Fortuna volvat

So I brought home a spinning wheel on Saturday! I had the phenomenal good luck of being contacted by a lovely Ms. Appletree from Ravelry who mentioned she had an Ashford Traditional she was thinking of selling. Through a series of unexpected surprises and good turns of fortune, we met up this past weekend and behold, the wheel is now sitting in my living room while I beam happily at it from my couch.

I am not very good at spinning on a wheel! But thankfully I am also not very bad at it either. The practice on Mme Soho's Lendrum gave me a bit of a head start, and after work on Saturday I spent a few hours getting acquainted with my yet-unnamed wheel. I spun a full 2oz of blue Corriedale and plied it the next morning and it is hilariously bad compared to my spindle-spun yarn, but it is yarn all the same!

Can you see the unplied sections? Ha! 

The wheel is in fantastic shape, though. I took a trip down to Romni today and picked up an Ashford maintenance kit which is full of little bits and bobs to replace and repair anything that breaks, so pretty much if anything goes wrong at any point in the future I'll be set (I like tools and tinkering and whatnot.) I oiled all the oil-hungry parts, and I replaced the drive band which was a bit stretched out. Oh! And they had a newer flyer with different ratios, so I picked that up for super cheap, so now I have a two flyers and a lot of different speeds to spin at! But really this wheel just hums along nicely so I really think I only wanted an excuse to tinker around with moving parts.

Plus, the cats like to hang out with her, which is a bonus. She just fits seamlessly into our place!

So thank you, Appletree, for bringing this lovely wheel into my life! I haven't found a name for her quite yet, although I've almost settled on Jude: the internet tells me it means "thanks."