I recently purchased an Ashford e-Spinner 3, mostly because it looked like fun (and it IS!). I also purchased a WooLee Winder to go with it – I can in theory sit down, turn on the spinner, and spin nearly a half-pound of fiber with nothing more than adjusting tension. So, so sweet.
But I only have three bobbins, and the bobbins are $49 each. Looking around for an alternative, I encountered Akerworks, a company in Tennessee that 3D prints bobbins for a number of wheels, among a variety of other fiber arts-related devices. Alas, Akerworks doesn’t (yet) make bobbins for my particular combination of wheel and WooLee Winder.
But even better – when their customer service representative wrote back informing me of the bad news, it turns out that I knew her! I worked with her in the Navy in the mid-1970’s. You should have seen the look on Peg’s face when I told her I had gotten an email from Jill!
Jill – it was just delightful to run into you after all these (40+) years. You were then, and I’m sure you still are, an amazingly nice person. (And please let me know if Akerworks starts producing bobbins for my spinner.)
One of the members of our weaving guild (North of Boston Handweavers) is also a docent at the James House Museum in Hampton NH. Benjamin James was a weaver at the turn of the 18th Century, arriving in Hampton to learn the weaving trade circa 1690. The house was initially built around 1723, after James learned his trade and accumulated some wealth.
Three generations of weavers plied their trade in that house. The Museum President, Skip Webb, gave a tour of the house and the (many!) ongoing renovations. The current project is reconstruction of the house’s facade, including period-appropriate exposure for the clapboards. All of the nails for the project were manufactured by hand to ensure period authenticity for all materials and methods.
The demise of the American Textile History Museum in Andover MA provided a collection of fiber processing tools for the James House Museum. Among the collection are a number of flax wheels, yarn winders, swifts, and other linen tools. The collection also contains a flax break and a (much larger) hemp break. Hemp was a very popular fiber in the early years of the United States. It’s falsely rumored that the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper, but the real document is on parchment, not paper at all.
Flax Wheels
Yarn winder & swift
Squirrel Cage swift
Additionally, a brace of “great wheels”, or “walking wheels”, along with more weasels (winders) and swifts, occupy the wool room. One of the wool wheels has a “Miner’s Accelerating Head“, a system of two pulleys that spins the yarn spindle much faster (4-5X) than a standard wheel, allowing yarn to be twisted, and therefore completed, much more quickly. The yarn winders present all seemed to have in-built counters, typically a worm screw on the winder axle driving a worm gear which in turn drives an indicator dial on one side of the winder. Often, there will also be an audible click or pop when a predetermined length of yarn had been wound. Believe it or not, this is one theory regarding the origin of “Pop Goes the Weasel”.
Great Wheels
Yarn winder (weasel)
Squirrel Cage swift
The centerpiece of the entire exhibit, however, is a rather large barn-frame loom. I didn’t measure the piece, but it’s at least 8 feet long, 5 feet wide, and nearly 6 feet tall. Our weaver, Diane, has to climb into the loom to weave.
The loom originally came with reeds made of rattan, not steel like modern reeds. The reed is that part of the loom that keeps the warp threads spaced evenly across the loom. Rattan reeds are much more delicate than steel (go figure!), so a temple (seen next to the beater in the right photo) is used to keep the fabric’s selvage edge straight to avoid stressing and breaking the reed.
I’ve had the Ashford eSpinner3 for about three weeks now and I have spun a little bit of yarn on it.
The first yarn that I spun was from old partially felted batts that I had laying around. I don’t even know what the fiber is, but I spun it up in a lumpy rope single, felted it, and I am now knitting a hat. We’ll see how that goes. Here’s some of that yarn:
The Mystery Yarn
The other yarn I took more care in making. It’s spun from Romney roving that I had processed last year, and it’s just lovely. Nancy from New Aim Farm in Waldoboro, Maine washed, picked, and carded it for me last December and did such a wonderful job. It spins like butter and made a really nice yarn.
Romney Yarn
I have ten pounds of this roving, so the eSpinner will be very busy.
This is my third season of the New Hampshire Wool Arts Tour. I’m starting to recognize some of the dirt roads. NHWAT has been running for 35 years!
New Hampshire is getting gorgeous this time of year – we’re before the peak of fall color, but gaining on it.
New Hampshire is lovely this time of year.
The tour this year was hosted at these four farms within quick driving distance of Hillsborough, rather the center of the whole thing. (The directions all stem from the McDonald’s in Hillsboro, where I did get a cup of coffee.) I used Google Maps to plot a route starting (and ending) at home. Be mindful if you do this, sometimes Google Maps on the phone gets really confused if you are not within cell coverage to let Google talk to the home planet.
