My New Contraption

OK, I am ridiculously excited about this thing.

It looks like some sort of medieval torture device, doesn't it?! Here is a less blurry picture.
I love that chair, by the way.

So what is it? It is a Mother Marion.

Oh, you still don't know what that is? It is a kick spindle. No?
Notice the adorable cat on the left in the picture. :-) Does that stuff at the top make it a bit clearer? It is used for spinning fiber, in this case wool.

I have been using a drop spindle to spin wool on, which is fine, but it does take a fair amount of time, and I was having trouble drafting out the fiber (pulling the fibers apart enough to thin them out for spinning) and keeping the spindle spinning. I really wanted to be able to use both hands, but I don't have the money for a spinning wheel.

I've looked into ways of making a spinning wheel, but I don't have any old bicycle tires hanging around, and that seems to be one of the main things I'd need. Yes, you can make a spinning wheel from a bicycle tire. I'd love to try it sometime. They are mounted sometimes on a PVC frame. Cool engineering, huh?

Anyway, somewhere on the web I found a mention of a Mother Marion, a kick spindle, where you can put the thing on the floor and use your foot to turn the spindle, thereby leaving both hands free for drafting out the fiber. So neat! There are people who make them and sell them online (Here is an Etsy shop where they make and sell their Mother Marion's, and HERE is a place where they make gorgeous ones!), but they can be pricey as well. I didn't have the money to buy one. You can also put them on a table and use your hand to spin the wheel, but that kind of defeated the purpose of wanting both hands available for me.

So I searched on the web for people who had made their own, and found a couple different ones. One was on YouTube, one was on a blog. I can't find the links right now. At any rate, the materials needed were very few, so I made a list and headed off to Home Depot. Here is what I bought:

a 3/8 inch dowel
a 'bun' foot
a piece of wood about 12 inches long and 8 inches wide, rescued from the bottom of that 'cutting center' cart in the wood trimmings aisle
a piece of wood doweling about 2 1/2 feet long with a 1 inch diameter, also rescued from the cutting center cart thing
a package of cup hooks
a large wood drawer knob

I spent less than $14. The flat piece of wood for the base and the 1 inch doweling cost me 51 cents each, because they came from the bottom of the cutting center cart! The cashier just kind of made that amount up, I think, based on something she looked up in the pricing chart. Worked for me!

You would also need some screws and nails, etc, but I had that kind of thing at home, thanks to my hubby's workshop and tool collection.[ I'm going to call it a collection, so that when I buy another shawl or more knitting needles or crochet hooks I can just say it will be part of my collection. :-) Just like his coin collection.]

So I cut the 1 inch dowel into 10 inch long pieces, the DH helped me drill holes from the bottom of the flat piece of wood into the bottom of the dowels, and also a hole through each of the dowels. I put another short piece of dowel (3/8 or smaller) through these holes to make an H. You can see that better in the next picture. We unscrewed the screw that comes already screwed into the bun foot and then drilled a 3/8 inch hold through the center of that, as well as through the center (well, it's not quite perfectly centered on either one, but close enough!) of the wooden knob. The big H is screwed onto the flat base. There is a small hole (not all the way through the base) drilled at a 45 degree angle where the dowel sits (that did take a bit of maneouvering), and two little nails hold the dowel on the top of the big H. You push the dowel through the bun foot and through the knob. The knob sits above the H on the spindle, to keep the fiber from going down the dowel. I cut the dowel to about the length I wanted, just by sight, and we put the cup hook in the end. Voila!

Here is the other picture:
The fiber you see at the top is what I did the first night I had it. So exciting! :-) I have to work on my consistency, making sure there aren't thick and thin spots, but it was easier and so much faster to use than the drop spindle.

It has its issues. For one, it does tend to jump out from between the two little nails on the H, but not so often that it is a pain, and we can figure out some way to fix that. It slides away from me a bit on the floor, but that is easy to fix, with some cork or some of that rubbery drawer liner on the bottom of the base.

That dark brown wool is that last of the roving I had on hand. Last night I started using the kick spindle for plying the singles I have spun on the drop spindle (plying is taking two 'strings' or singles you have spun and spinning them together in the opposite direction from the way they were spun to make yarn. You can make 3 ply, too, or even more, but I'm not up to that yet! ). The plying goes very fast, and it very rewarding because you can see what the yarn is going to look like. Fun! Now I'm really looking forward to the fiber tent at the local fair this weekend!

Now I just have to make sure I don't stay up too late at night doing this stuff, because it makes it awfully hard to get up to get the kids off to school in the morning!!