , figured out how I wanted the color repetitions to work for me, and began spinning onto two separate bobbins.

When I plyed the two bobbins, I had succeeded in spinning the two sections of the roving to within 6 inches of each other. (I love it when a plan comes together...) The result, shown above, is approx. 105 yards of 2-ply yarn. I wrapped the yarn 18 times around a size 10 knitting needle and it measured just a hair under an inch.

I'm actually really pleased with the results. All in all, I feel like it was a really great exercise and an excellent use of some fiber that I bought to add to the felting stash with no clue how I wanted to use it.

What can I do with...

I just finished plying approximately 183.75 yards (3.4 ounces) of handspun yarn. It started as a beautiful brushed sliver with blue, purple, green and fushia. I'm still trying to get the tensioning right on the wheel so my singles were pretty tightly spun. A tight twist in the opposite direction during the plying actually resulted in a pretty balanced yarn. I'm guestimating (I lifted about an inch worth of fibers from the skein and measured/counted it...) it at roughly 17wpi which would make it a fingering weight yarn. It may, however, bloom some when I soak it in hot water to set the twist so I'll probably re-measure the length and actually wrap some along a pencil or dowel to get a more accurate wpi measurement.

My friend H. is coming into town on Friday so I can pick her brain for ideas about what to make when I see her this weekend. (Consider yourself warned, H.)

It should be an interesting weekend. I'm having a birthday party on Saturday which I seem to have gone out of my way to sabotage. I don't remember when the last time I had a birthday party was. It's easy for me to blame K. for my reluctance to have parties because he's not the most social creature. The truth is, however, that if I wanted to have parties he'd indulge me in that as he does in almost every other way. (He won't let me start smoking again, but really who could blame him and I guess that I'd rather spend the money on spinnable fibers since I really only miss it when I want something to do with my hands.) I don't have parties because I become paralyzed by anxiety at the thought of preparing for a party and no one showing up. On some deep level I'm absolutely certain that no one really likes me or wants to spend time with me. Rather than face the rejection, I don't have parties, or (as I did this time around) I do something stupid to sabotage them like procrastinating on the invitations until everyone has already made other plans. I'm sick... I need help... Maybe I should find something to do with my hands other than letting them loose on a keyboard to dump the unfiltered contents of my brain into my blog.

What's distressing me at the moment is that my spinning options right now are pretty thin... I didn't think to grab the fiber that I bought from Arlene after my drop spinning lessons so I can't spin that. Of the fiber I bought at Wool Gathering, I've spun everything but the natural black corriedale that I still need to wash the chocolate milk out of. (My beloved put the bag containing the roving on the floor under the car seat. Somehow - we won't point fingers or anything - a bottle of chocolate milk ended up being dropped into it nipple pointing down...) the other options are some beautiful handpainted roving that I bought on Etsy and recieved last week or a fiber sampler that I listed in my Etsy shop and now am really wishing that I had kept it for myself so that I could play with it...

For now, I think that I'll try to distract myself by needle felting features onto a hand puppet that I need to get out in the mail. Who knows, maybe I'll find something spinnable in my needle felting fiber case. I'm afraid that I may have a bit of a problem here... I just love the rhythm of spinning.

My kingdom for a niddy noddy

It's hard to describe how rewarding it feels to have made my own yarn on my spinning wheel. The fiber is CVM (California Varigated Mutant) roving that I picked up at Wool Gathering. I had about 4 ounces to play with and absolutely loved spinning it up. I'm still getting the hang of adjusting the tension so that it winds onto the bobbin. And, speaking of the bobbins, I didn't do very well at getting the amounts on the two bobbins equal. I haven't had much luck with Andean Plying and the Handy Plying method from KnittySpin is not going so well for me yet either. Since there's not much left on the bobbin, I'm debating either plying it with thread and using it as an accent somehow or using it as an opportunity to learn how to handle singles. It's all about the learning experience.

