Queen Penelope

A recent purchase has made me quite happy, and Scott is happy that I'm happy, and therefore my house is full of happy.

Meet Queen Penelope, a.k.a. Penny:

She's a Lendrum :) And her name comes from The Big Bang Theory, of course.

Penny came to me used, from a friend of a friend, for $575. Now, of course you're thinking, "Anna, that's not a very good deal. You could have gotten a new one for close to the same price." Well, the woman from whom I bought it has four babies, and had no time for spinning like she thought she would, so she had bought a whole lot of indie-dyed fiber and then never spun much at all, so really, the wheel is pretty much new, and it came with ALL the fiber the woman had bought. There was at least $100 of fiber there, all in colors I like and would have picked out myself. So really, it was a fantastic deal.

Now, I've spun a bit on it, and let me tell you: it's different than spinning on a spindle. Much different. I feel like I have to learn from the beginning, because the hand motions are completely different, and you're controlling like five things at once instead of just two. It's a good thing I love this so much, because it's going to take a lot of hard work to get as good on Penny as I am on the spindles.

So here's what I've spun on the wheel so far:

The first bit is on the left, and the bit I just finished is on the right. They're all still better than my first handspun on the spindle, but still leave something to be desired compared to, say, Barbie.