Joy out of the box

Finally the Ashford Joy was unveiled and assembled last night.



Joy out of the box


Following the instructions were easy and even a klutz like me could screw the right thing at the right places - or so I thought. And learn some cool new spinning jargon as well. Such as "Flier"



"Fli-er" - the thing that goes round and winds the yarn on to the bobbin.


And here is my baby all assembled and ready to go.


The lump in the background is my husband reading "Harry Potter 6", who , after blinking several times, did not lift a finger to help. Which is understandable, it's "Harry Potter" after all.


Well it took me at least an hour to figure out why the yarn wasn't winding on to the bobbin. It was screwed in the wrong way :).

Then I was practicing pre drafting fibers and feeding it in strips the way one did with the hand spindle but that didn't work at all for me. I keep getting huge overtwisted yarn and I just knew I wasn't getting into the right rhythm.

Using the spindle it was easy to stop and start to smooth over the kinks down the draft but a moving spinning wheel was going much faster than I would have liked it to.


Bobbin full of Bad yarn.


I decided to change track and spin from the fold. And then light bulb came on and I was into the groove. Pinch! Pull! Feed ! I got the rhythm! Except the instructions said the drafting hand should come up to the pinching hand wherelse my pinching hand is coming down to the end of the draft and then back up towards the Orifice (that's the hole you feed the fiber through to the Flier).

Yarn is still overtwisted at places cos I haven't go the knack of stopping the wheel from back spinning.





But all in all 2oz of fiber spun last night and I think I am going to run through my last 4 oz of sampler fiber I got from Inspirations Yarn in the next couple of days. I haven't placed a fiber order yet and that will take another 3 weeks to arrive at least.

What am I going to do in the meantime?