Spinning at the Garden

Today I was at the local Garden - it’s an old homestead that was made into a historical site: the old house is still there, and the guy who homesteaded there originally was determined to grow all kinds of plants. There are trees there that “shouldn’t” grow here, like a black walnut and some others .. the crazy guy even imported poison ivy (it doesn’t grow here) to see if it would grow! (It does! It has a big fence around it, but it grows here!)

Anyway, today was ”History in the Garden”, celebrating the centennial of the homestead, and I was there doing a spinning demo on my 100 year old wheel … in period costume (or close to it) and spinning rovings done at Custom Woolen Mills, here in Alberta, which uses equipment from around the turn of the century as well.

So I was at my wheel all day - and I spun up another 4 bobbins of singles, so about 400 grams more.

It’s nothing special - it was some random CWM rovings I found in my stash, don’t even know what it is, but I know it’s their stuff, I recognize the characteristic structure of the rovings - but it’s another 400 grams of wool spun up during the Tour, which officially ends today.

Oh - and today I also sold two books, a knitted scarf, and two balls of my Tour yarn, which I had on display and a lady asked if I’d sell it. :)

So yep, I had a fun day, even if I was spinning in shoes (shoes!?? at the wheel??!). The rhubarb punch was good, too! :)

Ontario Days 4 & 5

I’m (finally) feeling tired so this’ll be brief.

We went to St Jacobs, where we met up with my sister and her husband, and checked out the market and the antique stores and the Home Hardware museum and a fabulous quilt/fibre arts shop and lots of other neat things.

The information centre in Leamington is shaped like a tomato. This, of course, is because the Heinz factory is in town. Leamington is all about tomatoes!

The tablecloth at this produce booth was hand woven:

 

Neat stuff at the hardware museum:

That was Thursday. We spent the night in a little B&B out in the country … which is different than the Alberta definition of ‘out in the country’ in that the roads are paved and you can do 90 km/h (if it is in an area with few Amish, who still use horses & buggies to get around). I woke up early and went outside to try and walk some sense into my body and saw this:

We all went to St Mary’s where there is a lovely river and some spots where there used to be large waterwheels, to power grinders or what have you.

Look, it’s my family at the Thames River:

Then everyone headed off in different directions – me to the fibre conference with my friend Wheelwright, my parents to visit an old friend who lives in a seniors home (Dad plays the piano for her and it makes her very happy), and my sister and her husband to head home.

Here’s Wheelwright spinning on one of his restored antiques – this one is from about 1860 he figures, and it’s amazing. Awesome to spin on.

And I am, finally, tired enough to sleep … so I shall go do that and I’ll tell you more about the conference and the wheels tomorrow.

Pink. Purple to be added shortly.

The PTSD fatigue has, up until recently, kept me too tired to spin at the wheel (thank goodness I found supported spindles - I can still spin, even when I’m too tired to treadle!) … but today, the mood finally struck. Jacqueline and I decided to play.

I spun two bobbins of hot pink hand dyed Tunis (actual woolen prep rovings from the local mill) - about an hour per bobbin.

I was aiming for something I could use in a 2 ply for socks, and I think I got it. I plyed on my Norwegian (since she has no issues going backwards, and that meant I only had to wind off once onto a Lazy Fred storage bobbin). The finished yarn is now back in the dyepot soaking up some splotches of purple.

Ah, here we go: out of the dyepot.

Left to right: great wheel spun blues plyed with spindle spun whitish singles; hot pink and purple sock yarn; garnet silk/merino, spindle spun.

Pink and purple splotch socks.This should be a decent antidote to the muck and slush of the (hopefully) upcoming spring season. :)

(Spring in northern Alberta is NOT something to rhapsodize about. It’s messy. It takes too long. I want to go from 2 feet of snow to summer in two weeks, but it takes two months. Of muck. And grayness. Pink will help.)

Spinning

For today’s productive adventure, after cleaning the kitchen counters and making a giant fire-truck shaped cookie for The Reluctant Farmer’s birthday lunch (it ended up more like cake, but nobody really complained), I sat down to spin up some alpaca.
I combed this on my Louet Mini Combs, then spun it from the poofs that resulted (I didn’t diz the fibre out into rovings). The fleece is incredibly soft and fine – this is a prize-winning alpaca fleece that I was asked to spin, it’s really very lovely. The gray is subtly variegated from white to silver to dark gray with a few flecks of brown and the resulting yarn is beautifully textured. I spun this for loft and softness, rather than fine and shiny, though the fleece could do either. I need to ply this and see how the finished yarn looks, but it certainly feels soft on the bobbin!

Part of the next century

One of the wheel wrights on Ravelry said one day, “Have you ever thought that maybe you have added another century to the life of this wheel?”

This week, I got the chance to be part of the next century of another Canadian Production Wheel. I tell you, it’s such a great feeling!

A Bordua wheel showed up on the Alberta kijiji listings, and I posted to the Ravelry board to see if anyone wanted me to pick it up and foster it until the new owner and I could meet up: someone from “the absolute centre of nowhere, Saskatchewan” piped up, so while I was in Calgary yesterday helping my sister and brother-in-law move to their new place, I picked up the wheel.

It’s the same maker as mine – but this one has a mark! I’ve never seen a maker’s mark on the wheel with my own eyes before, so that was quite something.

Here are the two wheels side by side:

There are a few differences – the one in front (that’s the one I picked up in Calgary) has some more detail (extra lines on the wheel rim, wooden ‘toggles’ to hold the uprights and one of the maidens in position, finer turnings on the spokes and maidens). One theory is that over time, the maker dropped some of the finer points of construction. I wonder, too, if perhaps there were different models, like with cars – the routine style and the ‘upgraded’ style.

