What’s the best spinning wheel for a beginning spinner?

Fortunately, folks that know a lot more about spinning wheels than I do have answered that question in the most recent (Summer 2008) edition of Spin Off magazine. The article, “How to Choose Your First Wheel” by Rudy Amann, gives the following suggestions:

Visit a shop that has several different spinning wheels you can try
This is probably the most important guideline in the article. Even if a wheel meets all the technical specs you’re looking for, you won’t really know if it works for you unless you try it out. If there’s no shop in your area, try to find a spinning guild with friendly members that might let you try out their wheels.

You’ll want to pay particular attention to whether you’re more comfortable with a single or double treadle wheel. Many people seem to feel that double treadle wheels are easier for beginners to handle, but this really is an individual preference.

Think about where you will be using your spinning wheel
If you’re planning to travel with your wheel at all frequently, you’ll want to think about getting a portable wheel. On the other hand, if you think that will be an extremely rare occurrence for you, a Saxony style or castle style wheel might be better because they are often more stable. Of the three styles, the Saxony style is going to take up the most space and be the hardest to transport easily.

If portability is highly important to you, you might even want to consider a charka instead of a spinning wheel.

Decide what fibers and types of yarn you’ll be spinning the most
This will influence your decision of what type of drive system you’ll want to look for. If you want to spin finer yarns, you’ll want to consider either a flyer-lead (scotch tension) or double-drive wheel. On the other hand, if you want to spin heavier weight yarns, you might prefer a bobbin-lead wheel, which also has the advantage of requiring fewer adjustments while spinning.

Here are some other factors that I think are important:

Cost
Spinning wheels come in a wide range of prices. Among the least expensive are spinning wheels are the Babe’s spinning wheels. These are far from the most attractive spinning wheels around in my opinion, but every time I’ve read a review, their owners seemed to be happy with how they spin.

Reputation of the Manufacturer and the Seller
You can find this out by searching on some spinning forums. You’ll want to pay particular attention to how they resolved any customer complaints. If you are considering buying a used wheel, you will probably want to make sure the manufacturer is still in business or you might have a difficult time finding compatible replacement parts or accessories (such as extra bobbins).

Hope you found these tips helpful!

There are plenty of blueprints and instructions on the web telling you how to create your own spinning tools. Here are a few I’ve run across lately. All of these resources are free, unless otherwise noted:

Spindles

• CD Spindle, via Interweave (pdf)
• Wooden Spindle, via the Joy of Handspinning
• Clay whorl drop spindle, via Not Another Knitblog!
• Supported Spindle, via Spindiicity
• Ahka, via spindling.com
• Spindles of several different types, all on one page, via lahottee.info

Charkas/Wheels

• Cigar Box Charka, via Interweave
• Little Great Wheel, via Interweave
• Saxony Spinning Wheel Plans, via Paradise Fibers (currently $7.95)
• Spinning Wheel Plans on eBay (prices vary)

Other Tools

• Niddy-noddy, via Spindle and Wheel
• Lazy Kate, via lahotte.info

If you know of other resources for making your own spinning tools, or I’d love to hear about them. Or, if you’ve already made your own and have pictures, I’d love to see them!

Following the instructions I’ve read in a few places, including Knitty.com, I separated a thin sheet from the rest of the cap like so:

Here’s a single sheet of the silk:

As you can see, there was already a hole starting to form at the middle, so I just made it a little bigger and started pulling and lengthening it so it started to resemble a piece of circular roving.

Next, I broke it at at thin part and continued to pull it out into a thin roving. Here’s the result:

I’ve just started to spin it on my Bosworth mini drop spindle. I plan to spin it as fine as I can, and eventually turn it into a 2-ply. Fun stuff!

Have you spun silk before? How did you prepare and spin it?

There were several specific exercises though, to give us ideas about how various combinations of fiber might turn out. For example, one exercise we did was blending some fibers together to get a base color, then blending the base fiber with varying amounts of black or white fiber to see how it changed the base color. You can see the result of that experiment by looking at the purple skeins below.

For me, the most interesting part of the class was getting a chance to play with fiber that I wouldn’t otherwise have tried. For some of the exercises, we worked with partners, which was fun because it got me to try colors and fibers (witness the sparklies in skein in the top middle) that I wouldn’t necessarily have picked on my own.

I’m really glad I got the opportunity to take both of these classes. They’ve given me a bit more confidence about working with color and different fibers to create new effects. Now, instead of just choosing a roving and spinning it as-is, I feel like I’ll be able to tweak what I buy a bit so I’ll end up with just the yarn I want.

The class was geared toward teaching us how fiber can be blended to give you different color effects. The first thing we did was to create color wheels by taking the 3 primary colors - blue, yellow and red - hand carding them together and separately, then spinning the resulting rolags. Here are the results:

Color Wheel, Printer’s Palette


Color Wheel, Standard Palette

Each of the primary colors was used on its own, then each was blended with the other in different proportions using hand cards - 25%/75%, 50%/50%, and 75%/25% - to create the complete color wheel.

It was interesting to me to see how much variation you can get from pre-dyed rovings, simply by blending them together, and how the effect can differ quite substantially depending on how much time you are willing to spend in the carding process.

