December | 2022 | The Archaic and the Arcane

I thought I’d try something a little novel for this blog. A short post.

What? It could happen. Maybe a “shortish” post for now.

Back in July, I started a supported spindle spin that ended up being a far larger project than I imagined. See, I usually spin just to spin. Then the yarn gets put on the wall where it may take me years to use because I spin more than I knit or weave combined.

I talked about this project back in August and showed a bunch of in progress pics. Well, around late September I got it in my head that maybe I could finish it by November 10th and have it blocked and dry in time for the Edmonton Fibre Frolic. I do these things – putting unnecessary pressure on myself. Still it was only a couple of rows a day, as long as nothing went wrong and if I could keep up with the spinning. It also depended on how many repeats of the penultimate chart I decided to do. As written or one repeat, it was doable. The knitting alone though was a huge undertaking. True lace (no rest rows) and shaping I’ve never done before. Some days a row would take me 2 hours – especially if I had to go back and find an error or fix one in the row below. Continue reading An accidentally epic finish →

I mentioned back in August that one of the next projects on the list was the next version of the eSpinner. Well, September wasn’t the month for it. Mostly, I wasn’t really in the mood for CAD work and I knew there would be a lot of it.

The first week of December though – I was all over it. We had a brief cold spell and it seemed like a great time to take advantage of the time in.

I started the modifications on December 2nd and ended up doing the bulk of the CAD work over the next four days. At the same time, I began the printing. There were a couple of parts redesigned from scratch but most were modifications of the designs I’d created for the first version back in 2019 when I was learning CAD. This of course has its own pitfalls because how I design has changed a lot and what I did when I was learning was very inefficient. So in updating the files, I had a lot of things I needed to modify other than just dimensions of the drawings.

Here was the wish list for V2.0: Continue reading Mechanical Heart – version 2 of the eSpinner →

My thoughts and revelations on the skills of yester-year