Thor is Complete!

There's something about accessories that brings out the OCD in me.  I can't seem to get piece of equipment without obsessing about acquiring every possible accessory that I might NEED someday.  (Note to self:  don't ever buy another sewing machine that has 20 bazillion presser feet again!)

Tuesday's mail brought something special all the way from the Netherlands for Thor -- the distaff that Moswolt sold as an option to the M1 and M2 wheels .  It even has a hank of what I assume is flax tied to it.  Now Thor has everything.  These are just about impossible to find and I was very lucky.

Here is Thor with distaff and reel installed, along with his other goodies.

 I found this wonderful Dutch company - Low Lands Legacy - that had a photo of a Moswolt M1 with the distaff attached on their site.  Funny thing was that I was not even searching for Moswolt at the time.  I had just seen a gadget called a Bogway Handspinner and wandered into their site looking for more information on it.  So I emailed to ask and lo... they had a distaff for sale.  

Hans and Gerrie were very kind -- they concentrate their business in the Netherlands and rest of Europe, but agreed to ship to the U.S.  They were able to fill me in on more of the Moswolt company's history:

" The Moswolt spinning wheels were produced in ‘De Achterhoek’ (a region in the Mid-East of Holland). Originally it was a furniture mill and they also produced spinning wheels in de ‘70’s. The company doesn’t exists anymore. And therefore you won’t find anything on the internet. We do have the original Moswolt brochure. You can have a copy if you want to. Nowadays the Moswolt has become a collector’s item and rather rare to find. Even more rare is the distaff."

I already had a copy of the brochure translated into English, but here it is in the original Dutch:

And by now you know that I couldn't pass up the little Bogway -- me and my gadgets!  People either seem to love it or hate it - I played with it a little bit and have to say it's kinda fun.  Who knows - using it may help firm up my flabby arms (gotta remember to switch hands occasionally) or maybe scare off muggers.

Here it is in action.  Not in English, but you can get the idea, anyway.

The rest of the Angelina fiber order arrived yesterday, just in time to take it to my class.  Can't wait to see how everyone uses theirs.

Up Close and Personal

I have this idea that I will understand my spinning better if I understand the nature of the fiber I'm spinning.  Is it smooth?  Heavily cuticled? Crimpy?

So a few months ago, I bought a Celestron digital microscope (the least expensive one!) so I could get a closeup look.

Can't say that I've learned anything yet, but I've been having fun looking at all kinds of stuff close up.  The most intriguing so far is skin, but I won't gross you out with photos of that.

Know what this is?  No, it is not a closeup of the pores on my nose! Find out at the end of this post.

 In my Wednesday night class, we've been talking about adding Angelina fibers to some of our spinning, and I placed an order for everyone who wanted to try it.  This is the smooth stuff -- can't wait till the crimped stuff arrives and I can see what it "really" looks like.






Then I got out my second (most recent) finished batch of handspun.  This was some fiber I got really cheap on ebay.  Proof that you get what you pay for.  I have no idea what it really is, except the burn test showed it was wool.  This was so hard to spin, I was tempted a few times to burn test the whole bunch.  But impatience is one of my biggest faults so I decided to stick it out as a character-building experience.  On the plus side, this was so difficult to spin, all of the other fibers I have experimented with since then have seemed incredibly easy to draft.

Here's the original unspun fiber:

Normal Size

Enlarged

REALLY Enlarged

No wonder I couldn't draft this stuff smoothly -- it was so curly and the fibers twisted around each other so much, there's no way a beginner like me could get anything remotely uniform for a result.  And each of the colors had a slightly different texture -- you can see here that the pink stuff was slightly thicker and quite a bit less curly than the white.  The green doesn't really show well here, but it's somewhere between the white and pink.  So every time there was a change in the colors during drafting, the thickness of the yarn really wanted to (and did) change.  Hence, VOILA!  Art yarn!

8.3 oz, 264 yards of finished yarn.

Here it is in increasingly closer views:

I'm actually pretty pleased with the result given what I started out with, and am just waiting for the yarn to tell me what it wants to be.

The honeycomb picture at the top of this post?  A photo I snapped accidentally while the microscope was sitting on my table.  Here's the wood a little bit less magnified.  I would never have guessed if I hadn't seen it first-hand.