There was an interesting variety of vendors this year. From wooden items for working with fiber, beautifully crafted shawl pins, soaps and honey, there was a lot on display. Oh, and there was a fair amount of fiber! Fleeces, roving, dyed braids of top (I succumbed to one), and lots of other fun stuff.
Dyed Corriedale Top
Electric Eel Mini Spinner
Alpaca Socks
The Corriedale top had such gorgeous colors I had to pick it up. I think I’m going to spin it “fractally“. That will allow the colors to mix and “barber-pole” as the colors intertwine and play off of one another. I’ll post about that adventure when I get to it. (I would not hold my breath.)
That Electric Eel Mini Spinner is very cute, but it only holds an ounce of yarn on its bobbin. My regular wheel holds 4 ounces, and my new eSpinner holds about 8 ounces – half a pound of yarn. But it’s only $70 and it’s wicked, wicked, cute.
The socks were beautiful. I’d have taken them if they were in my size, but I passed. Peggy would have loved the colors, but she’s not a fan of Argyle. (She has subsequently admitted that because they were so pretty, she might have gotten past the Argyle bit…)
I strongly suggest a spin around the circuit next fall.
OK, the time has come (and passed, empirically) to wash some fleeces. I was in the basement the other day, and there was this pile of unwashed fleeces, sitting in their plastic bags, brought home from the “sheep shows” and dropped off “to be washed later”.
Later has come. There were eight fleeces. Yeah, I’m kind of embarrassed, but most of them were still in pretty good shape, except that the lanolin and waxes had started to harden, which means that it’ll take some extra soaking to get them clean. One of them, unfortunately, didn’t make it through the winter (I’m pretty sure I bought this in 2017). Moths had gotten in, laid eggs, and the larvae were making a mess of the fleece. Out into the compost pile. Fortunately, it was a small fleece (< 3#), and it was relatively inexpensive ($20), but I have learned my lesson. Tossing that fleece into the compost pile was like watching someone rip up a double sawbuck they pulled out of my pocket. Grrrr.
Here are a couple of pictures of fleeces being skirted (I think both Romney – I’m not great at annotating my photos). When the fleece is shorn from the sheep, it comes off (ideally) as a large blanket of fleece, with the back of the animal in the middle, and the edges are all leg and belly areas, which can be quite filthy, actually, covered in mud, hay, sheep manure, and other less amusing stuff. Skirting takes all of this junk away from the nicer bits. I just throw it into the compost pile, though the fleeces I purchase have typically been skirted pretty well. Skirting also include picking out bits of hay, seed heads, burrs, and whatever else the sheep might have gotten into. If you ever see a sheep with a coat on it, it’s not to keep the sheep warm. It’s to keep the fleece clean. These fleeces are marketed to handspinners, who appreciate the clean fiber.
After the fleece is skirted and picked over (do the very best job you can – it will come back to haunt you), I put about a pound, or a couple of good handfuls, of fiber into mesh lingerie bags.
Bags of fleece
The bags allow me to wash more than one fleece at a time without mixing up the fibers. I use a strip of Tyvek to label each bag with the fleece information, written with a Sharpie. The strip of Tyvek just goes into the bag. I can fit about eight or ten pounds of fleece in a load.
Bags of wool to wash
My washing machine (as contrasted with my wife’s washing machine) has only hot water coming into it. I only need hot water to wash fleece. Warm water, and by extension, cold water, just won’t cut the grease (lanolin). I fill the washer’s tub with the hottest water I can muster out of my water heater, turn off the washer, and pour in a half-cup of Dawn dishwashing detergent (I’ve heard that Palmolive is good, too), and submerge bags of fleece. After less than a minute, see how filthy the water is? Yuck!
I have a dowel I use to push everything down into the water. After 20 minutes, the wool has soaked and lots of the dirt has come off. I use the washing machine spin cycle to get rid of the dirty water, then remove the bags. I will wash the fleece at least once more – twice for a really greasy fleece (Merino, Rambouillet, etc), and then I’ll rinse it at least twice, using a cup of vinegar in the first rinse to clean out the detergent- more specifically, to rebalance the pH of the wool to its natural slightly acidic. Detergents tend to run alkaline, which is great for cutting grease.
Nicely washed very light grey Romney
After that, the wool will air dry on repurposed window screens (or on a sweater dryer that I stole from my wife).
Washed Romney Fleece
The dried fiber is then “picked” to break up the clumps of fiber, ideally separating each fiber from the others into a uniformly disorganized “cloud” of really fluffy wool. The picker in the linked photograph is typical in that it contains a large number of very sharp spikes that separate the wool fibers.
