Hello Crafters!

Welcome to Spins and Weaves! A site on my adventures in crafts and also the occasional post of my adventures in a new town doing my PhD.

My name is Kira and I started my craft adventure back in 2006 when I was recovering from my second brain surgery (of three so far) and I joined the rest of the family doing cross stitch. Since then I spent many years doing cross stitch only. Last year for no reason in particular I decided to try my hand at knitting. Then this year I picked up three crafts including crochet, spinning and weaving!

Over the next few posts I will be introducing the different history of my crafts. Today will be an introduction into spinning with my first wheel!

I have no idea what made me decide "I need a spinning wheel". I had never seen anyone outside of tv spinning or tried hand spun yarn. So maybe as I later joked when brining it home, I am cementing my spinster-hood. So onto gumtree I went without much (any) knowledge and within a week I was driving to pick up my first wheel! If only I had known then what I know now!

Ashford Traditional 7/15

With more education I found out this was a single treadle, single drive. It also came with a niddy noddy (seen attached to the wheel). The bag also came with two spindles a dog comb (yes you use that in spinning) and some bobbins. The seller didn't really spin, but had the most amazing house and other crafts and enough musical instruments that I wanted to set myself there to live despite it being so difficult to find on a hill with tight streets. I would say this was a crica 1975 wheel due to the spokes and where the tension knob was.







After I got this home I tried the old YouTube catalogue of "Learn to Spin". I eventually got something that looked like yarn from some fibre I got from spotlight.

Pretty thick, but I miss being able to spin thick easily now!

It was within a week or so I went to my first class at Petlins at Rhodes, Sydney, Australia. I signed up via the site for both the loom weaving and the spinning class as they ran one after each other. I arrived nervous and a little late. I entered a small shop and couldn't see any people doing classes! After a chat to the owners I found out that the site did something funny with my classes and being me I was ready to leave rather than put someone out. The lovely lady, Linda, started pulling all the tables and everything out to get started. So after that small hiccup I spent a good number of hours weaving a scarf while people turned up with wheels and the footpath outside of the shop started to fill with the sound of chatter and flashes of beautiful fibre and yarn. I elected to finish my scarf during the spinning time instead of the lesson. By the end of the day I even got to try a wheel and learn how to start spinning properly.

This is a lovely first basic wheel that gets highly recommended to any new spinner. This is due to being able to easily get cheap second-hand ones and the quality of this NZ made wheel.

This lovely first wheel did get sold onto another spinner when I got other some other wheels which I will mention in my next posts!

However this was the beginning of the end for my bank account!

Posted in: Ashford, spinning, traditional, wheels