I’ve been working through all the details needed to get the EEW Yarn Counter ready for manufacturing. One item I’ve done this month is the user manual for the Yarn Counter. I received a lot of feedback on an earlier version of this manual that I showed to Kickstarter backers, but this link is to a new version with all the suggestions I received. I think it’s looking really good now and like how the line art in the manual looks.
Cone Winder
There is a lot of waiting on my Yarn Counter manufacturing partners, and I fill in those down times with EEW Cone Winder work. I released the video below that explains the kinds of decisions I’m making when figuring out what cones can be supported on the Cone Winder. After releasing that video I got a ton of great feedback and have been working on a new prototype to improve many aspects of the yarn counter. I know a lot of you want to see the Kickstarter for this Cone Winder, but I need to get the design to a point where I’m very happy with it before I will run the Kickstarter. I expect that will take a few more prototypes. This newsletter will keep you updated on the progress and let you know when it’s available.
Have a great summer, unless you’re reading this from the southern hemisphere and then enjoy the sweater season!
– Maurice Ribble (Inventor of the Electric Eel Wheel)
The EEW Yarn Counter kickstarter was a huge success. It sold over 3,100 of the counters, which will let let me make a huge initial batch. If you missed the kickstarter then I will be selling it on my store after I finish shipping all the kickstarter rewards. I did release a video that goes into a lot of detail about the Yarn Counter.
EEW 6.0 Switch
A EEW community member showed me a new style of switch that can be used by your hand or switch that works with the EEW 6.0. If you are interested you can purchase it on Amazon by searching for “tattoo foot pedal”, but since there was a ton of interest in it I’m going to investigate what the price would be for me to include a switch like this with the EEW 6.0 in the future. Below is a video that goes into details about the differences between my current foot switch and this alternative.
3D Printed Parts
As I’m sure many of you know I like releasing 3D printable parts accessories for EEW products I think might be useful to the community. I always release the files for free and let other people sell prints since I know most people don’t have 3D printers. For things like bobbins 3D printing gives you many more color options, and others parts aren’t popular enough to justify me making an expensive mold so 3D printed versions are the only option for those. If you have access to a 3d printer or would like to see what you can buy from others I suggest checking out my 3D printing page which gives more information.
I made a video that announces I now have the EEW 6.0 sliding hooks in my store. The video also shows some new 3D printable sliding hook options for the EEW 6.0.
Happy spinning!
– Maurice Ribble (Inventor of the Electric Eel Wheel)
I’ve spent most of my time this month on the Yarn Counter Kickstarter. For those who don’t know Kickstarter is a platform where I allow pre-orders for new products. If you haven’t already seen this project, I really suggest going to my Kickstarter page since by the time the next newsletter comes out this Kickstarter project will end.
Yarn Counter Kickstarter
I recently launched the EEW Yarn Counter on Kickstarter. It really has some interesting uses and features beyond what a typical yarn meter would. This project will close soon so time is running out to be part of this project. Go check out the three minute video about the EEW Yarn Counter to see why over 2,000 people have already backed this project!
EEW Photo Contest 2021
The photo contest was a huge success this year. There were hundreds of amazing photos submitted and I’ll be posting about one a day to my Instagram account. Below are winning photos from Carrie, Janice, and Patricia.
Happy spinning!
– Maurice Ribble (Inventor of the Electric Eel Wheel)
I’m starting an EEW photo contest today and it ends May 15th. You can participate by emailing your photos to support@dreamingrobots with the subject “EEW Photo Contest 2021 “. After submissions end the community in the Facebook and Ravelry groups will vote for three days picking one winner per day from a list of photos I select from the entrees. Then there will also be 2 randomly selected winners. Every person who emails me will get one entry into the random selection for submitting photos, and if you also include a link to any place online that you shared your photos you’ll also get a second entry into the random drawing. You can submit multiple photos, but you don’t get extra entries into the random drawing for this. Each of these 5 winners will get a $100 credit to my store for future purchases. All the photos submitted to this contest can be used by me for marketing purposes. One way I plan to use them is to post them to my Instagram page since people love seeing a new EEW related photo there every day. If you want me to include any info in my Instragram post of your photos include it in the email and I will do my best to include it.
