Tinkertoys
May 21st, 2008 at 10:36 pm (spinning)
I thought up this idea to use weaving bobbins and my bobbin winder to store singles off a drop spindle. You can wind the singles into a center pull ball with a ball winder - which isn’t great because the center will collapse when you take it off the winder; and the singles can get tangled.
It’s best to keep the singles under tension the whole time. I learned from Amelia (http://askthebellwether.blogspot.com/) about felted balls to wrap the singles around; but that’s pretty slow and I haven’t managed to make any felted balls yet. Gee, I wonder if I have any fiber around here to do that with…
So I pulled out my bobbin winder, and some empty bobbins, and setup this contraption. The bobbin the spindle sits in is held in place by a tinkertoy stick that comes out of the little orange thing. It’s short so there’s plenty of room for end of the spindle to stay in the bobbin and spin freely as the yarn winds off of it. It also keeps it at just the right height to go straight across onto the bobbin. The bobbin winder is an accelerated deal so as you turn the handle around once, the bobbin goes around a bunch of times.
I did have a problem with the tinker toy contraption tended to slide towards the bobbin winder when I got going too fast with winding off the spindle. A little more weight on the bottom of it would have been great.
Special note: These are tinkertoys that I used to play with when I was a kid. My kids play with them now; and I think that’s so cool. We even still have the book that came with them that shows you a 101 things you can make with tinkertoys. Every household should have a tin of tinkertoys in it.
(Don’t forget you have until this friday to enter the contest to win the Peter Teal book! See previous blog entry for details)
Katie - The Knitting Mama said,
June 12th, 2008 at 12:38 am
That is absolutely brilliant! We have tinker toys, I have bobbins and a winder, and I could totally do that… Makes drop spindling slightly more appealing to me. :) I hadn’t figured out what in the world to do with the singles before plying… so I have a couple of drop spindles with ever growing singles on them! LOL… I never would have thought of that - I am artsy and creative, but I do not have an engineer brain. I need to pick my husband’s brain for things like that. :)