The drum carder works beautifully, and I have a series of lovely roving photos that I will add shortly. So now that the drum carder is functional, today I turned my attention to the wheel. Here are the steps as I set up and began learning to spin today.
1. Wheel is dirty.
2. Dust of all wood pieces, all sides, use orange oil on them.
3. Wheel is wobbly.
4. Figure hey, if I’m going to tighten everything, might as well loosen everything and oil all moving parts as well. So, dismantle entire wheel with great fear, and oil metal parts, and wax wood meets wood parts, and clean everything well.
5. Put it all back together again (which, surprisingly, went smoothly save for one screw which I over tightened and it actually burst through the cap thingy at the other end. See how technical I am??? :-P)
6. Wheel now looks beautiful.
7. Get out The Best Book on How to Spin that there is, and place on lap.
8. Keep dropping book because lap keeps moving.
9. Rearrange furniture so that end table supports book.
10. Spend ages trying to master the knots that hold the leader yarn on the spindle. Literally, ages. (Specifically, this would be a lark’s head knot on a bight knot). Experiment with different types of yarn to find one that works well … (when in fact, it’s not working because I keep messing up the knot).
11. Wheel is now spinning, spindle is now spinning, but the flyer is not. I’m not sure that this is a problem until I notice that only thin roving is going around the spindle. Hmmmm.
12. One more search of YouTube (what a resource!!) to discover why .. no luck.
13. Start nudging it gently to see if that helps.
14. Nope, wrong direction. That was bad. Nudge the other way.
15. And suddenly … it worked. It squeaks, and bangs so there is more work to do, and my first 15 minutes of work was pretty sad, but once you get your rhythm it is FUN :-).
Oh, yes … the chore list for today … hmmm … laundry still in process … yikes. More tomorrow :-).
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