Wheel Review - SpinAway Holiday Wheel

The nice thing about spinning wheels these days is that there is something out there suitable for anyone. A wheel that is just not working for one person will be the bee's knees for another. That was the case between me any my Majacraft Little Gem II. Nice enough wheel, and goodness knows I adore the Majacraft Rose, but at the end of the day I found the tension adjustment a nuisance, the portability not quite everything I was hoping for, and so decided to try for a different travel wheel, the SpinAway Holiday wheel. I'd gotten to try it out last summer at Spinning Day at the Winery and thought it was just fantastic. The waiting list was long (so long that the manufacturer's, a lovely pair of folks, have closed the waiting list for now so they can work through their back orders) but I am a patient soul - no giggling, now - and my wheel finally arrived last week.This post is a review of the wheel, purely from my perspective. Other folks may say "but that's not how it worked for me" and they'd be absolutely correct. So, as they say, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

Item 1 - Travelability
Wheel assembly is a critical feature of a travel wheel. If the thing doesn't come together/pull apart reasonably easily, and if it doesn't fit in convenient bags or cases, what's the point? Here is a picture of the wheel fully disassembled. Putting it together is pretty easy.


Getting the treadles on and the wheel in its little base was quite easy. First time I did it, though, I put the wheel assembly on backwards with that little wheel in front on the right instead of the left. I quickly figured out that puts the flier on facing away from you when you would be spinning - obviously not correct, and quickly fixed.


Here is another picture of the wheel halfway put together. This is an accelerated wheel, meaning the larger wheel turns a smaller wheel in the assembly so that you can get big wheel ratios on a little tiny wheel. There is obviously some magic going on in that compartment - I have no idea if he's got gears, straps, or gnomes in there connecting the big wheel part to the smaller part. It works, it doesn't require me to do anything, so I'm fine with it. My sweetheart, however, stares at it a lot trying to figure it out. Perhaps I need to lock my wheel up when I am not home lest his curiosity gets the better of him!


The next step is to get the bobbin post and the tensioning system set up. You can see a black rubber cord that connects the little wheel to the whorl. It is quite stretchy, and does not have a huge impact on tension. That's where a second cord comes in - you can see it on the blanket behind the wheel.


That thin white cord is made of nylon, I believe, and is the primary tension for the bobbin. When you put it on, it is in a figure 8 folded back on itself, and you want no tension at all on the bobbin. It's not a particularly stretchy thread, so don't fight with it. You'll hurt its feelings and it will probably break. So, no tension when looping it over the bobbin and around the little wheel.


The flier is the next thing to go on, and it just slides in to the post holding on the bobbin. Easy-peasy. I do believe I'll be putting little beads on the end of the metal hooks on the flier, though the makers were careful to make sure the end of the hooks are rounded. Still, it is a nice way to both personalize the wheel a bit and to make sure those ends are not going to catch on fibers.


Item 2 - Spinning
A very wise spinner by the name of Judith Mackenzie McCuin has all her students "tune" a wheel as their first exercise in class. The idea is to see what range of fiber diameters you can get from your wheel. By adjusting the tension and the drive band between the two available ratios, one should be able to get some reasonable variation in fiber diameter. The Holiday wheel is an accelerated spinning wheel with only two ratios and more of a double-drive type tensioning, definitely a change for me from my previous travel wheel's scotch tension system. So, I started with spinning with varying tension on the small whorl, then repeat that with the larger whorl.


Working with an undyed merino top, I was able to comfortably get about 6 different yarn thicknesses with the combination of tension adjustment and ratio change. I could have probably stretched it a bit either way, but the focus here is on Comfortable. This is not my primary wheel, I am not trying to make lace or novelty yarn, so this was just fine for me. Fiber spun past either the thinnest or thickest shown above got quite, ah, variable. Serious thick-and-thin spots, which is fine if that's what you are aiming for, but not what I wanted out of this exercise.

Item 3 - Maintenance
For the most part, this wheel needs very little maintenance. A bit of oil on the posts going in to the tension system help make sure that system moves up and down smoothly, and a damp cloth to get the dust off will help the rest of the wheel. As far as I can tell, no other maintenance is required. If the drive band or tension band break, spares are included with the wheel.

