baad company

… There is a season (turn, turn, turn)…

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.)