A New Take on Spinning

I know I've shared pictures and videos about my hand built spinning wheel, but I've been itching to open the studio doors and show how it came about. As an artist process is fascinating, revealing, and inspiring to me, hence I've decided to post my notes, sketches, and thought process regarding this awesome project.

I made this contraption for an assignment in my SculptureI class last spring when we were told to make something out of found objects. (Leave it to me to make that simple guideline incredibly complicated)

The idea was born from a synergy of my interests of the time;

-stuff made from bike parts

- Wool obsession combined with daydreaming about how I could make my own yarn to save money

 - eagerness to take advantage of both having a teacher and having awesome tools (saws, drills, a welder, sandblaster, etc.) 

Then there's also the practical side of me wanting to make something I'll either get use out of (functional art) or make money from (marketable art?)

My original plan was to build a traditional spinning wheel using bike parts and scraps. That later morphed into a new design using an exercise bike to spin the yarn because

                       a) I had only two and a half weeks

                       b) had never welded before

                       c) I knew absolutely nothing about how to build a spinning wheel (or how they worked)

                       d) Free cycles had an exercise bike for grabs

                       e) my professor met my ambitious idea with more skepticism than I'd hoped

above: trying to piece together the parts of a spinning wheel, and the bike parts I'd use

you can see above, that I had a hard time figuring out where to attatch the bobbin/flyer, and that the bike itself needed tuning up and parts added. I finally had a clever bike mechanic give me the idea of placing a wheel perpendicular to the front tire, so that the motion of that front tire pedaling would propel the wheel touching it, which would then turn a string attatched to the flyer, which would then turn the yarn! The best part? I can sit comfortably on the bike and have the bobbin/flyer right in front of me.

I feel like the end result is a testament to the power of google, and teamwork. I made use of my resources; people, internet, and tools to create a tangible version of my vision. I went back and forth from a yarn store to a bike shop, asking questions and drawing connections, bouncing ideas around, figuring out the engineering involved, and essentially piecing a puzzle together.

for a while I thought I'd have to make actually construct the bobbin and flyer. Thankfully Joseph's Coat (a yarn shop) was kind enough to give me a broken one I was able to fix up (found object sculpture!). In the end I only had to make the bar it sits and spins on, (you can see in the video) by welding some scrap metal together, and pipes, drilling some holes, etc. and attaching it to the handlebars. Oh and to the lower left is an insight into my crazy to-do lists. Talk about frantic. 

The final product may seem simple, but you can see from my sketches I experimented with many designs and threw out multiple ideas before finally finding the right one.

I hope I didn't make this too confusing! The details are sometimes hard to describe and explain but hopefully the pictures balanced that out.