Oops. You broke it.

Since I gave up on my attempt at plying with a Navajo Spindle, I decided to ask Mom to help me ply my merino on her spinning wheel.

My Mom has two spinning wheels, an Ashford she bought new, and a Louet she bought used. For various reasons, including bobbin size, the presence of the swift thing on top and the fact that the Ashford's bobbins are full, we decided to use the Louet.

As we messed around with the yarn I plied before, it become apparent that I did fine on my drop spindle, but did something terribly wrong on the Navajo Spindle. Maybe I spun the wrong direction.

Here's Mom cleaning up my mess. I tried, but I didn't catch any of the clumps where the singles kinked up on themselves.


After we got past the wonky part, I took over the wheel. Here's my set up. Each single is in a ball in its own bowl.


I got the hang of it quickly. Mom said when she first spun on a wheel, the teacher had them ply singles. So this was a natural progression.

And I was going to ask Mom to take a video of me plying, when this happened.

(I tried to find a way to link to Homestar Runner saying "Oops. You broke it." But I couldn't do it.)

There's a more specific explanation of what happened here. Basically, there's a little thingy holding the treadle to the doohickey on the wheel. The thingy is made of rubber or plastic. Whatever it is, it's flexible. And this one broke.

Dad attempted to fix it.

And he did come up with a temporary solution. He put managed to attach the shortened version of the now broken thingy back to the doohickey. It worked for a while, but it broke again before I finished. Mom even spun the wheel by hand while I plied for a while, but there was too much left for her to keep it up. I tried spinning by hand while plying, but that didn't work either.

So I'll have to wait before I finish plying. I did get a picture of what I managed to ply. This was taken as Dad tried to fix the wheel.

Hopefully Louet won't take six to eight weeks to deliver the new part.