...and Kromski makes 4

2008 is going down in history as "The Year of the Wheels." For our 30th anniversary (see my May 14 entry), we both got "wheels." Stephen got a new truck. I got a new spinning wheel.

I've wanted a good, modern, folding wheel for traveling to workshops, meetings, demos, and festivals since taking my Wendy wheel to Black Sheep last year, and discovering that one of the gorillas of Amtrak had stacked luggage on top of my poor little wheel. Fortunately, the wheel survived nicely, thank you very much, but I was a bit put out and not a little concerned. After all, I can't get replacement parts for that wheel. Traveling with the Reeves is even worse--it's a real collector's item, and I'd be crushed if something happened to it. It's also heavy! I started thinking about a Kromski Sonata after I had a chance to spin on a friend's Kromski, and I like that it came with a good padded travel bag. So I ordered the Kromski, Stephen paid for it, and it was mine.

I finally had a chance to sit down and spin on it, and I'm satisfied. It took a bit of getting used to at first--I normally spin on single-treadle, double-band drive wheels, and the Sonata is a double-drive, Scotch-tensioned wheel. It required a bit of adjustment in my spinning style, but once I made the adjustments, the yarn I was able to produce was pretty decent. I didn't want to waste anything really good while playing around with it, and most of the fiber is packed away, but I found a bump of carded Border Leicester combing waste, and started with that. The fiber is full of neps so the resulting yarn isn't great, but I could spin a fairly fine thread pretty quickly, and I spun a half-bobbin in no time.

It turned out that a half-bobbin was all I could stand of that nasty, neppy mess. I still have a bunch of the "samples" from the color blending workshop I took last year, almost all of buttery-soft merino, so I switched to that and yay! the wheel spins great.