It works!  It works! I’d overthunk the driveband, and used a leather thong, which turned out to be too much friction.  Substituting a piece of string makes the wheel functional.  I have Franklin Habit and his blog, the Panopticon, to thank for this reminder of Engineering Rule No. 1: Use the least possible object that will carry the force.  EG: If you only need tensile strength, use a skinny wire.  If you need tensile strength+friction, as in my wheel scenario, use a mid-sized piece of cotton yarn.  Don’t jump ahead to preconceived ideas of what "ought" to be used – … Continue reading Wheel update

So here it is, off the loom.  This is not a big item – I think I’ll fold it in half, with the fringys out, and call it a zippered wallet.  That is, after I sew a zipper in it. But it was fun, and didn’t take very long – about 2 hours including the warping of the loom.  I think I could do two of them in three hours time, if I do them on the same warp. Playing with the colors was particularly enjoyable.  No right or wrong here! Continue reading Handspun, handwoven, Part 2

(as usual, click to make it bigger) Why yes, I had a good Christmas.  Daan and I had to burn some time in a Wisconsin antiques barn, and they had not one, but about FIFTEEN spinning wheels.  This is, of course, because I stood outside in the rainy parking lot and said, where the fairies could hear, "Wouldn’t it be funny if we found some spinning stuff here?"  So I spent a couple hundred dollars on this wheel, and… a weasel, and a pair of carding paddles. A weasel is a kind of swift, which is doing above what most … Continue reading Meet Maud, my Irish spinning wheel