Anna is a German double-flyer "wedding" wheel, dated 1893. A wedding wheel was typically given to a bride as part of a trousseau (commemorated with a nameplate behind glass), and she was designed for two-handed spinning of flax.
One of the most special things about Anna is how her path to me was made possible by a very modern phenomenon: the smallification of the world due to the Internet. I discovered Anna on a German eBay listing in the middle of the night in New England. The seller listed her as "pick-up only" in Hamburg. I consulted online with a wheelwright/antique wheel collector in Australia, who confirmed within an hour that the wheel appeared to be in good condition. I contacted another antique wheels fan in the Netherlands, who helped me communicate with a German spinners group on Ravelry, and within six hours, two people had volunteered to pick up the wheel from the seller and ship it to me. It was a wonderful first experience tapping into the wide community of antique spinning wheel enthusiasts!
Anna arrived a little worse for wear after her long journey across the ocean. The most pressing problem was that her back leg had snapped off. I repaired it by pulling out the stub of remaining leg, drilling a hole for a peg through both pieces, and gluing the peg in place. Once that was repaired, it only took a little shimming and shining and a few nylon washers to get Anna ready to spin again.
Double-flyer wheels have two sets of spinning mechanisms. Most of the European double-flyers I've seen are driven on two separate sets of drive bands, so the flyer grooves are offset to hold the two bands apart. The idea is that each of the spinner's hands is feeding fiber into a flyer, which doesn't quite double production but does make it faster than spinning one strand at a time.
Since I haven't mastered one-handed spinning yet, I run Anna with only one drive band set up at a time. Both flyers work well, though one is in better condition than the other. Most double-flyers seem to be marked with an "X" on one side or the other. I have been told that this indicates a repair or replacement piece, and I have also heard that the "X" is meant to distinguish which flyer/bobbin goes on which side.
This wheel has some lovely finial decorations, typical of this era of German wheels. I haven't determined whether they are bone or ivory. Her nameplate has some water damage, but a bit of playing around with photography software brought out the "1893" with reasonable certainty.
For a small wheel, Anna is an effective little machine! We flew through four ounces of Merino/silk blend a few weeks ago, and I wondered how long it had been since Anna had hummed along like this, doing what she was built to do.
Oh how lovely. How do you differentiate between a 2-flyer flax wheel and a gossip wheel? Or could they be the same thing, just used slightly differently according to whether one had company?
ReplyDeleteMy understanding, after reading discussion on the Ravelry Antique Wheels Forum, is that a "gossip wheel" (in which two people spin on the same wheel at once) isn't really a very practical use, especially given that the two flyers face the same direction. Apparently two-handed spinning is a much more likely purpose for this class of wheels. I have seen a photo of a wheel that had two flyers facing at 90-degree angles to one another, and that seems to be designed for simultaneous use by two spinners.
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