If Ikea made spinning wheels…

They’d come out of the box looking like this!

This is my new Kromski Mazurka, bought yesterday at Wingham Wool Work for the super bargain price of £150, because they’re being discontinued. I’ve been fancying a small single treadle wheel for a while, and this looked perfect, especially at the price. It took about half an hour to put it all together (thankfully the instructions were somewhat clearer than Ikea’s usual offerings, having words as well as diagrams), and now it looks like this -

I’ve left the distaff and its support off, as I can’t imagine that I’ll use them, and it just looked like something to get snapped off at the first opportunity.

The wheel can be set up in either scotch tension or double drive, and I thought I’d have a go at double drive, since my Sonata can only do scotch tension.

There are two whorls, for four different ratios; I started with the smaller one then switched to the bigger one as I played with the wheel and different fibres. It’s spinning okay, but I still need to get the hang of it properly, especially how to adjust it – there’s screws at the front and back of the flyer to adjust the tension. But I think I’m getting there, and though it’s tempting to just set up the scotch tension and go, I’m trying to persevere!

One thing that does disconcert me is the channel in the flyer – on my Sonata it’s angled so that the yarn travels up it to the orifice, but this one seems at completely the wrong angle, unless I’m missing something really obvious. The hooks are on the opposite side of the flyer to the Sonata too, which it going to take a bit of getting used to.

Moll would like a go, but her feet just won’t reach the treadle.

This is the bit of yarn I spun up yesterday – you can see that the natural BFL is much more even than the white. There’s about 70m, so I don’t know what I’ll do with it, but it was nice to practice with no distractions.

More successful is the Falkland I spun at the weekend – this was from the Yarn Yarn fibre club a few years ago, there’s 200g and about 300m of chunky-ish weight, which I’m pleased with as I find it hard to spin thicker than very fine these days.

And what else did I buy yesterday? There’s this batt, which is part of a new range Ruth’s trying of repeatable colourways – this one is cherry truffle, and there’s 365g there. I tried spinning with it first on the Mazurka, the batt was lovely to spin, it was the wheel I  was having trouble with, but I’m sure that as soon as we get used to each other everything will be fine. Mollie doesn’t look so sure though.

And I picked up a selection of silks, alpaca, mohair, tencel and sparkle to put into batts along with some of my merino collection – I’m hoping to borrow a drumcarder soon and have a play, watch this space…