Just shy of eight weeks after I ordered it, my Louet S-15 wheel is finally here. I think I used up all my excitement waiting and fretting about it, because I have been remarkably sanguine about the whole affair since MA e-mailed me to confirm that it had arrived on Tuesday. I’ve somewhat disappointed in myself, actually; I wanted that adrenaline rush making the pickup and assembly and first go on it just a bit more exciting.

There’s a humorous saying that Louet is like the Ikea of spinning wheels. When we picked up the box at Ariadne yesterday (boxes, really, because my free skeinwinder was separate) we saw that the saying was so far accurate: it was shipped in a big flat box, complete with convenient carry-handle. Not what one envisions when one thinks “spinning wheel” at all. I’d been warned, so I knew what to expect.

Once home, we ate (this was very, very hard for the boy, despite having picked up chicken and fries from his favourite restaurant, St. Hubert, on the way home from Ariadne, because he was so incredibly excited about the wheel) and then adjourned to the living room to unpack the boxes.

The box yielded five pieces: the flyer, the-mother-of-all that holds the flyer and bobbin, the upright back post with the wheel on it, and the base/treadle unit, and the bobbins and the kate (the wire bobbin-holder on the base). If this photo is so far exploding your mental image of a spinning wheel, it gets even better. (Or worse, I suppose, depending on how attached you are to the image of a stereotypical Sleeping Beauty-style wheel, more correctly termed a Saxony wheel.)

We put it together to make sure everything was there and that it worked before staining it. We screwed two nuts onto bolts, and snapped the footman connector onto the flywheel. And that was literally that. And like Ikea, Louet thoughtfully includes the necessary wrenches with their material, so we didn’t even need to dig one out. Louet goes beyond Ikea, however, in that they even include a half-pound of fibre in the box (in my case a half-pound of black Coopworth) so you can set up and go right out of the box without any fuss. It’s like the Mac of spinning wheels or something. Anyway, so after attaching a leader onto a bobbin (which took longer than assembling the wheel, I confess, argh) we could spin.

And we did.

I spun a tiny handful of test fibre for a moment or two (and got a very respectable thin though slightly uneven yarn, yay me), but the boy was bursting to try. I got a ball of acrylic from the closet and tied it on for him so he could practice treadling (he’s not really there yet, even with me helping) and maintaining the tension on the fibre in his hands. He “spun” up a bunch, then I put the skeinwinder on the wheel (not shown here), wound it off for him, then showed him how to twist it into a skein, with which he was absolutely delighted because it was “his yarn that he had spun”. As you can see, Gryffindor is fascinated with the flywheel. There’s a black knob on the back of the disc that caps the bit you snap the footman on to, and he was watching it go round and round.

The boy cried when it was time to go to bed. I promised him he could spin again tonight.

Once he was in bed I took the wheel apart and began staining it. (For reference purposes, I used Varathane Gel Stain in Early American, no. 466, and I adore the colour; it’s almost exactly what I wanted. I would have preferred something a tad lighter, but the next lighter colours were much too gold or red for my taste, and besides, this will lighten slightly over time with exposure to sunlight.) The wood didn’t even need a sanding; all I had to do was wipe it down with a bit of flannel. It did soak up stain, but not to such an extent that the colour went irreversibly dark immediately. After I finished staining each piece I wiped off the excess and evened it out. It only took about an hour, and then I left it to dry overnight.

The stain is only supposed to take six to eight hours to dry, but I happened to stain it on the only night where we got rain in September. It was still a wee bit tacky when we got up, but I gave it another two hours then rubbed it down with another piece of flannel (and near knackered myself doing it, stupid fibro). Then I put it back together.

Astute persons will see that the drive band is not on in the above pictures. What can I say; I was so excited about putting it together to take pictures for you that I forgot it. It’s on now. I haven’t decided if I’m going to stain the bobbins yet or not. It would be finicky. The wheel itself needs a touch-up in one or two tiny places.

It does not yet have a name, although it is a girl, and I am leaning toward Verity. I shall have to see what she feels like over the next week or so before she is properly named.

It’s a very modern-looking wheel, but I’m very all right with that. I wanted something with a small footprint, which meant an upright instead of a Saxony, and I wanted something I was comfortable with that was low-maintenance, didn’t require much adjustment, and could be easily serviced in case of problems. My LYS is a Louet dealer, and I worked with their Louet and was very happy with it. It’s remarkably light and not awkward at all to carry, which means that I can move it from the living room and back to my office when I want to, or even to the back deck in the summer. It will travel very well in the boot of the car on its back on a blanket. (Although I hear that many Louet spinners buckled their wheels into a seat in the car, which would also work.) I couldn’t do that with a Saxony. I’m also not afraid to knock this one about a bit; if I had a nicer traditional-looking wheel I’d be worried about it all the time. Louets are workhorses and go on forever, judging from the enthusiastic following they have in the spinning community. When I have room, and when I am better at this, and when there is extra money, perhaps I shall look into getting a Saxony as well. That’s far in the future, however. I have my wheel; I am content.

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Flyers, mother-of-all, footman? I have no idea what you’re talking about! Here’s a diagram of a generic Louet upright wheel with all the parts named for you, although the model pictured is a few steps above my basic model.

What are the specs of your wheel? Here’s a basic outline of the Louet wheels, as they’re mostly the same with only minor differences. There’s a page for the S-15 but it doesn’t tell you anything more.

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ETA: I managed twenty yards of two-ply today, which is now hanging to dry. It is lumpy and uneven, will probably knit terribly, and I love it.