Spindly too

I ordered myself a spindle from Tracy Eichheim. I will post an update both on how the ordering experience goes and how well I like it when it arrives. There is a queue, so I am not expecting my spindle(s) until January.

If you did not see the update to the previous “Spindly” post, it turns out I had an immediate reply thanking me for pointing out the “next” issue, but it went into the spam folder. Gmail recently had an update where they chose what folders you commonly use and I did not notice the spam folder was one of the hidden ones. It took me a week to find the email.

Spindly

A rather surprising thing occurred while I was composing a “which should I buy” post that was really a “gloom and doom” in disguise. I realized I had not spun since May. I did a little bit immediately after Yarn School; I was looking to get back on that horse before the fear set in and managed that. But for the most part attending Yarn School stripped all the joy out of spinning.

I knew I was still upset about the fiasco, but I had not realized how much that had permeated my perspective. (I am the phantom disagree-er whenever someone says something positive about Yarn School anywhere I see it on Ravelry.)

Today I finished what was on the bobbin. Then I plied it with the matching bobbin (from May). I also spun some extra oatmeal single for my birthday fiber leftovers and from which I will make a Navajo ply for my Mobius. (I attempted to cast on with my 2-ply oatmeal BFL + birthday merino, and it just is not durable enough to withstand multiple attempts. I need to frog the cast-on plus .5 rows, but that yarn is three breaths from dissolving already, so I need something that might blend in seamlessly but still be super-durable. )

I feel a lot better. I am calmer. I feel more energetic and accomplished.

I can admit to being a mediocre knitter. I am adventurous and I believe I can knit anything, which makes me more than a beginner for sure, but I am never going to be an advanced knitter without considerably more effort. I do not care to put in that effort, so I know that I have to admit I am not a great knitter.

I am already a mediocre spinner. I know I can do anything if I try. I know my yarn is not perfect, but I have extremely consistent yarn (to the point that the bobbin I finished today and the one I did in May matched in terms of thickness and twist.) I have a real feel for when my plying is coming out right, now that I have stopped trying to get that underspun fluff anyway. The yarn I am knitting my sweater out of is really nice yarn, very consistent across 4 separate balls.

That made me realize, even with the knitting, it is the effort that matters. Whether it takes me 3 months or 3 days to finish a project is all irrelevant. I can do that. Then I realized there are really advanced knitters who cannot do anything without a pattern. I almost never use a pattern.  They might be faster than I am, but I know how to find my own way through the darkness. I like having my eyes open.

I am considering buying a drop spindle. I made one years ago, but hate it. I am thinking that good tools might help. I want one of the Tracy Eichheim dragon spindles. There is some weirdness because I have to deal with yet another fiber-person who wants a check. No one takes checks. No reply to the email, but the website was changed in response to my question. I wish there was a price list for some of the other designs. [ETA, there was an immediate reply, but it went to the spam folder that gmail was hiding from me.]

Now for the original topic, do you think I should get a top whorl or bottom whorl spindle? If I was buying one of the production spindles as well, what weight should I get?

Slow Swift is an oxymoron, but buying one would make me an ordinary moron.

What do other people want in a swift? It seems unimaginable that the new Paradise Fibers swift would be good after seeing their advertising video. It has added friction. They made it extra friction-y, purposefully. If it was software, this would be the cripple-ware version that most developers give out free to entice you to pay for the full-featured version. “If you buy our swift, we will send one with bearings and bushings to reduce drag and damage-through-use! In the full version, your swift is finished in your choice of varnish! Pinch clamps will make adjustments easier than you see here in our proof of concept mock-up.”

I want a swift with smooth action that does not resist. The plastic ball winders use plastic gearing and they will be destroyed by high-tension skeins.

I want my swift to be easily skein-size adjustable because yarn manufacturers are really horrible about consistency in their industry. I want it not be easy to lose the tail end of the yarn around the axle.  (How hard would it have been for the swift manufacturers to include a notch to hold the yarn end?) And if it was possible, I would like it to have a brake that can be applied without sticking one’s hand into a blur.

Currently I have a swift made of K’Nex. Then I bought some Fleece Artist yarn (very much on sale) and it comes in 800yd skeins that are enormous. *pause for measuring* at least 65-inch circumference. My homemade swift is about 50″ circumference. It is not very adjustable. I can take it apart and use a smaller diameter, which is about 40″, but there is not much I can do to make it larger. What I like about it is that normal (for whatever variance normal has) skeins seem to be 1.5 yards or 54″, so since I have flanges on my swift, it works pretty good. (For handspun skeins, I do not care what size they are made into.)