What kind of photos should you submit? It can be photos of your EEW eSpinner, yarn you spun with it, the garments you made with that yarn, or anything you think is related to your EEW. Have fun with these photos and I hope to see a lot photos!
EEW Yarn Counter Kickstarter Coming Soon
I have a the molds made for the EEW Yarn Counter. The current prototype I’m using is very near final and I’m starting to work on making the Kickstarter campaign for it. I’m hoping to launch it on Kickstarter for it within the next month or two. When it does launch I will announce it online and to this email list. I’ll have all the details about what makes this Yarn Counter so special when I launch the Kickstarter.
EEW 6.0 Shipping and Support
The EEW 6.0 has been shipping out for all the Kickstarter backers and all my online store orders. When shipping out well over 2000 eSpinners there is going to be a lot of support required. Most of the support revolves around people who have never spun before asking about issues they are having with various parts of the spinning process. These questions were much easier to answer for the EEW 6.0 thanks to the awesome 6 part eSpinners for Beginners video series and the Fiber’s and Spinning Techiques video series Vampy made before the EEW 6.0 launched. The next most common issues were handling parts that got damaged in shipping or were missing. I shipped out replacement parts for all these issues and while there is room for improvement in the future, the amount of mistakes I made was manageable. Lastly I had a few actual design issues that was causing the EEW 6.0 to stop for a small number of people using the EEW 6.0. It took me about a week to figure out the root cause and propose two fix options. This page explains this stopping issue in detail and gives the fixes.
UPDATE – This only applies to EEW 6.0s sold in 2021. Any newer versions ship with this fixed.
The turning off issue that affects some EEW 6.0s is related to static building up and being stored in the metal spindle. When that gets discharged it can sometimes pull the reset pin on the circuit board low which effectively turns off the EEW 6.0 briefly then it turns if back on. When you turn on the EEW 6.0 it always starts in a stopped state so this reset event stops the EEW 6.0. In my research of this issue I’ve found other spinning wheels have had this issue, but it seems more people are seeing this with the EEW. I believe there are two reasons for this. The first is the nylon case is a better insulator, and the second is the bottom cover’s rubber feet are even better insulators. This is why some people saw the issue improve when they removed the bottom cover. These insulation layers let the static to build up faster than it tends to on other spinning wheels which mostly use wood which is also an insulator, but not as good of one.
There are two things that can help fix this. The first is to ground the spindle. You hide this by drilling a few small holes in your case and running a black wire down the back support arm and under the case (I show this in the video at the end of this post). However, I went for the very easy method here. The method here uses materials most people will have in your house. All you need is tinfoil, tape, and some scissors. What I did was to cut a thin strip of tinfoil and then folded it over twice to give it a little more strength. Then I ran that from the back bearing to the motor and held it in place with tape. I put some photos showing how this was done below. In my testing this completely fixed the problem.
Another solution is to use a female to female breadboard jumper wire (or these on Amazon) to connect pins 1 and 4 on the programming header. This solution pulls the reset line high on the EEW 6.0 and prevents a reset, but the spindle can still build up a static charge similar to how you can shock yourself when touching a metal object after walking on a wool carpet. The image below shows what pins to connect for this fix.
In theory the most robust fix is to do both, but in my testing either one solved the issue. If the physical shocks are bothering you then I would recommend the first grounding one, but I will point out these shocks are no more dangerous than any other static shock you get in dry climates.
Here is a video that goes over those this problem and the fixes. It also includes a way to hide a wire to make the first grounding fix more invisible.
The EEW 6.0 is now available in my store! I’d like to thank the community for all the feedback and suggestions on previous versions which helped make this the best eSpinner I’ve ever made.
I will finish shipping them to Kickstarter backers by Monday and that is when I’ll be shipping out the first batch of orders from my webstore. So if you or some of your friends were interested in the EEW 6.0, but missed the Kickstarter now is your chance. If you are curious what goes into unloading them from the truck, I made this video of where I did that exhausting unload.
