I've been regularly spinning cotton on the Lendrum spinning wheel. It had been easy-peasy spinning till yesterday.
The yarn I was making was over-spun and over-twisted. And worse, I could
not control the wheel it wanted to spin backwards (counter-clockwise). After half an hour I walked away from the wheel, it was 30 minutes of frustration.
I couldn't figure out what was going on. Nothing had changed from the day before - same wheel, same time of day, same fiber. Yet. I was clearly doing something wrong, something different.
This morning I started by taking out the excess twist from yesterday's singles and tried again. Aargh, same thing, too much twist and the wheel was out of control again.
I took off my socks, I repositioned the space between my chair and the wheel, I turned the radio down. What the heck was going on? Why couldn't I control the spin direction of the wheel?
Oh. Wait. What?
My feet forgot how to treadle. For some inexplicable reason I was pushing down on the treadles instead of the usual heel to toe movement.
Once I realized the problem was the way I was treadling, my spinning improved as well as my control. I was once again able to start and stop, slow down or speed up with just using my feet.
How weird is that?