My swift spins like greased glass. The yarn does not fly off the tops of the supports because I put end caps on them. It is silent. Honestly if I could find an easy way to make it big enough for those giant skeins, and if I could make it adjustable so the shrinkage after washing handspun did not take 20 minutes to retool for, I doubt I would even consider replacing it. It is also plastic, so I can use it as a drying rack for wet yarn. Wood is not a superior material choice.

I certainly am not going to spend $50 (going up to $65) for a friction-added, unfinished wood, hassle-to-adjust, no feature swift that is not large enough to handle the ridiculously over-sized Fleece Artist skeins. (Remind me not to buy their yarn again, I bought it months ago and cannot use it because it is not possible to wind it.)

I think I could make a swift from stuff found at the hardware store. Metal rods, clamps, and a bushing-lined block of wood. I think, with a drill and some dowels, I could improve on the friction-added swift concept just by lining it with a spare couple pieces of K’Nex. But it is mind-boggling that $3 of wood and 4 wingnuts and 4 rubber feet is selling for $65 next week.

I started knitting with dowels I put in the pencil sharpener. But I have seen people selling birchwood needles for $30 a pair. I paid $0.30 for a birchwood dowel that made 4 needles.  I used a square of fine grit sandpaper and rubbed the sticks with the end of a candle for a fancy wax finish. I did not spend even a dollar making 4 needles, not even when I added the clay endcaps later.

When I saw that swift, made from the $1.09 size dowels (and they surely do not pay retail!) using screws that are under a dime each, I do not have to ask myself whether it is worth the money. It is not. But I do want a swift that adjusts. Maybe I just need more K’Nex!

Or maybe yarn manufacturers should actually wind their yarn into pull skeins so we do not need absolutely everyone who knits to own special tools.  I can understand small fiber artists not having that kind of equipment and time available, but Cascade? They are the Red Heart of wool yarns and there is no excuse for them expecting absolutely everyone to own a ball winder and swift in order to use their products.

Pledge to Polish Furniture

When I run across new conversations where someone wants to buy a spinning wheel, I cringe.

When I bought my wheel, no one wanted to say anything negative about any of them. I got so I understood the vernacular, when I would ask about a particular wheel and someone replied, “A lot of people like those, but you should try your wheel out in person; there’s no way to tell what will work for you without trying them.” That should be taken as a warning that the wheel is extremely fiddly and hard to use or limited for advanced work.

Now, more than 2 years later, there are still people asking their own questions on various unrelated groups instead of reading what advice has already been given in the appropriate venues.

Since I bought my wheel sight unseen because there were no other options, several stores have started carrying spinning equipment. I should be pleased, but mostly I think it is too late to win my customer loyalty.

I still think some of the wheels out there are vastly undeserving of their popularity and a surprising number of people do not investigate maintenance requirements or look at the engineering. They focus on the woodworking and pay no attention to the lack of bearings or high-friction action of the wheel.

Generally I am happy with my Fricke wheel. It barely needs attention between spinning sessions and the spinning action is effortless and smooth. There is that funny business with the screw, I admit, but most other Fricke owners have had no trouble with it. I love the enormous bobbins.

If I had to buy a wheel again, I would probably buy the same one. Because price and performance are much more important to me than looks. If I got to have a dream wheel, I think I would prefer even less wood because widening the materials search would broaden the success of the engineering. I would love to have a wheel that was counter-weighted to prevent backspin, for example. I might like to have gear shifters so I can change ratios without stopping. I would definitely want the bobbins to have an external winding setup as well as something like the WooLee Winder. But what I most want is the ability to swap bobbins without unscrewing or unstringing anything.

Somehow I just do not see my preferences mattering to any newbie spinner who is looking at Kromski wheels.

It is only “progress” if everyone else was standing still.

Well. I certainly lack in content.
I finished spinning the first batt. I started with a layered batt that was gray, grey, then red. I ended up with singles that were self-barber-poling. Plied together it just looks mottled. Not a big problem, but significantly less attractive than expected. Also the mystery wool felts like water was Crazy Glue™.

Overall my first experience with batts suggests that drum carders do a nice job pre-drafting but the batts themselves then require manipulation before spinning (pulling into strips, then tugging lengthwise) and uneven batts mean it is hard to get equal amounts on the singles’ bobbins. (My scale measures down to half grams, but it only claims a 2g accuracy. Variance in bobbin weight (unladen) is about 2g between manufacturer and leader differences. When the whole batt is about 40-50g, that is a huge inaccuracy level.) I just do not think it is worth hundreds of dollars to get a drum carder when it does not solve the problem of dense roving. So far nothing has solved that problem. Diz is a [cursing goes here, elided for politeness and so you can keep your illusions that I might be a lady.] waste of time. Hand cards are for people with more time than an unemployed apartment-dweller. I had really hoped that a drum carder would be the right tool to fix the really compressed combed top I keep getting from online sources. But it looks like the only cure is to predraft manually and laboriously. There ought to be a tool, but I have not yet found it.

