Pip: Spinning wheels, rare island sheep, and jam with bourbon pickles — kiwiweave’s corner of the internet contains multitudes.
Mara: This episode covers two territories: a wheel upgrade that solved a bobbin-size problem years in the making, and the completion of a two-year spinning project built around some genuinely unusual wool.
Pip: Let’s start with the wheel itself, and why the bobbins were the bottleneck.
Wheel Upgrades And Bobbin Limits
Mara: Older spinning wheels have a ceiling on how much yarn fits on a single bobbin — and for wheels like the Ashford Traditional, that ceiling sits around two ounces, well short of the five-plus-ounce skeins common in handspun work.
Pip: The fix was a drop-in replacement: “The solution was to order an Ashford Sliding Hook Flyer, which just drops in neatly in place of my original flyer.”
Mara: What that gets in practice is the ability to ply two fully loaded original bobbins onto the new one and produce a five-ounce skein — without buying a fleet of large bobbins.
Pip: Though the flyer that arrived had its hooks oriented the wrong way, a legacy of pre-2015 production stock sitting in a warehouse. Ashford and the retailer both sorted it quickly — but a newer spinner might never have figured out why the bobbin wouldn’t fill.
Mara: Worth noting: the post also shares a side from the Oak and Fern garden — blueberry jam in two varieties and bourbon okra pickles. Fiber and preserves, same afternoon.
Pip: The bobbin problem and the jam problem both required patience. One of them is more delicious. Onto the yarn that took two years.
Long-Term Spinning Project Finished
Mara: The post titled “Huge Milestone” opens a story that spans two years, two continents, and one very unusual sheep: the North Ronaldsay, whose flock grazes almost entirely on seaweed along the shore of a small Scottish island.
Pip: The wool arrived as a gift — brought back from a cruise around the north of the UK — and it sat waiting for a plan worthy of it.
Mara: The plan came together at a guild stash-buster sale: “Anne and I had just bought some fiber at a guild stash buster sale. It is a Merino/Targhee blend roving in natural white and was 2.2lbs in total. The cost on the original docket was $80 and we paid $20.”
Pip: So the North Ronaldsay skein becomes accent stripes, and 2.2 pounds of bargain Merino-Targhee becomes the body — two woven shawls, one for Anne, one for the sister-in-law who brought the wool home in the first place.
Mara: The spinning was done mostly at Tennessee Valley Handspinners Guild meetings and festivals rather than at home — which explains the two-year timeline. The resulting skeins run mostly two ounces, with some larger ones produced after the new flyer upgrade came into play mid-project.
Pip: There’s still red highlight yarn to spin, and a small sample already woven to confirm the sett for a point twill. The loom stage, as the post puts it, is the much quicker part.
Mara: Two years of spinning to set up what might be a few weeks of weaving. That ratio is either humbling or motivating depending on your disposition.
Pip: Probably both, at the same time, on a Tuesday at guild.
Mara: A bobbin limit solved, a two-year project finally off the wheel — the loom is next.