Third wheel
Thursday October 04th 2012, 10:37 pm
Filed under: Friends,Spinning

A timber company once copied those Ashford guys down the road, briefly; their foray into spinning wheels apparently didn’t last. (This got me to Google–who knew. They do still exist. Curtain rods and finials, okay.)

There was an auction nearby about 15 years ago of the estate of a woman who’d owned a shop that had sold spinning wheels–y’know, back before people knew what that Ebay startup was all about.

There was a wry comment from my friend Karen after I bought one of those at that auction, while I was hoping the box had all the disassembled pieces (it did): “I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for that brand.”

There was my father-in-law, maybe ten years ago, who, while visiting, decided to put the thing together for me.  Thanks, Dad! The directions said there was a second bobbin in there, an extra, because, y’know, you might want to spin a second color or something. (Plying, folks.) One of the sidebars was slightly shorter than the other, it turned out–well, that didn’t work.

Dad said, Hey, I got an idea.

So we went to the grocery store, bought Dove ice cream bars, ate the ice cream bars, and he used the stick of his to finish off that shorter sidebar.

The thing still never did really spin, though. If you pumped really hard you might get it to turn once. Maybe. Even if it was kind of fun to have instructions in aboriginal (near as we could tell) as well as English.

A few weeks ago I finally got that wheel in to Purlescence and the verdict was that it was such a close copy of what is the number one brand in the world, last I checked, that they could swap out the handmaiden (the top part) with an Ashford’s to get the thing going.

A friend at the shop tonight who didn’t know about all of that back-and-forth-ing two weeks ago about can you make this thing work mentioned that her partner (who is recovering well from a major health issue, and I’m big on having a good creative outlet when you’re dealing with a major health issue) has really wanted to learn to spin. If only they had a wheel.

Let me finish working on that, says Kaye, adding that she just happens to have a spare handmaiden to use on it. Now that she and I know who she’s fixing it for.

I’ve got two Ashford wheels, I don’t need the Woodcroft with the tulips engraved on it. Done. That was easy. With Sandi and Kaye’s help, it’s all finally coming together.


7 Comments so far
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seems that spinning wheels are meant to be passed from hand to hand — nice!

Comment by Bev 10.05.12 @ 5:18 am

Oh wow – I know who this is and she is going to be thrilled! 🙂

Comment by (formerly) no-blog-rachel 10.05.12 @ 5:35 am

What a great excuse to eat ice cream!

Comment by LauraN 10.05.12 @ 6:40 am

I quite agree with LauraN. Couldn’t have said it better myself!

Comment by Don Meyer 10.05.12 @ 8:35 am

No coincidences. It takes a village to raise a wheel.

Comment by Channon 10.05.12 @ 8:51 am

Plying wood to get’em spinning! The wheels on the world go round and round.

Comment by DebbieR 10.05.12 @ 10:56 am

What goes around, comes around. You prove it over and over again.

Comment by twinsetellen 10.06.12 @ 6:10 pm



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