Yarn Softness
This video covers what fiber micron count is and how it is one factor that affects fiber softness, which is useful information for those buying yarn online. Then I explain two ways to measure micron count yourself at home, and talk about how these results work compared to lab testing your fiber. I also wrote a blog post that contains related information about this whole process.
Happy spinning!
– Maurice Ribble (Inventor of the Electric Eel Wheel)
If you enjoy a fiber craft like knitting, spinning, crocheting, or weaving; then this article is for you. The reason measuring micron count matters is because micron count can be a good approximation for softness. A smaller micron count means the fibers are thinner and that often leads to a softer yarn.
If you can’t feel the yarn because you are buying it online, then micron count is a great way to get an estimate of yarn softness. Different people will have different meanings for soft. An online review saying the wool is “super soft” doesn’t help you understand how soft yarn really is. However, if you say the yarn is 15 micron Merino that will help a lot if you have been looking at micron count for awhile. A lot of yarn doesn’t report the micron count, but my hope is with this article will help with that. I’d like to see more people start reporting the micron count in online reviews which will help make more informed yarn purchases.
By the way, I’m certainly not trying to say everyone should buy all their yarn online. If you have a local yarn shop or fiber festival I encourage you to support them. Feeling yarn in person is always better than trying estimate the feel from photos and reviews. However, the reality is a lot of fiber lovers buy some of their yarn/rovings online these days and I’d like to make the process better with this article.
Background Information
One of the important measurements when looking at wool and other fibers is it’s micron count. Micron (or micrometer) is the measurement for measuring the diameter of a single fiber. For example Merino fleece will contain fibers with diameters as low as 10 microns or thicker fibers of maybe 25 micron diameter. A micron is one millionth of a meter or one thousandth of a millimeter.
Certified fiber labs can accurately measure samples when you want official micron counts. There are two reasons a lab typically does this measurement. First the tools they use to analyze the fiber require some training to use properly and if not used properly you’ll get the wrong results. Secondly, the tools they use are expensive. One of the typical tools is the OFDA2000 which typically costs around $60,000-$75,000. A newer tool called a FiberLux costs a little over $2,000. My general understanding from what I’ve read is the OFDA2000 is basically the standard way of measuring fiber and the verdict is still out if the newer FiberLux is accurate enough to replace it in some use cases (this was written in early 2021). Here is an article with more options if you are interested in more details about various ways micron counts are measured.
Measuring Yarn Micron Count Yourself
Before these automated machines people would look under microscopes to manually measure fiber. This is interesting option, but requires a lot of a lot of time and training to learn how to measure fibers consistently and accurately under a microscope. I did some research and found a common way to measure human fiber (we call it hair) is using laser diffraction and interference. This sounds complicated, but is actually pretty straight forward. You basically shine a laser pointer at a hair and then due to the how light works it will create a pattern of bright and dark wave pattern on the wall. You know the distance from the hair to the wall, the distance between these light/dark pattern on the wall, and the wavelength of your laser pointer so you can calculate the diameter of the hair with this equation.
Note for those not wanting to do the math I added a calculator below on this page that does it for you.
hair_diameter = (wavelength of laser) / (distance_between_light_dark_pattern / distace_to_wall)
For example when I measured one of my hairs, I was using a red laser with a wavelength of 650nm. The distance to the wall was 651 cm. The distance between the light/dark pattern was 4.8 cm. Using the equation above gave me a hair diameter of 88,000 nm, or 88 micrometers. If your laser pointer doesn’t list its wavelength you can use 650nm for red lasers and 532nm for green lasers.
Another simpler method is is to use a Micrometer. That link is the one I used which has a 0.001mm resolution which is a 1 micrometer resolution. I did a lot of testing with it and it was quite consistent, but it was consistently less than the light diffraction method above. I think the reason for this is using a Micrometer can squish the yarn. So to get accurate measurements you should either use the light diffraction method or practice with the micrometer on known fibers until you get a good feel for how much pressure to use without squishing the fiber. I talk about this more in the video below.
