A Wild Librarian Appears

You can spin wool on cheap or easy-to-DIY drop spindles, you can use cheap dog slicker brushes as hand carders, combs are literally just nails set into wood handles if you're up for DIY-ing, you can safely dye fiber with natural dyes from your yard or kitchen (which is what I do), etc.

There are plenty of cheap or even free ways to engage with spinning as a hobby. Do not let anyone try to tell you it's expensive to get into because you need this or that specific pricey tool or product, or because good quality fiber/fleeces are more expensive to buy and only lower quality fiber/fleeces are affordable—which is absolutely not true btw. All the cheap fleeces I've gotten have still been very nice quality fiber for making wearables with. You can even get nice quality fleeces for free sometimes if you make friends with shepherds online or irl who are trying to offload them because they have too many to deal with, or who have no desire to process and/or sell their fleeces themselves.

I got into spinning with a cheap $10 drop spindle that was just a rough, round piece of wood stuck on a dowel rod. That was all I used for my entire first year of this hobby, and it worked perfectly fine. I still primarily use my drop spindles now even though I have two wheels (thanks to gifts from people). They're convenient to use anywhere, they're what I'm used to using, and when you are used to using spindles they are not really any slower than using a wheel. Wheels are not "better" than spindles, they're just pricier lol

Also, speaking of gifts, when people in fiber arts hobbies tell you that you can get a lot of stuff for free from older people looking to pass their stuff on or from people looking to de-stash, we mean it. I got an entire set of very nice wooden knitting needles (my very first set of needles) and a bunch of nice natural fiber yarn more expensive than I could ever hope to afford for FREE from someone I know from tumblr who wanted to de-stash. I've had shepherd friends I made online offer me free fleeces that they didn't have a use for. Gifting really does happen if you put the energy into looking for and making connections in your hobby of choice.

Fiber arts guilds and classes for fiber art hobbies will often have people looking to get new folks into their hobbies or shove off some old supplies taking up space in their house onto someone new. If you are in a place that has a local fiber arts guild (look it up and see if you do, you might be surprised) they probably also have equipment you can use—drum carders, spinning wheels, looms, etc.

(This also works well with crochet and knit, btw. The resource collection on there, both magazine and book, is WILD.)

And be on the lookout for local guilds! I know our local spinning guild has not only a collection of online resources, but also an equipment library (and a book library) where you can try different things out without committing the hundreds of dollars necessary to try certain wheels or looms. The weaving guild in our area has a similar setup. From the look of old periodicals I've flipped through, this is the sort of thing that exists outside New England as well.

And consignment/charity/used shops often have cheap yarn and needles and hooks and such. Even if it's just a regular used clothing store, take a glance. Not to mention all the cool new used craft supply shops popping up! (The Stitchery has a great community-built list of those shops here, with tabs for both US-based and international options.

Don't let cost intimidate you! The community is rich both online and off - we will happily adopt any and all crafters. You do NOT need to invest thousands of dollars to get started. A bit of time and practice are mostly what you need.

Made it about half-way through the baby blanket! I've started pulling from a stitch dictionary to keep things interesting.

Have an Ezzie for scale.

The color pools in such fun ways - you can even see where I had to start a new skein for the second to last stripe.

Each stripe is a completely different stitch pattern, though the black interlays are all identical. It's hard to see all the different textures in photo-form, but I'm really enjoying it. I've started a bobble-heavy border to even up the edging and use the last half-skein of both colorways.

Fingers crossed I win at the yarn chicken.

(Yes, I've been at this long enough that baby Callum is out. He was a bit preemie and had a rough start of things, but is officially over five pounds now and getting stronger every day. Goal is to finish the blanket so when the first-time parents are comfortable enough for visitors I can bring it up to them.)

At long last, we are done with Callum's blanket! I even won at the yarn chicken despite the bobble border.

In total I ended up using two skeins of black, three of the variegated.

And when I ran it through the wash to get the cat hair out, things got... frustrating.

I'm very glad there were other towels in there with it, because they absorbed a LOT of the leakage, going from pink to maroon and white to grey. Still, I can't exactly call this a black and white blanket anymore, I don't think.

I did reach out to the indie dyer. She was lovely and wrote back, apologizing and offering refunds and better instructions for care for folks going forward. She was very sweet and this will absolutely not prevent me from buying her work in the future.

It was still frustrating. Fingers crossed my next adventure goes a bit better.

Made it about half-way through the baby blanket! I've started pulling from a stitch dictionary to keep things interesting.

Have an Ezzie for scale.

The color pools in such fun ways - you can even see where I had to start a new skein for the second to last stripe.

Each stripe is a completely different stitch pattern, though the black interlays are all identical. It's hard to see all the different textures in photo-form, but I'm really enjoying it. I've started a bobble-heavy border to even up the edging and use the last half-skein of both colorways.

Fingers crossed I win at the yarn chicken.

(Yes, I've been at this long enough that baby Callum is out. He was a bit preemie and had a rough start of things, but is officially over five pounds now and getting stronger every day. Goal is to finish the blanket so when the first-time parents are comfortable enough for visitors I can bring it up to them.)

Two packed-to-bursting Lendrum bobbins plied to make 8.4 oz of quite fine yarn. Not my finest, far from my most even ply, but it's still got such a lovely drape and I'm excited to crochet it up.

Also, I officially earned my Teeswater sticker! It's happily in my Shave 'Em to Save 'Em passport now with the Dorset Horn sticker from earlier. Progress!

SHE WORKS!!!

