45. Drop Spindle

This is wool:

This is a drop-spindle:

I made the drop-spindle from a dowel, a wooden model-car wheel, and a cup hook drilled in at the top. Drop-spindles are ancient devices, starting in the Neolithic Era and not being replaced by the spinning wheel until the late Middle Ages. It is hand work, it is slow, but it is cheap, portable, and does the trick.
Here I have it threaded with a leader cord (a piece of single ply bulky yarn). I split the leader cord in order to start feeding in the wool fluff (roving). The wool I'm using here is still a bit greasy from being on a sheep, which is what I want for this project. I bought a huge box of roving and mill-ends from a woman who gets them from a yarn mill and sorts through them by type, quality, and color, and resells them online. Perfect--I'm teaching Fiona's class how to spin with drop-spindles and that's perfect.
I catch the roving into the leader cord and start spinning the spindle, like a top, but letting it hang from the yarn as it twists. I catch it again and again, checking for how much twist is present. Fluff becomes a string, here below. Awkward photograph: I lay the camera on the ground and set the timer. So you're looking straight up at my hand holding the drafted (stretched) roving.
It isn't the most economical way to have mittens on your kids' hands come November (that would be $1 mittens at Target on clearance), but this yarn will ply into a bulky weight yarn and then will knit up tight into a warm wool mitten that, due to the lanolin content, will felt a bit and be somewhat waterproof. You can't buy that for $1 at Target. I'm thinking that the amount of roving I'll use for a pair of mittens will be about $2, and then there's just my time. But I like it. So there. I like being able to create something beautiful and useful out of what is essentially someone else's discards. That always makes me happy.