The second part of the class was devoted to taking a color photograph you liked, and trying to design a yarn based upon the colors in the photo. Unfortunately I didn’t get that far with this idea because I was just too tired by that point, but I’m going to try to use it for future inspiration.

My verdict on this class is that I learned a lot, but felt that the instructor covered a bit too much for a one-day class. If this was kept to the one-day format, I would have preferred to do just one color wheel and spend more time with creating yarn designs.

In any case, I learned a lot from this class and it’s given me a little more confidence to play more with color!

I’ve just spun a little bit on it so far, but it’s working nicely. Because of its light weight, this spindle is meant to be used to spin fairly fine yarns.

Like most lightweight spindles, this one does not spin for a very long time, but it does spin quite fast. What gives it an advantage over some lightweight spindles I’ve tried though is its stability. Even before you’ve built up much of a cop on the shaft, it still spins nice and evenly, without any detectable wobble. I can tell that this is going to be one of my favorite spindles.

If you’re in the market for a Bosworth drop spindle, check Kendig Cottage’s eBay store - they usually have a good variety of Bosworths as well as some other beautiful spindles by other high-quality drop spindle makers.

What’s your favorite lightweight drop spindle?

I’ve got 4 ounces to spin but didn’t get all that far with it last week because I also brought a knitting project to work on. But I did manage to spin one cop - here’s another (again not so good) picture of the the singles from that cop wound off in a ball for later plying:

I really like spinning alpaca. It might not be quite as easy to spin as wool because it doesn’t have the same elasticity, but in my opinion, it’s easier than spinning silk because it has more ‘grab’ to it, and it’s also quite a bit easier to spin than plant fibers like cotton. Another advantage to alpaca is that it’s considered by some to be somewhat hypo-allergenic, so if you have friends with an allergy to wool, they just might be able to wear alpaca.

I’m hoping to end up with enough yarn from this batch of roving to spin a shawl or at least a scarf. I just love the natural brown color, which is actually quite a bit deeper of a color than it appears from the pictures above.

If you’re interesting in spinning alpaca, remember that it generally likes to be spun fairly fine, so choose a light spindle or a fast ratio on your wheel. If you’d like to end up with a thicker yarn - say a worsted weight or chunky - the best strategy is probably to plan on at least a triple ply.

If you’d like to try spinning some alpaca but don’t have a good local source, you can often find some really nice rovings on eBay.

What’s your experience with spinning alpaca? If you have any tips, please leave a comment!

I followed the suggestion by Boogie from Spunky Eclectic on this thread on Ravelry (login required) to set the twist in the silk by steaming it, which I did by putting it in a colander over a pot of boiling water on my stove. The suggestion was great, but unfortunately, my execution was poor in at least two ways:

1. I must have overfilled the pot
2. Instead of staying inside where I could keep an eye on things, I went outside and pulled some weeds in the garden while the pot was boiling.

This is the result of these two errors in judgment.

See those white blotches? The dye almost completely washed out of my silk in the places where it came into contact with the boiling water. Sigh.

The yarn will still be usable - it’s just didn’t turn out as well as I thought it would. It is a bit disappointing, but at least I’ve learned a few lessons about dealing with silk along the way - and maybe someone reading this will be able to avoid my mistakes!

The spinning itself went okay, although I knew at the time that I was overspinning the fiber a bit. The problems didn’t really start until I started plying.

First I tried using a center-pull ball and plying the center end and the outer end together. No go - it was a big mess! I just ended up with a tangled heap of yarn.

Next I tried taking the center end and the outer end of the center-pull ball and re-rolling it into a double-stranded outer-pull ball. This is the technique I’ve stuck with, and here are the results so far.

Not so good, not so bad, right? I think it’s actually going to look okay, but I’ll know more after setting the twist. The big problem has been that it’s a pain in the @ss to ply because it’s really kinking up, probably because I’m not keeping the singles under good tension when I ply.

Before I try plying overspun singles again, I think I’ll invest in this spindler’s lazy kate. Spinsanity’s idea is genius, don’t you think?

Of course, next time, I’ll also try not to use so much twist in the first place.

The book starts out with a discussion of the general characteristics of wool and the characteristics of the wool produced by the specific breeds that are showcased in the book. There is also a bit of information here on the fibers of other animals used in the book: mohair, alpaca, and llama. The first chapter also covers the topics of blending and dyeing fiber and gives some really valuable information about how to decide what fiber or fiber blends to use based on the project you have in mind.

The knitted projects in the sections that follow are what really make the book. Most of the patterns are fairly classic but still manage to be unique. And the wonderful part is that each project is shown knit with both a handspun yarn and a commercial yarn, with details given about the blend used to make the handspun version. I haven’t yet had the chance to knit any of the projects in the book, but in reading through some of the patterns, I’ve found them to be well written and easy to follow. Levels of difficulty of the patterns range from “intermediate beginner” to “experienced”.

In short, A Fine Fleece: Knitting with Handspun Yarns is a wonderful book for any spinner who wants to get some ideas about what to make with their handspun yarns, or a knitter who wants to learn more about what types of yarn work well in what projects.