I rescued this old Great Wheel from wheel restoration enthusiast Erv Henecke's estate. It was likely manufactured in Cornwall, Vermont, USA around the 1890s (thank you Spinning Wheel Sleuth!) and has now been freed of its Powderpost Beetle infestation, reassembled, and put to work.

Ervin E Henecke and Patricia T Henecke ran a little knitting store in Crown Point, New York called SPIN - N - KNIT CRAFTS. From what I've been able to research, they were quite well known in the region and in the world of fiber arts. I've found their shop advertised in all sorts of old Spin-Off magazines and, of course, Erv comes up several times in the Spinning Wheel Sleuth talking about wheel restoration and things he's been brought and/or found over the years. I never got to meet either of them, but I heard of them many times in passing. Usually it was when someone was fed up with a wheel or loom and wishing Erv was still around.

Then, in late summer of 2025, we received word that L Henecke was up cleaning out his parents' estate. He had apparently reached out to local weaving and spinning guilds in the area to ask if they'd come take the things left in his parent's shop.

My friend Sara had the day off, so she went with some of our old time guild members who had known the Heneckes. Apparently, though both Erv and Pat had passed back in 2012, the house, shop, and barn were all completely untouched. I don't know why that choice was made, but it meant that there was a LOT of cleaning out to do.

Below is the barn of wheels that Sara found on arrival:

(And yeah, my Tilden is in there somewhere.)

This was clearly where Erv had been storing wheels he'd restored and/or worked on. Sara said there were some very grabby folk there aggressively snatching up anything they could, but that she managed to get a couple odder pieces of equipment and things that needed a bit of TLC.

She also went into the old shop to see what was inside and... yeah.

It was kind of intense.

Sara knows her stuff and helped L Henecke with sorting through the stacks of fiber and yarn, discarding things that had signs of moth or other bug infestations or had started to disintegrate. A lot of the prepared wool was just falling to pieces, but not all of it.

She rescued an electric drum carder from in here along with some drop spindles and other little odds and ends. Everything needed cleaning and restoration, but it was far from trash.

Sara also rescued a bunch of notebooks, patterns, and records that the Heneckes had kept over the years. We're currently working on digitizing that archive and I'll share it once we have things available.

I heard about the operation and volunteered my mother's truck for transport if someone wanted to go back out again. On that second trip I went out with the goal of snagging a great wheel, of which there were SO many left, even while knowing that we had discovered the barn had a powderpost beetle problem that would need solving.

I ended up snagging the Tilden in all her bug-ridden glory. L helped me pull her out and used a little leaf blower to dust off the cobwebs and bits of bug dust. Her drive bands were still intact and I was able to confirm that everything was moving as expected, so I took her back to a friend's barn where were storing all the infected equipment.

Sara and other guild folk and I spent weeks researching ppb (oh the conversations I had with local pest control companies) until we settled on Boracare, a pesticide that could be painted on our equipment to kill any bugs and/or eggs inside. Unfortunately, Boracare is not sold nor can it be shipped to Vermont, so some shenanigans ensued as we figured out a workaround.

It was very nearly winter by the time four of us bundled up in a mostly-screened-in porch and thoroughly de-bugged every single piece of wood across my great wheel and four or five other littler flax and wool wheels.

The fully saturated wheels then hung on my friend's porch while they dried. I cannot find the pictures of the dried wheels, but you get the idea?

After everything was set, I came and retrieved the parts and put them onto our mostly-unheated porch in an attempt to keep things from changing temperature too quickly. There they sat for a few weeks until it was warm enough for me to go out to reassemble things and realize that.... most of the accelerating head was missing.

One of our associates had very excitedly disregarded how I'd laid things out and scooped up all the parts willy-nilly.

On the bright side, I managed on a weirdly warm day to sneak the wheel inside. I also retrieved the missing bits from the guild member's house and let them everything come to temp in the spare bedroom of our old farmhouse.

FINALLY, I found a weekend where I had time to try and reassemble things. Everything mostly worked right out of the parts pile, but the accelerator head had come apart and needed some sanding and gluing.

Twenty-four-hours to set the wood glue and I had everything both together AND functional. Luckily, I'd spent several months playing around on my Lendrum's quill so I had some idea of what one-armed long draw was supposed to work like. Plus, Sara and I had been passing antique wheel books back and forth for a while so I had a good grasp on different wheel tensioning devices and how to troubleshoot them.

So, with a leader and some fussing, I was able to get her going. I see why folk kept these around even after the bobbin and flyer systems became common place - these wheels spin SO quickly. In no time at all I managed a surprisingly fine woolen single. The cats only barely had time to loose interest in the giant moving thing before the quill was full.

So yeah. That's the story of the Tilden Wheel, more-or-less. I hope to eventually refresh the corn husks and do a rub down and some basic conditioning on the wood, but for now there's nothing creaking, straining, or screeching, so I think I'm good to get to know her and her quirks. I'm planning to transport her to our local farm and field days for demonstration in the summer, so I've got to be comfortable enough by then to talk and spin. And she'll DEFINITELY get a full bath afterwards.

If anyone has interest in the research we did, let me know? I can do more posts on it--I just figured I'd give the overall rundown with whatever I had on hand since someone was nice enough to ask.

Yeah, the office plants continue to hang in there despite my black thumb. Bren the Jade-Plant got super huge, and then got root rot so I had to salvage just a couple pieces and re-home him to a small pot again. (He's still Bren. I have resisted the urge to rename him Jase.) I need to do some TLC on some of the window folk, but it has been some years since I purchased an actual plant--most of us around the office just trade cuttings whenever we have extras. Or rescue things from the garbage? That's how I got the massive dude climbing the window.