Every time Mob wears the monkey shirt Dimple makes a point of wailing “UUUUUGGHH my eyes are burning! This is the most hideous thing I’ve ever beheld! What is wrong with you?!” and every time Mob just says “I like it :)” and this is an important bonding activity for them.
My favourite type of compliment is when people tell me they like how I draw women with more realistic proportions especially right now bc ngl watching so much one piece at once has really been fucking with my brain
having sat down and spent a bit of time spinning on all the wheels, i have thoughts on them!
our first contestant: a sheridan scandanavian. kinda.
sheridan was an australian manufacturer in the 70s and early 80s, and this particular model is often mistaken for an ashford traditional. one tell that it isn't is the spokes on the wheel—a traddy has eight, and a scandanavian has six.
another tell is its tension knob, which i actually love—this is a lot easier to get a grip on than the ones that are just balls.
...there's also a nameplate identifying the maker and the model. but that's kinda where things get weird, because this? this is not what a scandanavian is meant to look like.
eagle-eyed readers may have already noticed that it's a double drive wheel, which is weird, because the scandanavian was only ever made as scotch tension. sheridan made a similar wheel, the macarthur, that was a double drive. my understanding is that these wheels were sold as kits, so as best i can guess, someone must have had a scandanavian and a macarthur, and at some point, for some reason, they dropped the macarthur's workings onto the sheridan's stand.
whatever she is, though, she spins nicely—works exactly like you'd expect, even after what was clearly a number of years of neglect. i'd like to get some more oil into the leather bearings, but she's in good shape. this one's a surprisingly slow wheel, even on the highest ratio, but will be great for plying and—more importantly—for @binchickencrafts to learn to spin on.
next up is the tarra...something. maybe the evelyn, but maybe the agnes?
she's beautiful, right? another tilt tension, too, which i like. lovely matching orifice hook with a little storage hole, and integrated bobbin storage, which i absolutely love.
so why's she weird? well. the evelyn was the evolution of the agnes, basically. agnes had a block for a mother of all, evelyn was shaped. agnes had a four-part drive wheel, evelyn had six. agnes had eight spokes on the drive wheel, evelyn had six.
this wheel, though. she has a shaped mother of all, an eight-part drive wheel, and eight spokes.
she also has a really neat flyer.
the flyer is part of what attracted me, to be honest, and no regrets. it needs shined up some more—i was eager enough to try her out that i cleaned off the worst of the rust with some vinegar, but it needs some more attention. those hooks, though, are fantastic. i think that they're a curse for a lot of people, because if one's lost, replacements are almost impossible to come by, but if you have them, they're so good. the screw loosens the hook and lets you slide it as needed, and you can get very close to either end of the bobbin—you can use the stationary hook to wind on right at the front, and the movable hook covers the rest of the bobbin easily. all my treadle wheels have been fixed hooks, so this was a new adventure.
this is the wheel in the worst shape, i think. she needs oiled up, but also needs to have the rear maiden reseated—it's loosened and has a fair amount of horizontal play, which doesn't give the best experience. i feel like when that's fixed, which won't take more than a couple hours and some wood glue, she's going to be a sweet spot of a wheel. even with the movement in that back maiden, i can get from worsted down to cobweb on her, so i'm really looking forward to seeing what she's like when she's been patched up.
finally: the pipy saxony.
please clap.
i can't overstate how small this wheel is. she weighs less than five kilos. that's like. a cat. that's a cat of weight. that's how much this wheel weighs. i knew when i bought her that she was a small wheel, but i hadn't realised how small, so i was a little concerned that she wasn't going to be very effective.
turns out joke's on me, because this teeny tiny wheel is an absolute powerhouse—as long as you want to spin finely. which is perfect for me, because i almost never use or spin yarn that's thicker than a light worsted, and even that's kinda pushing it. i'm the kind of person who knits jumpers out of sock yarn and owns multiple pairs of 1.5mm (size 000) circular needles.
this wheel wants to spin fast and wants to spin thin, and I *love* her. the wheel is weighted so it always stops ready to turn clockwise, and it's a string footman, and something about the combination of the two makes this an absolutely amazing experience. i spun for several hours, and my breaking point wasn't knee or ankle pain, but hip pain from sitting in that position too long.
how the heck does a wheel that—again!—weighs like ten pounds manage to weight anything?
it's easy to miss, but in that first picture, there's integrated bobbin storage again, with room for one on each side of the wheel.
the tension system isn't like anything i've used, and can be adjusted both vertically and horizontally. the tension peg does what you'd expect and moves the slider block (and the mother of all on it) closer or further from the wheel, but you can also move the mother of all towards you or away from you to better align it with the wheel.
she's just really nicely designed. look at this incredibly tidy bobbin release!
for the specific things that i spin most frequently, i'm pretty sure that the pipy is going to be my go-to treadle wheel, though i expect the others will see plenty of use, as well. and my eel wheel certainly isn't getting retired—my somewhat broken body is never going to let me use a treadle as often as i'd like, and there's a lot to be said for the ability to spin while watching television in bed. but i'm really excited to have these, and to use them when i can, even if it's not as often as i'd like.
i know that a lot of people are really dubious about buying used (especially vintage used) wheels, but i feel like they're often underrated. there's a lot of cool wheels out there that are as good or better than what you can buy in a store, and it's worth investigating it, if you're able to. (it's also worth noting that buying all three of these cost us less than half of what buying a single new ashford traditional would cost.)
finally, you want to see my favourite thing about the pipy? i saw someone complaining about this the other day, that their wheel's prior owner had 'gouged' it. but look.
that little gouge means someone else loved this wheel so much that their yarn wore a channel into the wood. and as soon as i stop holding my yarn back, it slots straight into place.
right where it's meant to be.
this wheel is older than i am—they're dated, on the bottom, and she was made in july 1972. she's only had one owner, a woman who used to teach spinning, but is elderly now and can't spin anymore. her daughter delivered it to me, and told me that this was her mother's last wheel—she'd gotten rid of the others, slowly, but held on to this until she was physically unable to treadle. fifty years! that woman spun on this wheel for fifty years.
i'm old enough that i don't imagine i'm going to get fifty years with it, but maybe i'll get lucky. either way, hopefully in another fifty years, someone new will be taking their turn, weirdly touched by the idea that this wheel has been so loved.
19 more images below the cut (WARNING: Some PG-13 saucy shenanigans ahead)
Part three of their date: an unconventional visit to a nearby alley so Light can clear his head and try to get to the point of the outing. The events lead him to becoming confident enough to move onto the next stage...
I combined footage from my Detektiv Conan Blu-ray with audio from my Case Closed FUNimation DVD and made an HD English dub clip compilation for Episodes 57-58, "The Holmes Freak Murder Case."
this cannot be happening again. the world needs to stop giving me dumbass white men to go insane over or i'll like. actually go insane
i saw a tiktok that mentioned 9-1-1 and i was like oh i've never heard of this show so i looked it up on ao3 and it had 30,000 fucking fanfics so i was like oh- guess i'll give it a watch then
and now i'm here and i've had evan buck buckley for all of three days but if anything happens to him i'll kill everyone and then myself
thinking about him makes me giggle. uncontrollably. last time this happened was with hotch and hotchreid... just thinking about them put me in a silly goofy mood and it's happening again