So when I got home, I started feverishly searching for something warm, woolly and stylish. Have you seen the Fall 2010 issue of Twist Collective yet? Fiona Ellis offers Gwendolyn:

This could be the one – it’s certainly going to be warm (important in upstate NY in October). I have some deliciously-woolly wool in my stash that would do, or I could spin some to suit. And stylish? oh yeah. At least as stylish as I get, anyway…

The way the ends of the cables flow smoothly into the edge ribbing delights me; it’s one of the things I love to do with cabled sweaters, and normally I have to work out the pattern changes myself. The sleeve detail is ravishing:

Now, there are a couple of things I would need to change – not that it’s not a great pattern on it’s own, I’m just that way. The hood is probably a non-starter for me; I’d prefer a nice stand-up collar to match the hems. And the pullover is wonderful, but I need a cardigan for temperature control when moving between heated buildings and the outdoors… luckily, the pattern comes pre-cardiganized for both zipper and button closure. The other problems are ones I’ve dealt with before, regarding my body shape: the pattern is sized for normal people, with a roughly rectangular torso… alas, woe is me! I am a triangle with freakishly wide shoulders. There will have to be sizing modifications.

Yeah, I bought it. The sock I was working on last night has been tossed aside. Wonder if I’ll have time to swatch later today?

This, on the other hand, is what my weaving looks like: a dishtowel with an egregious threading error right smack down the middle.

Crappers.

He was born in Northumberland, England in 1840 or so; records vary a bit. He emigrated to Canada around 1850 with his parents, William and Mary, landing in Toronto and then settling in the village of Lumley. The family prospered; by 1869, William Dinnin the senior is listed in the Ontario Gazetteer as a merchant and local postmaster, and William Junior has established himself as a carpenter. He married Grace in 1872, and 4 children followed. He must have enjoyed a certain amount of success; this photograph shows a comfortable, handsome family, including a young son named for his father and grandfather:

I find myself looking closely at his hands – gnarled, strong hands – the hands of a man who worked with iron tools and wood, building houses and furniture for his neighbours. He was proud enough of his work to stamp his name on it, which is how I know he made my spinning wheel.

I don’t know when he made it; it could have been any time between the 1860s and 1908. I do know that he made it well, with care and craftsmanship, for it still spins for me now.

A few weeks ago, Himself and I went to the Christie Antiques Show – it’s one of the finest shows around, and we always go if our work schedule allows. I don’t think we’ve ever left without buying something, and this spring’s show was full of wonderful things… but there were slim pickings for the sort of things that we collect. I found some marvelous vintage buttons that will require marvelous sweaters to be knitted so I’ve got something to put them on. But of spinning wheels and anvils and blacksmithing tools… there were none to be had that met our criteria. So we just enjoyed the show and left with our wallets pretty much intact.

There’s an antique shop on the way back home, right across the street from the Tim Horton’s we always stop at. This shop never has anything we’re interested in, but on this day – aha! as we drove by I spotted a spinning wheel sitting outside. On closer examination, I saw that it wasn’t much of a wheel; nice enough to be sure, and easily able to be tuned up into a good solid spinning machine, but not different enough from my other treadle wheels to thrill me. And the price the owner quoted me was so outrageous, it was only with great self-control that I kept from sputtering with laughter as I turned to leave. “But wait!” he cried, “I have another one – come look!” And I turned the corner and saw this, and my heart skipped a beat:

I knew exactly what I was looking at – it’s a Canadian great wheel, from an unknown maker somewhere in the Brantford area. There’s a half-dozen or so of them surviving that I personally know of (including one in the Canadian Museum of Civilization) and I’ve lusted after one for ages. The round, turned-wood bed is unique to spinning wheel makers in the Grand River area of Ontario; the mysterious Brantford maker is not the only one that built them that way, but I think he made the most beautiful ones. And the condition of this wheel was outstanding; I was filled with the desire to have it.

The owner quoted me a price that was even more outrageous than what he was asking for the other treadle wheel. I goggled at him for a moment – there was no way I was going to spend that much money, not even for this wheel. The expression on my face must have clued him in, and he began to waffle a little, confessing that he didn’t know much about spinning wheels. So I told him exactly what he had – everything I knew about these great wheels – praised this one extravagantly for its beauty and condition… and started to walk away again. That’s when the serious bargaining began.

