Monday, May 16, 2005

This is a lot harder than it looks!

Well here are my first couple of tries at plying on Ellie. This is the Brown Sugar roving combined with the Coopworth.


I tried to spin the Brown Sugar a little thinner than the Coopworth, and it's a good thing I did because the Coopworth really fluffed up when I was setting the twist. It also took me a while to figure out how to get the plying head to work and how much tension to use. Ellie came with an extra drive band and I'm not sure if'n I'm supposed to use that drive band with the plying head or not? Anyone know? Well, I ended up using the original drive band and it seemed to work ok. Tho I felt like I had to really treadle that plying head!

4 comments:

LadyV said...

I see you're having fun with your new wheel. You're mentioning a "plying head", can you tell me what the difference is between that and the flyer? I'm a new "wheel spinner" as I've always used spindles. Is the plying head an extra feature?

shizzknits said...

The plying head has a bigger bobbin (it's like 8 oz compared to the regular 4 oz), bigger flyer and bigger orfice. Everything is bigger so you can ply together two or more singles. I heard some people also use it to spin thick n thin chunky singles. I"ll try to post a pic later on showing the difference between the regular and plying heads.

LadyV said...

Thanks for the info. I will be plying for the first time today on my new wheel. If all goes well, I should be knitting tomorrow with the corriedale that I spun. Wish me luck!

Wendy said...

Yeah, that extra, slightly longer band is for the plying head. It's looser so you don't have to work the treadling so hard.