About me,

Well, I'm in the process of building a found items spinning wheel. It does include purchased pieces, but 99% of the project is made of found parts.

I have an absolute ton of acrylic sheeting, so with the help of my trusty wishes it was a Dremel I'm fabricating almost all of the would be wood parts out of acrylic.

Spinning is kind of a funny craft/hobby/artform. In theory, you might spin to save money on materials for other crafts, such as knitting and crochet. But there's a hitch, the price of a spinning wheel. You'll be hard pressed to find a wheel for under $100 and that includes low-end and modern models.

$100 is for some folks not a lot of money, and if you're one of those folks, then go ahead, make a donation of a used spinning wheel. Any old wheel will do.
The other option is to use a spindle, and one of those can cost anywhere from 50¢ to $50 and more! Spindle pros: inexpensive, the most ancient way to spin fiber, and immensely portable. Spindle cons: In videos I watched it looked to me like you're constantly starting and stopping to spin the spindle and wind the resulting yarn onto the spindle's shaft.

So I made a spindle, but it feels so flimsy and light weight, and I really want a spinning wheel. Time to get cracking.

If you came across my knitting blog, then u know about the starts, stops, and stalls of the project.

Well now I'm nearing completion of the base, and need to fabricate the pittman rod/crankshaft, and build up from there. I have my wheel, I bought an acrylic circle for around $3 and was so hoping to have a really pretty 100% acrylic wheel. Practicality has since taken over and I'm now using a wheel I found discarded in the community garden.

At first I thought it was a child's bycicle wheel, but now based on the "hubcap", for lack of a better word, well now I think it came off of possibly a wagon or one of those baby strollers for joggers, the ones with the gr8 big sturdy wheels, also there was a second one, but I only needed one, well that's one piece of non-trash rescued from the garden + landfill.

Also, for the wheel and whorl(s)(might go single whorl, and it might just work!) I managed to score some inline skate bearings and axles for free from a super-nice guy at a garage sale.

I have technically spun fiber! It's funny, when cutting and grinding acrylic with a rotary tool; every so often you have to clean little pieces of acrylic fiber off of the shaft of the attatchment! It's practically microfiber! It's also, as far as I can figure, completely useless! But I've spun fiber ;) :P

Back to the project at hand:)