Now Toy - er, Tool!

 

Yesterday Doug got the Ashford spinner put together and last night I fiddled with it to make sure I could make it work.  It took longer than I had hoped because I forgot to anchor the leader string so that it would actually wind onto the flyer, but in the end I got there and even managed to spin a rolag of fibre.  Now that it is set up the goal is to fill a bobbin nightly.  

I bought extra bobbins for it.  Not the smaller plastic ones - those belong to my other espinner, which in the end I'm not happy with for reasons.  And naturally those bobbins don't fit the Ashford.  Sigh.

I struggled with the decision to replace the (very expensive) espinner I purchased a few years ago.  I hadn't used it for two years, in part because I was just overwhelmed with other things.  In part because it wasn't behaving well.  Did I really want to spend a big chunk of change replacing that one with another?

I waffled back and forth - sell off my fibre stash or buy a new spinner and spin it.  Why was I spinning in the first place?  What was I going to do with the yarn?  I had been knitting shawls with my handspun made on the other espinner but I had bags of shawls, I really didn't need more.

So I waffled.  When I talked to Doug about the espinner I wasn't liking much he eventually took it apart to see if he could fix it.  (The maker appears to have gone AWOL, not answering emails or messages.) Then he talked to not one but several local people about electronics/electrics, took it to a couple of places, bought parts to see if individual components were faulty.  It all felt like I was tossing good money after bad by that point.

And still I waffled.

I started looked at other brands of espinners but all of them are made outside of Canada.  I didn't want to pay a premium on the exchange rate and expensive shipping.  Some of the 3D printed ones looked interesting, but I don't know enough about spinning to be able to tell if they were a good buy or not.  And again, international border/exchange rates.  If something went wrong (again) trying to get it fixed would become a gigantic issue.

In the end I turned to a brand I knew and trusted.  Ashford.  I had been an Ashford dealer but had given up the dealership when I retired.  I looked to see if there was a local dealer listed.  There was not.

So I scrolled through the list of BC dealers and spotted someone I knew and decided that IF I was going to purchase, I would purchase from her.  She's a spinner and knew that if I ran into problems, I could talk to her.

In the meantime, the other espinner went to a shop that specialized in small electric motors and he discovered some 'poor' wiring connections.  In the end we gave permission to fix those (for an additional $200 investment for the diagnosis and repairs) and when it came home I tried it again.

It still behaved poorly.  It was 'better' but not great.  One of the reasons I had bought that one was for the battery pack which would allow me to take it out and do public demos without needing to worry about a plug in.  It would do that that, but I still found it irritating to spin on because it wasn't running consistently.

So I bought the Ashford.

So, what do I like about the Ashford so far?  It seems to be a sturdy build.  It's small.  The spinner and two bobbins with lazy kate fit into a small carry bag not much larger than a big shoe box.

I find the controls to be a bit awkward, but the foot switch makes that inconvenience minor.  The bobbins are large - jumbo sized - and the orifice large enough that I can spin chunky without having the draw in impeded.

The controls are clearly labelled S or Z so you can easily see which way to flip the switch to spin/ply.

That's about as far as I have gotten so far.  But these are my first impressions.  It feels like a good fit - so far.  And I will keep the other for doing public demos.

In the end I decided that since every time I tried to get rid of spinning from my life it would come back to me in another way.  The plan is to knit - something - with the yarn I spin.  Not sure what, yet.  Sometimes it is enough to simply do, without thinking too hard about what comes next.  And if all I get out of the spinning is the tactile experience of feeling the fibres transform into yarn?  That might just be enough.