And, speaking of learning experiences... I don't, yet, own a niddy noddy. This invaluable piece of spinning equipment enables you to wind your finished yarn off the bobbin and turn it into a skein. I have a very limited number of bobbins and/or drop spindles (although I'm making myself more of the drop spindles to play with so that won't be as much of a problem) so the products of my spinning efforts must go somewhere. Although the quality of the image above leaves much to be desired, the yarn is obviously in the form of a skein. Obviously, I've come up with a solution. In the spirit of sharing, I thought that I'd post my (temporary) solution here in hopes that it will help someone else... If you combine a CD drop spindle and my improvised solution to the niddy noddy problem, it is actually possible to begin spinning for almost no capital investment beyond the fiber itself.

Looking at the image above, you see a rectangle. This rectangle is intended to represent a hardcover book, although any rigid, rectangular object will work. (I just happen to always have a book at hand, and there was one there when I needed it so that I could unwind my yarn and free up my drop spindle for the next project.) The illustration should help, the rectangle is supposed to be translucent so that you can see how the yarn wraps around the back as well as the bold pink lines that show how it wraps on the front. The pointing fingers show the path of the yarn around the front of corner A, diagonally across the back to emerge and go around the front of corner B. The yarn then goes around the back of corner C and diagonally across the front of the book and around the back of corner D. This should bring you to where you started, in the middle of the short side of the book, to wrap around the front of corner A and repeat that path until you're out of yarn. It is a kind of elaborate figure-8 which allows you to wind the yarn around, and around, and around the book. Once you've finished, you can usually slide the yarn off one corner without too much difficulty.

Taking the long way

As a student in art history, I developed an interest in artifacts from Neolithic and bronze age civilizations. That interest is a large part of the reason that I started making ceramic beads and small vessels. Most of what we know about these ancient civilizations is based on the items (most showing exquisite workmanship considering the primitive tools available to them) found amongst burial sites. Some of the most common artifacts are spindle whorls. The spindles themselves, the shafts attached to the whorl around which the fibers were wrapped, were generally made of wood and have long since disappeared. The whorls, however, were often made of clay, stone, bone, or other materials. Many were carved with elaborate decoration. A favorite spindle was a treasured possession.

I'm not sure when I realized what these spindle whorls signified. If recorded history is any indication, spinning was generally women's work. Every thread in every garment was spun in more or less the same way and passed through the fingers of a woman before being wound onto a spindle. Textiles were precious and were, almost exclusively, the domain of women. As such, spindle whorls were vitally important.

Soon after I came to these realizations, I decided that I wanted to learn to spin. I began making beads intended to serve as spindle whorls and even tried (unsuccessfully) to teach myself to spin. On some level, I guess that I believed that learning to spin would connect me with all of those women throughout history who spun during otherwise idle moments to produce the threads that clothed their families.

My own work in textiles has been sporadic at best. I constructed a backstrap loom and learned to weave as part of an art education class that I took in college. I learned to crochet when I was young and have picked up the hook and put it back down many times over the course of my life. I learned to knit in a DoDDS elementary school in 1976 long enough to knit a small acrylic flag for a school project. (The stars on the flag were not knit. They were actually made with gummed foil stars that were glued to the blue field with the foil side facing down.) I promptly forgot whatever knitting I'd learned and didn't try again until about two months ago.

About a week after purchasing my first set of knitting needles and taking a knitting class taught by a friend of mine, I asked the owner of my favorite fiber store if she would be willing to teach me the fine art of spinning on a drop spindle. I'm pretty sure that my life will never be the same. I've been spinning for almost two months now. I have a beautiful spinning wheel which offered me the opportunity to learn about the parts, mechanics, and intricate workings of the wheel before I'd even had a chance to spin my first yarn. (A design flaw in the original footman resulted in a break, either while I was transporting it or at some point before it came home with me... The footman had previously broken in the same place and had been repaired. It was now time to replace it which became an unexpected opportunity to re-design the footman.)

Between spinning and knitting, my interest in fiber and the textile arts has gone from a mild curiosity and occasional hobby to an overwhelming obsession. Since those interests were what motivated me to start making the shawl pins again (combined with the self-doubt that grew from an interpersonal conflict that I've already wasted too much time re-hashing here) it seemed only natural for me to renew my acquaintance with spindle whorl motifs and begin to produce focal beads based on them.

