Quebec, Adam

There is just too much beautiful stuff this week. I’ll try to cut down on the words to make up for the pazillion photos.

This is a “Quebec” Canadian production wheel made by David Paul at The Merlin Tree. It came to my house on Thursday evening. The first photo is a very accurate representation of the color – despite what some of the lighting has suggested, there is no red or gold in the color, it is true walnut brown.

The wheel is a replica of antique wheels made in the late 1800s in Quebec and used by women who were doing production spinning at home for woolen mills. This is number 47 of 50 that were made in 2005.

It is a double drive wheel through and through – it has grooves in the drive wheel to hold the two loops of the drive band.

It has a beautiful cast iron treadle.

It has a tilt tensioning system made of cast iron – to change the takeup and drive band tension, you unscrew the wing nut and tilt the mother to the left or the right.

It’s big. (Six year old included for purposes of scale only.) The wheel is 30 inches across. It has other unique details too, such as the footman (which you can partly see in the second photo above) – it is a curved length of iron rod with hooks at both ends – no leathers to stretch out or creak. It’s rustic – it has an oiled finish, not varnished, so I spent some time rubbing it down with orange oil, and the spokes and some of the turned pieces are not polished smooth.

It spins like the wind. When I was putting it together, I dropped the axles into the posts, hooked up the footman, and gave the treadle one push, and it started up like a jet engine. If I have scoped out the specs correctly, I have it set up at a ratio of 24:1. If I took the time to figure out how to run it with bobbin lead I could probably get it to go faster.

All I wanted to do was spin. Of course, that was not to be. But I hauled a pound of lovely white Shetland top out of the stash and it’s the perfect fiber to start off with on this wheel.

This wheel is not meant to be versatile. I have the Symphony for versatility. This wheel is made to do one thing really well, and it’s a thing I like to do – spin a fairly fine smooth single. And did I mention it’s fast? It is so amazing to treadle SLOWLY with one foot and have so much spinning go on. I have heard people remark that this wheel just tugs the fiber right out of your hands, it’s so fast, and the notes that came with the wheel said that if you try to treadle too quickly the footman will jump a little till you get the feel for it. But this wheel and I got along right away. It seemed natural to ride the treadle up until I could feel it reach the top of its arc. And I have the tension on the band set in such a way that I didn’t feel the speed was unmanageable. Maybe we were just meant for each other.

Meanwhile, I had the great good fortune to get hold of one half of a champion cormo fleece! This is one half of Adam’s coat.

Adam lives with Sue at the Cormo Sheep and Wool Farm in California. The photos were taken under incandescent light so they look a tad yellow, but let me tell you, Adam is NOT yellow. Parts of him were a little tippy of course, but he was SO white and fine. At Lambtown in Dixon, California, at the end of July, Adam was first in the Handspinner’s White class, champion handspinning fleece, and grand champion of the show. What a guy. I just happened to be by the computer when Sue’s email came out listing her winning fleeces for sale and so I got half of Adam’s 8 1/2 pound champion fleece.

My little wool pig Daphne thought she must have gone to wool pig heaven. She and LilyBlue lurked around the edges of the fleece while it was spread out on the washroom floor, trying to take bites out of it, and when I’d stuffed half in the washer and the other half into a bin, they lay down on the rug and took a nice nap in the lovely smell.

Sue very thoughtfully included one of her little ribbons in the box to commemorate my first champion fleece.

I washed about half of it and laid it out to dry and so far the cats haven’t been into it… I was intending to send this out to be processed because it is more fleece than I ever had hold of before, but looking at it now it almost seems I could spin it the way it is. I will have to give that a try before I pack it up to send.

I did knit this weekend despite the temptation to just spin and roll in fleece. I have almost finished the second section of the Bee shawl.

I haven’t made much progress on the Widdershins sock but I have started a sock for Emmy – she picked out remnants from my sock yarn leftovers, the legs are going to be Sock! Merino from Lisa in St Valentine and the feet are going to be Sock! in Emerald City. I’m knitting garter rib and it’s looking great in the yarn.

When I was thinking about sending out Adam for processing, I decided to see what else I had that I might want to send along. I made up a little set of samples from the fleeces I have in the basement, and combed them all.

I decided that there were a couple that would be less fun to comb, so they are candidates for being sent.

I finished another hank of the wool and alpaca that I’m really not enjoying. I had a little mishap with the hank when taking it down from the drying hook, so it had to go back onto the swift and from there to the niddynoddy. I still can’t decide what will be the fate of this yarn. But at least once it’s finished, it’ll be DONE.

Well, back to daydreaming about getting home to spin on my big wonderful wheel….