As part of the question of maintenance, I want to talk a bit about what kind of customer service you can expect if something does go wrong with your wheel. When buying a wheel, one of the things you should ask yourself is "what do I do if something breaks? Will the manufacturer be helpful?" Things break, fact of life. But if you've got a good company standing behind their product, it's all ok. When I first got my wheel, there was a problem with one of the treadles staying attached to the wheel. Norm at SpinAway was fabulous about it. We talked on the phone and he immediately understood the problem. He covered the cost of me sending the wheel back for the necessary adjustment and got everything sorted out in just a few days. If I'd lived closer than 3000 miles away, it wouldn't even have taken that long. He made sure I felt taken care of (in a good way) and I am happy to report an excellent customer service experience.

And that's the wheel review! I hope you found it useful. I know several folks out there have been waiting to get the full details, some of whom are on that waiting list anxiously awaiting their own wheel. Be patient, folks, it's worth it!

Playing in the Dirt

While it may not seem like I recognize any other pastime besides fiber arts, I am in fact something of a gardener/landscaper. Nothing formal, but I do like to make whatever yard I call my own at the moment a better place for me, for critters, and for the environment. That said, even gardening can have a tie-in to fiber arts, but I'll get to that in a minute.A few months ago, I moved in to a different place. It's a reasonable little rental, with a small front and back yards to play in and a landlady that doesn't really mind me messing with the space. The backyard faces north and has lots of tall trees around it (read: not much sun), and the front yard is itty bitty tiny but faces west and gets a reasonable amount of sun each day.

There is this thing that has always puzzled me about people and their yards. More often than not, a person will decided their yard needs some flowers, go to the nearest place that sells plants, buy some things, and plant them. At no point does the thought seem to enter in to their heads "hmm, will this plant actually thrive where I want it?" And so it was with the last tenants, who seemed to think it would be a fine and dandy idea to plant roses in the backyard where there is no direct sunlight ever. They also planted some asian jasmine, another sun-loving plant, right up against the house facing north where it, too, will get little to no sun.

So, last weekend started the yard recovery. I dug up all of the rose plants in the backyard where they were getting all gangly looking as they reached out for some sun, pruned them, and replanted them in the front yard.

Those roses will be so much happier!

I've never actually planted traditional tea roses like this before. Mostly, I don't find them particularly useful or practical. Birds don't get seeds from them, I don't get food or dye from them, and they are a lot of work. But they are part of the property, so by golly I'm going to make sure they are in a place where they can grow properly! Going back to the thought of useful and practical, dealing with roses isn't the only thing I did in the last week or so in my gardening explosion.

The whole front yard is now mulched with pine bark, and I've got a shiny new Whitney Crabapple tree growing in the container. Mostly it looks like a stick stuck in dirt, but in 2 or 3 years, it's going to have tasty little crabapples. Yum! And what I don't get, the squirrels will be totally happy with. Or, perhaps the other way around - whatever the squirrels don't get, I will be happy with!

Also planted on the other side of the walkway are some herbs that will be fine in partial shade: oregano, lemon balm, catnip, and english thyme.


Such a pretty green, isn't it? I can't wait to see how those herbs do against the house like that! And I planted the catnip near the air vent for the garage. Hopefully the cats, who love to hang out at said air vent, will appreciate the plants too.

No crazy gardener person would be without a compost set up, and I got mine going last weekend. It hasn't quite started to do that compost heating up thing yet, but I'm just happy to have it started. I hated throwing away perfectly good worm and plant food!


And the last bit of work I did in the garden was a raised bed in the one spot in the backyard which gets a few hours of sun. There won't be any tomatoes growing there - not quite enough sun for those babies - but spinach, purple carrots, fava beans, onions, and lettuce should do fine.


Now to tie the last bit in to fiber arts (you know I had to, right?). Next weekend I'll be putting up a 3'x3' raised bed, similar to the one in the picture above but with some willow lathe bordering around it, where I will start to grow some of my own natural dye material. On the list: Dyer's Coreopsis (lovely golds) and Indigo (totally blue, baby). The indigo will actually need a bit of a greenhouse thing to really thrive, so that section of the planter will have some vented plastic over it to make it that much warmer than the rest of the world. I'll also be planting some Hopi Black Dye (green, purple, black) sunflowers along the side fence to see if they'll work in the yard. They'll also feed the local birds, which doubles the pleasure of having them around.