So those are the two methods I used to get fiber diameter and each one cost me under $40. I created the video below that goes into more detail on these two methods of measuring a fiber’s micron count.
Primitive breeds tend to be far less consistent in micron count, both between animals and even within an individual fleece, so for those it’s especially important to take measurements from several areas if you want a decent average, or to grade the fleece well. Modern wool sheep are bred for fiber consistency, so for them it’s less of a big deal, though you’ll likely still find a bit of difference between the neck (finer) and the britch (coarser).
Fiber Micron Calculator
Press submit to get results.
Measuring Fiber at a Wool Testing Lab
I did some searching with some labs that test fiber samples. The best two options I found were New Zealand Wool Testing Authority (NZWTA) and Montana Wool Lab. The online documentation for NZWTA is much better so if you want to do more research online I’d recommend their website. That said I have contacted the Montana Wool Lab because shipping them samples is easier for me since they are located in the USA. Contacting the Montana Wool Lab by email (mtwool@montana.edu) and phone (406-994-2100) worked for me.
When I emailed Montana Wool Lab they gave me this submission form and this document that explains report you get on your fiber samples. You can see their prices as of March 2021 on the submission form linked above, and they seemed very reasonable to me. Example each wool sample I want tested would cost me only $3.
I found their fiber report document very informative. It explains they don’t just measure the one fiber, or a few fibers. They measure the diameter of many fibers and provide you with an average fiber diameter plus a standard deviation from that average value. With that information you’ll know a lot more about the fiber than measuring just a few fibers like my DIY approaches in the previous section. They also include a comfort factor which is the percentage of fibers that are 30 microns in diameter or less because this has been found to be a diameter that can cause skin irritation.
Judith MacKenzie says that a mix of high and low micron counts in a yarn is what causes the itchy feeling, more than simply high micron fibers alone. I haven’t verified this myself, but Judith is well known in this field so I want to share this.
I’m planning to send in some samples and get some reports from Montana Wool Lab in the future. I haven’t done it yet, but will report back when I have results from them.
Help spread the word about micron count and share this post with a friend.
I’d like to thank Vampy who reviewed an early draft of this blog post and provided some great feedback.
Hello fiber lovers! I’m back this month to give you an update on all the most important EEW news. Enjoy.
Should We do an EEW Nano Update?
I’ve started thinking about what to do for the next batch of EEW Nanos. The reason I mention this is because I need to decide soon if I want to just order more of the 1.1 version that I’m currently shipping, or spend time making a new version. I’d like to hear back from the community on what you’d like to see improved. I am somewhat limited in what I can do because I’d want to keep the price around the current $110 so I obviously can’t put all the improvements that you’d get with the EEW 6.0. That said I have several ideas on things that wouldn’t change the price much, but would improve the quality quite a bit. I know a lot of spinners love the small form factor of the EEW Nano and a lot of others who enjoy it’s price so I do want to keep those about the same. I’d love to hear from the community if they think I should spend time on improvements to a new version of the Nano for next year or focus on some of the other projects I’ve been talking about in these updates. If you want to help you can either fill out this survey. Thanks!
EEW 6.0 Update
This month there is some great news to announce with the EEW 6.0. The manufacturing is complete and they are now on a boat headed towards Boston. Once they get to my warehouse, I will do a final inspection and should be able to ship out all the orders by the end of April.
In addition to making the best eSpinner with the EEW 6.0, I wanted to have the best documentation. To that goal I partnered with Vampy and we created a video series to help more people learn to spin yarn so they can enjoy this wonderful craft. This series goes into much more depth than your quick spinning tutorial. After watching all the episodes you’ll understand not just how to spin, but you’ll know about several options for each stage of the spinning process and how to make the yarn you want. It covers everything from picking your first fibers to finishing the yarn. I’m super happy with these videos and think most of them are useful to a wide range of spinners. Check out the series here.
Happy spinning!