When you’re buying an antique wheel – or any kind of antique or used object, really – the important thing to remember is this: the person who has the most knowledge sets the price. So before you buy, educate yourself about the class of objects you’re shopping for: know what the current prices are and how condition affects the value. Most general antique sellers only have the vaguest idea about what wheels are actually worth, and the only hard piece of knowledge they have is what they paid for the wheel when they got it. If you can show that you have more specific knowledge – what kind of wheel it is, what its particular history is, its approximate age, what kind of repairs it would need to be usable – this establishes you as the one with a firmer grasp on the current market, and gives you the leverage you need to bring the price down. Be confident and bold, but remember that successful antique dealers have a very sensitive bullshit-meter, so be as honest as you can about what you know and don’t know. Eventually, the two of you will settle on a price that’s less than the first one quoted (that’s from the hard knowledge you have) but high enough that the dealer can make a profit (that’s from the hard knowledge they have) and with any luck, it will be a price you can afford to pay and in short order you’ll find yourself out in the parking lot trying to figure out how on earth you’re ever going to fit this humongous dang thing in your car.

In this case, the serious bargaining ended with me taking both the wondrous great wheel and the wool wheel below off the dealer’s hands (plus a fake Country Craftsman that he threw in just to get it out of the shop*). Altogether, I think it was a successful day.

*I’ll salvage the fake Country Craftsman for parts – the drive wheel is good. The “flyer” is missing; someone STOLE it right off the wheel while it was sitting in the owner’s shop. Obviously it was someone who already had a wheel without a flyer and thought that they’d just avail themselves of a replacement without going through the bother of paying for it. Me, I could tell that the wheel is a fake because there’s no functional tensioning mechanism, as there is on the real Country Craftsman wheels, but the thief obviously didn’t realize that a flyer without an orifice wasn’t going to do them any good at all, and I’d love to have seen the expression on their face when they finally understood that they’d stolen something completely useless. Sometimes Karma is a bitch. (Insert wicked, evil grin here.)

I spent the weekend at work – which is a Good Thing, as I’ve been laid off since December and looked forward to being called back. Still, I can’t help secretly wishing they’d waited a few more days; three 12-hour shifts pretty much wiped me out at the start line, and I really didn’t get into the swing of my shawl until yesterday. I pulled out two hanks of delicious Bijou Spun Tibetan Dream yak yarn in fingering weight, cast on 121 stitches for an Open Diamondwork border and commenced to knit like mad. I have a few rough sketches to work from, and a pattern in my head – I’m still not sure what the centre panel of this shawl will be, I’m sort of making it up as I go along. I knew this was risky, but I cast on with my normal exuberance and decided to fly with what I had.

Two repeats in, that little voice in my head began to clear its throat diffidently and ask, “don’t you think that’s a bit wide?”

I pulled out my scale and – damn, I’ve used too much yarn. If I carry on at this width, I won’t have enough to finish the rectangular shawl I’m imagining… and a square one is not my style at all; people shaped like me should never wear something that forms an arrow pointing directly at their arse. There’s nothing to do but to rip it all out and start again with fewer horizontal repeats.

Now I can imagine how figure skaters feel when they fall on the short program.

I know I won’t be making a cardigan. I don’t have enough worsted-weight yarn for one, and even I’m not silly enough to think I could finish a fingering-weight sweater in two weeks… though I will admit, I did spend an hour or so last night searching for my copy of Knit So Fine. Thankfully it seems to be missing, probably still packed in a box somewhere since I painted my office. This has likely saved just a little bit of my sanity.

I could knit Himself a pair of kilt hose. But it’d be a bit of a waste, seeing as my campaign to get him into a kilt is still failing dismally. Also, I’m not sure he’d wear them, what with the amount of psychic despair that will probably end up knitted into them… perhaps it’s unwise to compound Olympic stress with gift-making stress, it can’t be good for my blood pressure.

I could spin some yarn. But… my saxony wheel needs a rebuild, and my great wheel is confined to my office so I wouldn’t be able to watch any of the events on TV. I’m not sure if my shoulder can take 17 intense days of spindle spinning; it’s been giving me a bit of grief lately.

I’m beginning to think… perhaps a lace shawl. I have several splendid yarns that would do. I’m not sure if I’m a shawl kind of person, but there’s something to be said for making a big damn piece of lace, even if it does end up being given away.

Ah, well – no need to rush into making a decision now, I’ve still got 1 day, 12 hours, 47 minutes and 23 seconds.

A dainty little pair of slippers.

Yarn: Lion Brand Fishermen’s Wool

Pattern: just a monstrous big sock foot, with some short rows added behind the heel and an I-cord bind-off

Ah… but when we arrived at the auction, what did I see? Wait, this wasn’t in the catalogue! And there weren’t any other spinners there to bid against me… oh, frabjous day!

