24 Hours Later

Disaster #1:
Okay, not really a disaster, but highly annoying:

These spindles? They don't fit on my wheel. :( Francine said they looked like Ashford spindles, possibly homemade. Would anyone like these? Most of them could use some glue, and the jumbo-looking one is missing a piece. Contact me if you're interested. (I'm not going to charge for them, although I may ask you to chip in for shipping if it costs too much... which it hopefully won't, since they're light.)

So, after discovering I only have the one spindle for my wheel, I wound a center-pull ball and plied what I had spun that way. Or tried to.

Disaster #2:
The drive band broke half way through plying. I have it holding together for now through the miracle of duct tape:

...but I need to get a replacement. I may be able to get something that works reasonably well in the automotive section of Canadian Tire. At least, I sure hope so.

I plan to contact the manufacturer about the possibility of getting additional bobbins, and if I do order bobbins, I'll get him to throw in a drive band or two while I'm at it. (I suspect the shipping from Australia is going to be pricey, and *slow* I might as well get what I need.)

Here's my first skein off this wheel:

It's about 44 yards. I plan to give it to the lady who gave me the wheel as a thank-you. She weaves, so perhaps she can use it in her weaving.

I was stressing out tonight about the whole major-life-changes thing again tonight, so I spun up some mystery roving I got from a (non-knitting, non-spinning) friend as stress relief:

After spinning that amount I decided to stop since I was feeling sleepy. Did I go to bed then? No, I took photos and came down to post. I'll go to bed soon.

I wish I had three more spindles (I'd like to spin my big bag of roving as a true three-ply, rather than Navajo ply) and a lazy kate. And a non-duct-taped drive band.

In other news, my laptop has a shiny new hard drive, my Christmas present from mom and Bob. It wasn't a surprise so they could discuss exactly what I wanted, and it was installed early so that we can check to make sure there aren't any problems during the return period. I also got a drive enclosure for my old drive, but the enclosure seems to be finicky, so it may be going back. (Once everything is set up, I'll be using Time Machine and will have proper back-ups!)