And that's where things stand for now! If I actually manage to grow a few things from seed (I've never been successful at that), I'll post a bit about how that worked. But for now, while my yard settles in to a new routine, I'm going to back to doing some spinning. For the next blog post, I'll be posting about a new spinning wheel - the SpinAway Holiday wheel, scheduled to arrive on Tuesday!

A short piece on plying

The question of plying came up in an online discussion the other day - well, more like the other week - and I had mentioned an experiment I'd done regarding 2- versus 3-ply. Now, it turns out that Ask The Bellwether recently had a much better blog post about this than I can write up - if you are interested in fiber arts and don't read her blog, you really should - but still, a couple of photos I've taken might help further elaborate on what you can expect when plying yarn.

So, thing one. Why ply at all? I can give you all sorts of semi-scientific reasons - balance out your twist, strengthen your yarn, yada yada yada - but really, it's all about your preference. I saw someone at the local weaving guild meeting earlier this week knitting a gorgeous shawl out of unplied ("singles") yarn. So, it really boils down to your own preferences and what you want the yarn for in the first place.

For me, personally, I generally do ply, but sometimes I don't, particularly when I'm after some particular effect in my weaving. I've got some ideas about that I really want to try out in my weaving, but more on that another time. When I do ply my singles, I do either 2- or 3- ply. That is, I twist together either 2 or 3 singles at a time. I prefer 3-ply for its roundness and its technical difficulty - it's just plain harder to get Just Right - but 2-ply is quite nice for knitting or weaving as well.

When I'm spinning just for the fun of it (which is most of the time) I usually spin to about the same twists-per-inch and same thickness. No particular reason why, that's just the most natural thing for me to do. So, with that in mind, it was particularly interesting to see how some of my recent spinning projects turned out. I have a huge amount of natural brown merino (couldn't resist those fleeces!) and so I spun up a big skein of 2-ply, then did it again as 3-ply. The twist is about the same, just because I wasn't trying for anything in particular. The diameter of the singles is also more or less the same. Might have been a bit thicker as I was making up the 2-ply.

Here's the yarn I'm talking about, the 2-ply, the singles, and the 3-ply.


You'll notice the twist on the 3-ply is tighter than the 2-ply. Plying two singles together takes more twist out of the singles than plying three singles together. That means that there is more twist that needs to be balanced when you're doing a 3-ply. So, either spin your singles looser or expect a tighter 3-ply yarn than you'll get out of just a 2-ply!

If you are further interested in this sort of thing, do take a few moments to read the blog post I linked to above. I'll be doing some further experiments over the next few weeks with not just plying, but plying already-plied yarns back on themselves, something known as cabling. Cables are super round yarns and if you can do some crazy things with how the colors blend in a cabled yarn. I have so many ideas for interesting yarns, it's a shame I can't spend more time spinning! Ah well, tomorrow I'll post about what's been distracting me from spinning (and blogging) most recently - my garden!

Shearing that Sheep

OK, how did it get to be so long since I blogged??? Ah, well, in my defense, I can say that while I may not have been productive in my blogging, I have gotten quite a bit done otherwise. In particular, my Master Spinners Level One workbook has been turned in for grading. Assuming it arrives safely to my grader, I should know in a few weeks how I did, and I'll be ready to start Level Two! The plan is to finish Level Two by June, and then start my first in-person level (Level Three) at Fibre Week at Olds College.

Starting with Level Three, all future levels (there are six total) have a week-long in-person component, so it'll be one level a year for the remainder of my participation in the program. If I stick to my schedule, that means I'll be done with the Master Spinners program in 2013.

So, all that said, a blog post wouldn't be complete without photos, so let me direct you to my little photo album of photos taken yesterday at the first day of sheep shearing at Cormo Sheep & Wool of 2010! Not only did I get to apply some of my theoretical knowledge of shearing and skirting based on what I learned in Level One, I and the other assistants got first choice at the new fleeces! I brought home the most gorgeous black cormo hogget fleece...

Without further ado, go enjoy the photos! This Means Ewe!