– Maurice Ribble (Inventor of the Electric Eel Wheel)
This video series was created to help more people learn to spin yarn so that they can enjoy this wonderful hobby. It goes into more depth than your quick spinning tutorial. After watching this series you’ll understand not just how to spin, but you’ll often know about several options for each stage of the spinning process. You will know the fundamentals so you can choose the right options for the yarn you want to spin. I’m super happy with these videos and think most of them are useful to a wide range of spinners.
eSpinners for Beginners Part 1 – EEW 6.0 Setup and Controls
This is more specific to the EEW 6.0 of all these videos. It goes into a lot more depth about setting up the EEW 6.0 and how all the controls worked than the Quick Start guide did. While I think all the other videos are useful to people using other eSpinner or even treadle wheels, this video is probably best to watch only if you plan to get the EEW 6.0.
eSpinners for Beginners Part 2 – Practice Spinning, Fiber Selection, and Understanding Twist
This one isn’t really eSpinner specific so even if you use a treadle spinning wheel everything in this video will be helpful. The video really focuses on how to get started spinning by using practice yarn, which helps you get the feel for spinning without having to worry about drafting. Then it goes into how to pick the right fiber for you and explains how twisting fiber makes yarn. It really gives a solid background so you understand the core principles of spinning.
eSpinners for Beginners Part 3 – Ergonomics, Short Draw, and Long Draw
The ability to position eSpinners anywhere gives them a big ergonomics advantage over treadle spinning wheels and this video explains how to setup your espinner comfortably. It then covers details of how you do short draw and long draw spinning. It goes into detail about the differences in the yarn based many different factors you can control while spinning.
eSpinners for Beginners Part 4 – Plying
This video uses an eSpinner, but everything in this video applies to treadle spinners too. This video shows you how to ply consistent yarn and explains what parameters to watch to help you get the yarn that you want.
eSpinners for Beginners Part 5 – Finishing Yarn
This video goes through all the different finishing processes used to lock in yarn twist. It explains both the how and the why. Most of the video is about the various stages of wet finishing.
eSpinners for Beginners Part 6 – Examples of Finished Projects and Yarn Consistency Tips
This video concludes the series by giving you examples of several finished knitted projects, and explains the yarn decisions that went into each project. There are also several tips to help keep your yarn’s diameter and twist consistent.
If you are interested in learning more about our spinning wheels visit our store.
This past month I have been mostly focus on getting everything in place so I can start shipping the EEW 6.0 eSpinners out as soon as possible. More about this below. Other than that I’ve been making good progress on the Yarn Counter and Cone Winder projects. While I am planning to work on the CSM (circular sock knitting machine) in the future it isn’t a priority right now and I won’t be making progress for awhile. I will update you all when I start working on it again, but I just have too many projects that are being working on so one had to get put on the back burner and it is the CSM. Sorry for those of you who had that as the project as your most anticipated, but I didn’t want to leave you all in a limbo where you didn’t know what was happening with it. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I have time get back to working on the CSM.
EEW 6.0 Update
Previously I had been estimating the EEW 6.0 would be available in March on my store. This past month I pushed that back to April due to some logistic delays caused by Covid19. The good news is that assemble of the EEW 6.0 has finished and I now have a plan to get them shipped to my warehouse in Massachusetts where I’ll do final testing and shipping. So overall the EEW 6.0 is making great progress and if you missed the pre-order campaign on Kickstarter you will be able to start placing orders on my store in April. I have a high level of confidence there will be more than enough EEW 6.0s available since I ordered a bunch extra for this first batch so there is no need to worry about me running out of stock.
If you want to learn more I have started putting together this page about the EEW 6.0, and will continue adding more information and videos. I am super happy with that page so far. I’m now confident that the EEW 6.0 won’t just be the best eSpinner in it’s class, but it will also have the best documentation both for new spinners and those wanting to look at some of the more advanced techniques like supercoils.
EEW Cone Winder
In this video, I discuss the new improvements to the cone winder and then show how it works with yarn skeins on a swift. (Spoiler – It works great with a swift.)
Happy spinning!
– Maurice Ribble (Inventor of the Electric Eel Wheel)
