Thursday 29 July 2010

trying to spin

Assembling the new spinning wheel was totally easy and really fun. After all I'm a big assembler of IKEA furniture, so it was really a piece of cake.

Using it is all another matter. I have never seen a spinning heel used by anybody, and had never seen a spinning wheel in reality before assembling this.
I tried to learn something watching some videos on the internet, but as anybody will imagine, moving from videos to reality is quite a jump.
Once I had my wheel mounted, I decided to try to start spinning. I have a book documenting what you should do, so I took a piece of blue wool, fixed it to the bobbin, and started to pedal.... nothing happened. Of course, it was now time to understand all about the break, so I made several attembts, until finally the piece of wool started to be wound around the bobbin when I let it loose. I was really happy, and decided to proceed now with my orange rowing. Well, to make it brief, it was a bit of a battle, but I finally succeded to at least make something happen!

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Hey, OK, it's not much, but I'm so proud of myself! I suspect it will be overspun (it broke a couple of times); it is really uneven, but I had something happening.

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I still have a lot to learn: for instance, any suggestion on how to organise the wool on the bobbin? I have made three sections, but shall I fill it in blocks, or I should try to move the doodads (what's the name of the sliding things that guide the thred?) back and forth every now and then? I guess i'll learn by trial and error, but all suggestions are more than welcome!

3 comments:

try2knit said...

wow... io ne ho uno a casa di mia zia.. che lo debba mettere in funzione..? :)
Buon week end! :)
Ciami

Soth said...

The sliding thingy is called ....sliding hook, well on my Rose, they are called that...and yes, you are supposed to slide the hooks every once in a while. Myself I tend to start at the farthest side of the bobbin, spin until there is a slight bump of yarn and then slide a bit towards me and so on, and then back again. Just play around a bit. If you have questions, just give me a call... ;-) Gabi

Pearlesyarn said...

I do what Gabi does also; filling the bobbin a little bump at a time up and down the bobbin until it's all filled up.
Your spinning is looking great. Remember that when you ply you will even out the overspun bits to some extent and the yarn will tend to balance out.
Pretty wheel by the way:-)