Simplifying your Russian spindle spinning

Russian spindles are one of my favorite types of spindles. Not just because I'm attracted to all manner of foreign tools and techniques, but because I personally prefer to spin fine yarns. And spinning fine lace singles is what Russian spindles excel at doing. If you love to spin lace, you definitely need to try spinning on a Russian spindle.

So that brings to to the topic of this post, how to make handling and storing your cops a lot easier and with many fewer headaches. Once you have a full cop of singles spun on a Russian spindle, there's a cool little thing you can do. You can actually just grab hold of the cop and slip it right off the spindle, leaving yourself with a nice little wound of bundle of yarn to store or further process. But that nice tight little cop of yarn quickly starts to become a hassle which turns into a headache. The whole cop starts to loosen, becomes tangled at the ends and just generally starts falling apart and getting messy. And by the time to get to the center of your cop, the last 10-20 yards or so of yarn is just a scary mess. No bueno. So I had an idea to remedy this, and it turns out it works pretty nicely.

So without further hesitation, here we go. Things you'll need are a Russian spindle, available here, a piece of printer paper (I'm assuming notebook paper will work too), tape, and scissors. Nice and simple. What we're going to be doing here is simply making a paper cone that fits over the tapered body of our Russian spindles.

First, take a piece of paper and cut its length so that it comes down to the bottom of the body of your spindle, and stops an inch or two below the flicking point so you still have place to flick the spindle and store your temporary cop. Make this piece about 4 inches wide.

 

Before you actually start making the cone, cut 2 or 3 pieces of tape now, because your hands will be tied up in about 30 seconds. Position your paper as shown in the next photo, with the bottom left corner close to the bottom of your storage area, and the paper angled so the top left corner sticks out to the left.

 

Now take the top left corner over the front of the spindle, and start rolling the paper around the spindle tightly. The top of the cone has to be as tight as possible in order to make the paper cone grip your spindle. So you keep rolling...

 

And rolling... until the paper is completely rolled up, then you can secure it with tape.

Every once in a while the cone will slip and spin independently of the spindle. But as long as you rolled the top really tight, you can gently press it back down and it will stay there. So now, you just spin as normal, making sure to only wind your yarn on top of the cone, gently at first, just so you don't crush the cone against your spindle body.

 

 Then, once you're done spinning your cop, just slide the cone off and you're ready to store or rewind it to ply with! To help facilitate unwinding your cop, I suggest you find a thin metal bar, like from a metal clothes hanger, to slide your cone over so it spins freely while you are winding the yarn off of it.

 

Nice and tidy.

Happy spinning!

Hand Cards and Chess

I haven't had much to post about recently, unfortunately. I was planning on finally growing flax after missing out last year because of my trip to Puerto Rico. But... after 2 years of fallow, the grass was too thick to plow by hand, and I didn't have a rototiller or anything to till the land with, so I had to miss out again this year. And my cotton plants died... sadly. I planted them too early this year, and they were sort of stuck in their pots, way too large for them, because it was still too cold outside, and I wasn't able to build the mini greenhouse for them either. Lots of sad news this year. But hopefully sometime in the future when I'm actually in the United States for more than a year I'll try again.

But anyways, on to happier subjects. I did have a couple of special projects recently for two different friends. One was a chessboard. I made it from Hard Maple and Black Walnut with a little bit of plywood/MDF for the base and the baseboard for the checkered pieces. The outside got a coat of carnauba wax, but I went ahead and did a French polish on the top surface which turned out really nicely. And the other project was my first set of hand cards that I made. The carder heads were made out of soft/curly maple and given chamfered edges, with turned Ash handles. The carders were outfitted with 90 tpi carding cloth and finished with two coats of boiled linseed oil. I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking now!