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Post by paweaver on Jun 23, 2009 10:19:29 GMT -5
Well,
My life has brought me a surprise this past week. I am to pick up a spinning wheel this Sat. Wow! I got a call this week and a family is more or less gifting me this wheel. Her mother-in-law use it to spin flax and wool before she gave it to her. They want it to go to someone who will use it and it will not be a "show" piece in someones living room. So needless to say I am delighted and honored. Now this moves my desire to plant flax into high gear for next year. I just found out that a friend has planted and harvested flax at a living history museum. She is willing to come up and help me too. Looks to me like God is opening these doors for me in a very logical order. I can't believe just how closer my dream has moved in less than one week!! I'm left speechless.
weaverpa
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Post by caretaker on Jun 23, 2009 15:31:42 GMT -5
Wonderful! May God continue to bless you and your family. May he also continue to send an ocassional extra special suprise blessing. David.
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Post by joanne2 on Jun 24, 2009 8:36:58 GMT -5
Awesome Liza! Sounds great! I know you'll love your wheel. Looking forward to seeing your pictures. It can really become a family affair with your girls I'm sure! I haven't been doing much spinning on my most recent acquisition but I've been thinking to send the latest fleece down to Frankenmuth and have them process it into roving. Would make spinning on the Country Spinner much easier! I have found that with my large family the largest yarns I can make work up the quickest and that is handy if you plan to use it to make items for the family to wear. This pic is of my 3 girls and a sheep that my daughter Cherie sheared for a friend with a pair of Fiskars..don't laugh it worked well.. albeit a bit slowly.. think it took about an hour and a half! I'm sure the sheep appreciated the haircut! The newest wheel, another Ashford from New Zealand.. These are some of the most common wheels. I have the Traditional, the Traveller and now the Country Spinner. I paid 300. each. Ouch! a bargain,.. I love them all! Spinning wheels do have this habit of multiplying! Here's the first yarn I made on the cs wheel.. very slubby and newbie! I spun it from my hand processed rolag. The double treadle is taking some getting used to! and really this wheel is a fleece gobbler! so the commercially processed roving would be ideal!... Two potholders that I whipped up out of that first skein I spun with the wheel. I dyed them with oh..God forbid several packets of KoolAid! Hey.. this dyeing with the orange Koolaid would work super too for making those bright orange hunters caps! Not very primitive. So you are planning to learn to ret your own home grown flax.. and you'll spin the ingredients for weaving your own linen, will you? Sounds fascinating. I'm looking forward to seeing your work progress! thanks for sharing. God is Great!
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Post by Cody ( The Patriot ) on Jun 24, 2009 20:02:05 GMT -5
yall girls sure are something
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Post by paweaver on Jun 24, 2009 21:41:35 GMT -5
Thanks everyone!
Joanne,
lol Are you warning Loren of whats to come. lol Don't let all the secrets out of the bag or I never get him to actually let me bring the first wheel home. I wonder if he will notice if I slip an angora goat or a sheep or two into our goat herd?
Actually he should already know. My knitting lead to my yarn stock pile ( Buy it on sale knit it later). My weaving has lead to all kinds of hand held and other styles of looms. I hope the the wheel will lead to a flax plot and a rending procedure and then finally the spinning of linen.
You have a nice collection of wheels. Do any of your daughters spin? That is cool about them shearing the sheep with Fiskars. We were suppose to go to the local wool pull this year and see them bailing wool, however, life got too busy and we never made it. Next year I hope.
I'll post pics when it arrives. Its kinda like a child waiting for Christmas.
weaverpa
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Post by Buckskin Billy on Jun 24, 2009 21:54:26 GMT -5
like cody said you girls are something. thanks for the pictures and introducing me to something new. well its new to me
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Post by joanne2 on Jun 25, 2009 8:45:30 GMT -5
No worries Liza. You're a pretty determined gal and also very talented. I've watched you learn to knit and then come to produce handknit socks and caps. I thought you needed your own spinning wheel quite a few years ago now! I'm sure Loren is just worried about how much this is going to cost him.. what he isn't considering is what you and you girls will be producing with this new(old) device. Truly a spinning wheel is much more productive than a hand spindle at making cordage! However I have seen some women so talented with hand spindles that those gals could outspin women with wheels.. LIKE ME, LOL. However I know that you possess that stick-it-to-itiveness to make a lot of yarn and/or flax. Quite a bit to preparing stalked of the flax plant to spinning with it and you're best off to learn to spin first. First things first you're likely to really need yourself some commercially prepared roving, just to get a handle on using the wheel. I got a book from a crafts club on knitting and it had some really great looking sweaters in it and all the sweaters had yarn that was wool and a lot of the wool was mixed with a percentage of angora.. (gives the finished product kind of a halo'y effect.. beautiful accent to handknit items. when you see something that is handknit with the nice yarns you look at it like WOW.. is that beautiful..well so from that book I got the bug to learn to spin as the wool yarn is quite pricey to purchase.. (little did I know then, lol).. so anyway.... I ordered the traditional wheel and then our oldest girl was maybe 12 or so? well anyway we went to the fair to find someone that knew how to spin..well we found a gal there.. My daughter did actually, she was running ahead of me while I was carrying her baby sister! Anyway she spotted 'Jeannie' feeding her very tame shetland sheep 'Dougie' popcorn