The Spinning Adventure Continues

After I got a load of wool from a local friend, my interest in spinning really ramped up. I expected she would just give me maybe 8 oz or so, but instead provided me with an entire raw fleece. So much for easing into the hobby, haha.

There it is, the whole intimidating fleece. A nice looking brown color.

So I bundled a little at a time.

Soaked it in soap saturated nearly boiling water for 15 minutes.

And that's what the water looks like after the cleaning. Blech. I rinsed twice in very hot water.

With my impatience looming I got the great idea to put the wool in my dryer! We have a shoe rack that sits in the dryer so the shoes don't bang around in there while getting dried, so I laid the wool out on the rack and set it to ultra low heat and let it dry that way. It worked really great. So it turns out the wool isn't brown after all (except the stained tips) it's a lovely gray. I guess lanolin is pretty yucky in the raw...and I put that stuff on my nipples when I was breastfeeding, lol. 

Using some borrowed hand carders I made some rolags to spin on my drop spindle. And I started spinning. I made a couple of observations: (1) I don't really care for spinning from rolags, I don't like the yarn output and (2) this is going to take FOREVER on a drop spindle to spin ALL this wool!!

Naturally, I must remedy these problems. :-) So, I bought a pair of Indigo Hound 4 pitch English Wool Combs (thanks for the recommendation Beth). They are not fancy and nicely finished. Mine actually have a couple of snags and other imperfections, but the price was right, and they do their job perfectly well. And I LOOOOOVE using them. Man, if my kids would let me, I'd comb wool all day, I just really love doing it and diz-ing off the roving is way fun!

Problem 1 solved.

Now on to the next issue, I started browsing spinning wheels, so many options, so expensive. I wasn't ready to commit to buy a contraption I had never even tried at such a price. I wasn't sure if that investment was worth it for the hobby I was just learning. So I thought that perhaps I could build a simplified version and decide if I even liked spinning that much to invest in a real wheel. Well, one thing led to another and I eventually found The Electric Eel Wheel, I was hoping just to buy a kit and build it, but they were sold out with no plans to produce more. Better still, by the creator's grace, this was an open source project and I had all the instructions there in the builder's guide to order the parts and make one myself. That's it, I was sold. I was going to build my own electric spinning wheel.

I have some working knowledge of electronics so I thought I could wire in the option of using my sewing machine's foot pedal to control the speed instead of just the control knob. I ordered the extra parts I thought I would need to make this work, but after trying and tweaking and everything I could think of, I just couldn't get any of the sewing machine pedals I tried to play nice with the motor controller I was using. I figured my only option at that point would be to build my own foot pedal using a potentiometer I knew the resistance of and had all the connection points I was expecting. I decided that was too far off the beaten path and would have to be revisited later so I could actually get to building and using my electric spinning wheel.

It took about 4 days 4-6 hours/day from start to finish to assemble the whole thing. A couple of things I wish I had known/used for this build:

• A crosscut blade for the circular saw. I used oak veneered plywood for the box and the rip cut blade on our saw just tore the veneer to shreds. It looks so bad I decided to not even stain/finish the wood like I originally planned.
• A drill press. There are a lot of holes of varying size that have to be drilled in the box, electronics box, flyer and bobbins. A lot of mine didn't come out straight or very true to the size I was drilling and a press would have made this so much easier.
• All the metal and nylon flyer and bobbin parts have an acceptable process variation...What that means is a 5/8" outer diameter pipe might actually be 5/8" and a tiny fraction. That doesn't seem like a big deal except when you want to put on the pipe a 5/8" inner diameter spacer or pulley or shaft collar, except that it's 5/8" and a tiny fraction so it basically doesn't fit. Towards the end of the build, I figured out a Dremel with a grinding or sanding bit was the best choice to take out the "tiny fraction" and make everything come together properly.

I didn't take any pictures of the build as it came together because I did exactly what was on the EEW build guide and they have lots of pictures there. But here's a little video review for you to watch.