My new spinning wheel

Here she is, a Baynes double treadle spinning wheel, basking in the morning light.

And from the side:

New to me from SpunkyEclectic. Yes, I am totally crazy, I just started spinning when? But sometimes you just know. Here’s the description that won me over. And I got a shockingly great deal from Amy on this wheel as it was a floor model (thank you Daddy). I picked it up from her booth at Fiber Frolic. I gave it a light cleaning that night and started treadling without fiber to get the feel of it. Then I did some plying with two different colored singles so that it was easy to see what was happening. Then I broke out the sample of BFL. That’s Blue-Faced Leicester, which is a kind of sheep, not to be confused with BFML which is Annie‘s Jim.

It took me about an ounce of wool to get things going fairly well. Oddly enough I felt like I was starting over from where I’d gotten to with hand spindling. Which I suppose just means that my hand spindling has improved since I started. By the second ounce I was getting a fairly consistent single pretty easily and enjoying it. I tried to figure out what my techique is by poking around on the internet. As with my hand spindling, apparently I’m not doing exactly one particular technique but I think it’s most like what is called “long draw”. Here are pictures of the first bobbin at the beginning and then the second bobbin, you can see the improvement from left to right.

At the beginning it was a little like stopping at an intersection when you are learning to drive a stick shift. Slow down too much and you might stall out! I was a little hesitant to use the BFL to start out with but I didn’t really have anything else. I don’t think I ruined much of it. We’ll see how bad the beginning is when I ply it. Hopefully I’ll get fingering weight yarn in a quantity enough to make something . . . hmmm. I don’t know?

In any case, now that I’ve gotten to try it out all by my lonesome I may be comfortable enough to go take a class. This is the reason I’m terrible at group sports—I hate learning in front of other people. Okay, it’s probably not the only reason!