Spun half the next batt into singles. It has three layers, white, grey, and one of those Ashland Bay heathery blends in a peachy color. It is a crap sandwich. Whatever that grey stuff is, it is nasty. This is not spinning up well. I get sections that are grey, sections of the mottled peach, and swaths of all white. The fibers draft very differently. I started spinning the second half into singles last night but it kept breaking and that is so frustrating that I get better results if I just stop for a while.

I went back to using the larger drive band on my Fricke and the larger diameter whorls, the overall spinning part goes slower, but I spin more often because there is a loose enough whorl that I can keep the band strung. I really can spin for 5 minutes then go on and do something else. It is not that stringing the band is hard, but the more stuff upfront so I can be situated, the fewer starts and stops I want to have.

My recently replaced screw is still not holding. So I still have to tighten it all the time. Not as often as Kromski owners have to oil, but often enough that I am annoyed. I keep the screw driver in the oil bottle clip because I use the screwdriver about 6-8 times more often than the oil. I think it is time to write to Fricke.

I bought a copy of Wendy Johnson’s sock book. There were 6 socks that I wanted to make and she collected all the various techniques I had found online and put them in one coherent book. Plus the book does not constantly refer you to other pages like Cat Bordhi’s book (which is more like a Choose Your Own Adventure than a book— it really is completely useless unless you have memorized all the heel and toe machinations on your own, and then you realize a sock is just heel and toe machinations with maybe a bit of stitch-motif thrown in for visual interest when you are not doing toe and heel parts.) I had borrowed the Johnson book from the library and was very pleased that each pattern is self-contained although there is a section in the book outlining all the toe and heel options.

Some knitting done on the Leuca sweater. I carry it around with me in my Lantern Moon “Molly” bag. So if distance makes a sweater knit itself, mine will be starting its own mittens soon enough.

For the want of a screw…

I have been having an intermittent problem with my wheel. A screw kept working loose. It was so bad that I used the screwdriver more often than the oil bottle and actually had the screwdriver clamped in the oil bottle holder. 

It has been going on for more than a year. A while back, I took the screw all the way out and discovered that there was a chunk of thread missing.  (old screw on left, new screw on right)

Well today, I finally went to the neighborhood hardware store. I had my screw in a plastic bag (because it is greasy and I did not want to get my pocket all gross.) There was a man working there who asked me if he could help. I had not been there for 20 seconds yet. He looked at my screw and knew on sight what kind of screw it was. 

He asked me how many I wanted, I bought 2 so I would have a spare, he said they were stainless steel so they should last but put two in the bag. He wrote a code on the tiny paper sack. I asked him if there was anything I could put on it if it decided it wanted to work loose again. He suggested clear fingernail polish. I took this to the front counter, where a woman said, “I can help you right here.”

I was in and out of the Ace Hardware on Grand Avenue in Oakland, CA in under 5 minutes. They had parking, they had exactly what I needed with exactly the people who knew how to help me find it. There was no hassle about me being there for just a screw instead of a houseful of plumbing or something. They did not check my powertool user card before letting me in the door. 5 minutes and under a buck to completely solve a problem that has irritated me for more than a year. It was by far and away the absolute best shopping experience I have had in years. 

People are always pushing for support of LYSs, but I have never been in a LYS with that kind of service. Everyone should be supporting their local hardware store if they are all like this one. I never go to the hardware store because I live in a rented apartment. I am not supposed to fix things. I thought they would not want me there. But now I really want to go back and buy things just because I might need them someday. If my local yarn stores were like my local hardware store, I would probably have an entire room full of yarn stash. (And you people who like Article Pract can hold your breath until you turn purple and orange spotted because I will delete any comments insisting they are as nice as the Ace guys. That was not my experience at AP, not by any stretch of the imagination. And the Ace guys treated me excellently when I was just buying a screw!)  

There is that poem/story thing about how for the want of a horseshoe nail the kingdom was lost. For 32 cents plus tax, I feel like I gained a kingdom. Really great investment.

Buttons

I bought buttons today.

I came up with a “double-button” idea for the reversible jacket. That way buttons can be moved from side to side just by buttoning and unbuttoning. Or if the gender association isn’t important, it can just be inverted and the buttons will still work.

So, the buttons:

You will notice that they are a weird cross between a shank button and a bead. Simply Fabrics was the store. (I also had a nice lunch afterward, Thai. The benefits of going somewhere new.)

I plan to use the blue and orange buttons together on the first jacket.

The second jacket is made from “Evil Stepmother” and I finally got around to taking a picture of the yarn.