I've already uploaded a couple of my new spindle whorl shawl pins to my Etsy Shop. I'll be uploading more as time permits. (Life with toddler has a way of impressing upon you the things that you **MUST** do vs. the things that you'd like to do.) The process of making them is actually a bit of a departure for me. After carving the spindle whorl beads, I made press molds of them. I've made press molds in the past with varying degrees of success but don't always enjoy using them because I like the intimate connection with each piece that I make. Since one of my goals for my shawl pins has been to keep them as affordable as possible, I wanted to press mold the spindle whorls to reduce the labor and keep the cost down. I used a simplified variation of the technique used by Melanie at Earthenwood Studio. Once the individual beads have been press molded, I refine the carving a bit to clean up the lines and ensure that they don't have a "stamped out" appearance. The result is that each of the beads has its own character and individual feel to it from being hand-worked but I'm not investing several hours in each of them. It feels like a good compromise.

IMAGE SOURCE: Woman, possibly Bedouin, holding spindle, standing in road [Stereo glass plate taken between 1898 and 1946]Taken either by the American Colony Photo Department or its successor the Matson Photo Service. Gift to the Library of Congress from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection

An' The Wheel Goes 'Round

I mentioned in an earlier post that I'd recently learned to spin on a drop spindle. What I didn't mention was that I was also the recipient of a beautiful Country Craftsman spinning wheel. The wheel, she hasn't told me her name yet, came to me with a broken footman. After looking closely at the point of failure on the original part, I realized that it had broken at least once before in the same location and had been repaired.

The first thing that I did was to research Country Craftsman wheels in an effort to find a stock replacement. What I found was that these wheels were made by hand by a woodworker in Massachusetts for something like 25 years before he retired a couple of years ago. Needless to say, replacement parts are not exactly growing on trees.

In retrospect, I find that I'm actually glad that I wasn't able to get a stock replacement. I quickly decided that what I needed to do was to find someone to re-make the footman. I took measurements from the original, studied how it fit onto the wheel and how it worked, and took matters into my own hands. I created an Alchemy request on Etsy.

If you're not familiar with Etsy Alchemy, you're not alone. It is a system set up by the wizards at Etsy to connect buyers with artisans/craftspeople who can fulfil their makery wishes. It's also a little confusing. First, the buyer posts an alchemy request saying what they want. They include pictures or links to help clarify their needs. Then one or more Etsy artists bid to fill the request, supplying their own pictures or other information. Then the buyer chooses a bid (or several bids) and from there the commissioned work is completed, paid for, and feedback is left. It is a wonderous and magical process.

In the case of my footman, I got one bid from a woodworker in Canada who I'd corresponded with earlier this year about custom pottery tools. Barry is a great guy and the two of us exchanged quite a few messages about measurements and tweeks to the design of the original footman. In the end, he recommended a footman made of 2 layers of maple laminated together with metal plates on either side of the keyhole opening where the footman attaches to the flywheel. We changed the dimensions of the footman, as well, widening it so that the holes do not come so close to the edges as to weaken the structure of the finished part.

My new footman arrived from Canada in Saturday's mail. In the last few days, have admired it, fondled it, shown it off to my spinning mentor, and finally, attached it to my spinning wheel where it will live until the end of time. With the new footman in place, I took the wheel for a real test drive. I spun up 1/2 ounce of leaf green corriedale wool that I had purchased for a needle felting project. My thought, when I started spinning it, was that I would pull it off the bobbin and allow it to relax so that I could use it as vines for my planned needle felted embellishment. Now that it's spun, however, I can't decide whether to go with the original plan, or to ply it back on itself and save it as a momento of my first real yarn spun on my very own spinning wheel. For now, I'll leave it on the bobbin where I can admire it while I work on glazing beads for this weekend.

Expect some fun fiber posts over the next week or so... A tutorial, a long overdue explanation of my spinning fascination, more images of the large wavy motif in progress, and maybe even some yarn, assuming that I get my clay work done. Wish me luck finding the time that I'll need over the next three days.

Image: [Irish Spinner and Spinning Wheel. Co. Galway, Ireland] Found via Library of Congress online collection. REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-DIG-ppmsc-09892 (digital file from original) No known restrictions on publication. photomechanical print : photochrome, color. [between ca. 1890 and ca. 1900].