This wheel was (I shudder to even say it) painted brown with gold trim … the people I picked it up from had bought it that way, and promptly stripped the horrid paint job (and not erased the maker’s mark, which is impressive!) and kept it as a lovely decoration for years. Now, it’s back in service making yarn … and I’ve had a hand in giving it another century of life. Wow.

It’ll be handed off to the new owner this summer, at Fibre Week, when we will both be in the same place … then it’ll travel home to Saskatchewan where it can continue to sing it’s quiet, happy, productive song at the hands of yet another generation of spinners.

Wheel Alignment

When spinning, one hand is 'forward' and one is 'back' - the forward one controls the twist, and the backward one holds the pile of fibre. I spin with my right hand forward, and the pile of fibre in my left hand. This is fine on a wheel where the orifice is right in front of you as it doesn't much matter which way you twist ... but with the Canadian Production Wheel, it's a bit trickier. They were probably intended for the opposite arrangement of hands – it’d definitely be  bit easier to arrange yourself at the wheel if you spun with the hands in the other positions, anyway.

Still, I’ve discovered that this slightly unexpected alignment of spinner and wheel seems to work quite well:

 

The wheel is more beside me than directly in front of me, and that leaves plenty of room for drafting.

Of course, in this picture I’m spinning lovely machine prepped rovings so able to do that fancy long draw technique. :)

I also managed to fill a bobbin (i.e. spin up two lumps of roving that were each about as big around as a soccer ball) in an hour. This truly is a production wheel!

A one-bobbin solution for antique spinning wheels

I have no shortage of wheels (blush) but I wanted to come up with a solution to the 'one bobbin problem' that did not entail winding off from the antique one-bobbin wheel to one of the bobbins for my other wheels and then plying from there.

Translation for non-spinners: Most wheels have multiple bobbins, so you fill one, then take it off and put a different one on, fill that, then put the 2 full bobbins on something called a “Lazy Kate” – no, I don’t know why it’s called that – which holds them steady as you take the 2 single strands of yarn from the full bobbins and ply them together onto yet another bobbin to make 2 ply balanced yarn. If you have only one bobbin (most antique wheels have just the one), you have to put the first batch of single ply yarn ... well, somewhere … while you make the second batch, and then you need both batches of singles to be conveniently unwinding themselves as you twist them together into a balanced yarn. This is the One Bobbin Problem.

So ... I offer *The Lazy Fred* for your consideration.

First of all, it's called a Lazy Fred because although it is *like* a Lazy Kate, it doesn't hold regular bobbins - it's different. And since my wheel's a (presumed) Fred Bordua wheel, and this solution is particularly for the antique wheel crowd, I thought of it as a Lazy Fred. Just kinda stuck in my head that way. :)
Anyway - here's what it looks like:

 
 
Those are sorta-bobbins: a piece of dowelling with a wheel affixed partway up the shaft, much like a drop spindle. It's not hollow though, because the idea is that you can attach it directly to your handy dandy drill (you *do* have a drill, right? if you don't, you need one anyway, so quick, go get one!) by just inserting the end of the dowelling into the chuck, like it was a drill bit:

I put one leg up on my spinning chair, rested the drill on my knee, and used my left hand to guide the singles coming off the bobbin so that they went up and down along the length of the bobbin shaft. The wheel at the far end keeps you from going too far in that direction, and you're obviously smart enough not to get too close to the business end of the drill itself. :)

To ply, you place the Fred right beside you on the floor: the yarn comes off the tops of the cones, rather than the sorta-bobbins spinning around and unwinding, as on a normal Kate; or put it in a shoebox Kate and let it unwind from the side.


Construction details, for those who are interested - the bobbins are pretty obvious: the dowelling is a tight fit so some sanding of the end where the wheel goes is needed to get it to slide into place. A bit of wood glue holds them in their final positions.

The base is a piece of leftover wood from my floor installation, actually - I drilled six holes, just a wee bit larger than the dowelling I used, and put those 'feet' that you can nail onto the bottom of your chair legs to help them slide over the floor at each corner. This raises the board up off the floor a bit, allowing the dowels to drop through far enough that they are stable. Any kind of feet would do - you need about a centimeter of clearance below the board for the dowels to stick through, perhaps a little more if you plan to use it on carpet.

Everything was stained with Watco Dark Walnut and given 2 coats of tung oil - and that's all there is to it!
Hopefully this idea is useful to someone else! If you need one and you haven't got the necessary equipment etc to build your own, I've got a handy 15 year old who's always looking for a new revenue generating opportunity …

Restoring history

The Canadian Production Wheels, like Jaqueline, the newest addition here, were built mainly in Quebec. The Canadian Production Wheel Lovers, on Ravelry believe that this wheel was made by Frederic Bordua in Quebec, likely between 1875-1908. My aunt reminded me that Apple Jack, my beloved grandfather, was born in 1909 – so this wheel is about even a little older than he would be!
With much help from the people on the Ravelry group and other spots on the web, I have jumped in and done the refinishing and repairs on the wheel … and this is the result:

Before & After shot:

Close up of the wheel uprights (and you can see the Babe in the background!):

Cobbled together for a test run:

Close up of the repaired flyer:

… yes, that is yarn on the flyer.
You know what that means? She works.
29 hours after arriving here, Jacqueline spun yarn. The Boy took video … have a look.