in one of the stalls there. Anyway, she was happy to teach me to spin on this new wheel. I met her at a local farmers market and we both set up our wheels and Jeannie had some roving on her along with her vegetables and some handspun yarns to sell.. so in a short while I was catching on to drafting that wool onto the spool. It really helped I think having had the experience of knitting and holding the yarns previously. I think that you will take to spinning like a duck taking to water too but thanks to Jeannie the transition to actually doing the spinning came without any frustration. The trick to spinning is the well prepared fleece. The roving has already been processed so that spinning from it goes very smoothly. Hopefully you can find a spinning guild near you and some person that is close by your home to take a quick lesson from. Jeannie is the president of a group here that has a really big fiber festival. There are like 50 vendors that drive all the way up north here.. to attend. The fairgrounds are beautiful there too. I haven't gone to them all but boy one could buy anything fiber related there.. Rabbits! One year the kids and I got these angora rabbits there.. now they are a great pet to have to spin from! and dogs too. I made dog hair items a couple of times with that first wheel. Did you know that dog hair is like ten times warmer than sheeps wool? Some dogs are better then others of course! I got this newfie dog when it was a pup from a friend mostly cause I heard that they were great dogs to spin the hair from! anyway it was a great dog to have. I eventually gave him away.. takes a lot of $$ to have all of the fiber related creatures, you bet! Anyway I am sure that your kids will take to spinning too. Cherie, our oldest there is the only one that was around my spinning enough to learn! So I really should fix up both my first wheels so that they are all in good shape for spinning and get them all spinning and knitting again. I've been busy brain tanning hides and furs so.. my excuse.. Now it has been building sheds and cutting down trees. We heat with wood and collecting it is my 'job' so between 5 kids and gathering wood and all I can get a bit distracted! I hope that whomever is gifting you with this wheel might have a few of the items that really helps. You can easily make a niddy noddy. Those are a must have. A flick carder is a great little tool to have too. You might be able to find someone with sheep and wool from them for real inexpensive. To prepare your own fleece it's not too difficult but it is time consuming. You can however leave the lanolin in the fleece and when it's warm and sunny out it'll draft and spin up really well.. 'spinning in the grease' as it's called. but it will gum and dirty up a fancy wheel.. But the spun wool with the lanolin in it will create a wool yarn that will be water repellant. very cool.. I took a summer off of tanning skins a few years ago just to make a sweater.. I got the guage all wrong so it never fit the person that I intended it for so I finished it up as a vest and sold it for 100. anyway it was a fun experience and was the last item I really spun and knit so that's why I bought the last wheel.. because I'd come to learn that with all my other projects I needed personally to make BIG yarns! anyway this is a Salish.. or Northwest NA Indian replica. Those women out there make some GREAT sweaters..heavy thick water repellant and they have some kind of little dog too whose fur they would incorporate into their sweaters and socks and stuff. I never took a picture of the back of this sweater! LOL.. it had one big 'eagle' on it.. the person that bought the vest wanted me to add sleeves to it as it was just so warm! but needed the sleeves to be really fini'! oh well.. That was a fun project.. anyway sorry for the long long rambling post! I do look forward to seeing you and your girls taking off with this wheel and just making all kinds of neat things! You should be able to make some $$ with your wheel too as there aren't a lot of 'different' primitive things out there. I was just thinking that I have some yoteskins around here that I might be able to use the fur from.. mix it with some wool.. yarn made with wool and yote fur could make some very interesting textile.. even spun.. sometimes knitted dog fur can be 'picky' feeling.. so might be really cool woven..even just a bit of it and put together with some brain tan could make a SUPER looking bag or something.. thanks for the tangent to run off on Liza.. I really think I should be doing something.. I have umpteen chores around here! have a good one. paulette
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Post by paweaver on Jun 25, 2009 23:10:45 GMT -5
Joanne,
Your right Mohair is neat. Dog is warm too. I've seen a hat made from dog hair. Most people couldn't wear it; it was too warm. I do have some "unique" friends (including you). Like begets Like. I will try to get some pics of their set ups. One has a great wheel that she spins on. Another has so many looms in her living room the first time I visited her my eyes must of been huge. I was like a child. So many cool things to look at I just couldn't seem to take it all in.
Ya, I figure I got just a little over a year to get good at spinning so that I can move on to the flax. I have a small amount of roving here, but my other neighbor just offered me some of her wool. Seems the sheep produce it faster than she can use it.
I know that you a super busy. Please take time to take care of yourself no one else will you know.
weaverpa
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Post by joanne2 on Jun 26, 2009 13:22:58 GMT -5
LOL.. know what you mean about begets! My friend Jeannie's entire house is like that.. wheels and looms and fiber EVERYWHERE! lol course no hubby or kids either, makes a bit of a difference how obsessed a person can become!
Do you know what kind of wheel you're getting? I only went to one guild meeting with my friend and seems like out of at least a dozen women spinning there were only two women with the same wheel. Lendrums I think they were. They're all cool aren't they?
So is there a reason in particular that you have for spinning flax into material for linen? Sounds real different!
Thanks for the sage advice! You got a point there!
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