And another antique wheel has found a home here with me. It’s a lovely creature; it has a distaff, though I didn’t include it in the photo. It’s marked on the side of the table “W Kilbourn” and I suspect that it hasn’t travelled very far; its design is very common among 19th and early 20th century wheels made in the northeastern United States. If I were to take a wild guess, I would say it’s from New York State – perhaps the Albany area? – and possibly dates somewhere in the mid to late 1800′s. More research is needed.

It badly needs to be taken apart, cleaned and rebuilt; the flyer hooks are gone and will have to be replaced. I rigged up a very crude woollie-winder (a bent paper clip – ah, MacGyver would be proud!) and spun up a bobbin or two – just for testing purposes, right?

A lovely bit of carded Jacob fleece, dyed by Dan of Gnomespun Yarns in shades of red, brown, gold, and green – I bought it at Rhinebeck; I think it was called “Pheasant”, and the name suits. (Digression: Dan has just successfully defended his dissertation and can now claim to have Piled it Higher & Deeper, and call himself a Doctor of Something That Probably Couldn’t Be Explained To Me Even If He Used Small Words. Congratulations, Dan!)

And now, I’m off to ply.

Naturally, I can’t do any pattern without messing with it – in this case, I substituted seed stitch for the ribbing at the hem and cuffs, and knitted the shawl collar on instead of doing it separately and sewing it on. I’m quite happy with it – it’s a warm and snuggly cardigan, though it looks a little ratty in this picture after a month of constant wearing – I’m terrible for not taking photos of things when they’re freshly blocked and looking their finest.

It’s a great pattern, and I’m seriously thinking of re-working it in a one-piece top-down version for people who abhor seaming. The sizing is a bit smaller than we’re used to – I made the size 14, and there’s not much ease in it. (It’s also shortened, because I’m – well, short.) It’s a common thing with vintage patterns – I’m a size 12 in modern sizes, but manufacturers cater to our vanity much more nowadays and I suspect I’m closer what they would have called a 16 in the 1950′s.

I love vintage patterns. Sometimes the language is not what we’re used to, and the pattern writers didn’t do a lot of hand-holding – you were assumed to have a certain basic skill set, and it certainly wasn’t their fault if you needed more direction than “Make left side as for the right, with shaping reversed.”  If you’re the kind of  knitter who wants a little adventure and challenge, you need only to dig through some dusty boxes in your local second-hand bookshop to discover a piece of the past to breathe some fresh life into. Where else can you find as much fun for 50 cents?

And apparently, it is blogging season again.  I seem to have a finite amount of self-discipline, and I squandered it all on home renovations and business stuff over the last while, leaving my poor blog to languish. In apology, I give you this:

…the latest addition to the wheel collection. I picked it up at a scandalously low price at an antiques sale a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty sure it’s Canadian, and suspect that it was made  in the Brantford area of Southern Ontario – its turned bed resembles some other wheels known to have come from there. It’s marked with the name of a maker – “W.DINNIN” – and sometime soon I’ll have to get in touch with some local furniture collectors and see if I can find any history on him. It appears that this wheel has not travelled far from its birthplace.

It’s a frankenwheel, made from disparate parts – the big drive wheel is from another spindle wheel; the original one was eaten by a porcupine during the years that it lived in a barn. The accelerator head is historically correct, but came from upstate NY and wasn’t part of this wheel until I added it; it came with a crude bat-head spindle that someone had hand-carved at some point. With the accelerator head in place, the drive ratio of this wheel is about 310:1. Which, frankly, boggles me – that’s incredibly fast, and tricky for a modern spinner like me to get used to. You have to draft like a mad thing.

The invention of the accelerator head was surely greeted with great celebration by household spinners everywhere a century and a half ago. When you see someone spinning on a great wheel, people always go “Oh, how charming! so old-fashioned!”. Spinners often speak of the meditative experience, the dancing rhythm of stepping and drafting, stepping and winding on, back and forth, back and forth. The YouTube videos are invariably accompanied by soothing classical music. Me, I’m pretty sure the women who used these wheels to clothe their families weren’t thinking of the meditative aspects of spinning – they were just damned tired from the endless walking back and forth, cranking that big old wheel ’round and ’round. I’ve seen historical farmhouses with a valley worn into the floor where the wheel was; how many miles of walking would it take for a woman to wear a path in her wooden plank floor?

Every time I use this wheel I think of these women – they were my ancestors, and their endless spinning labour meant warmth and survival for everyone. They were as vital a part of the European exploration and settlement of Canada as the wheat farmers, fur trappers and railway men. (Some might argue that settlement wasn’t necessarily a good thing… but as it led to my very existence, I am unable to argue without bias.)