Now, there are a ton of fun spindles there. Top to bottom (or, back row to front row):
- Top (or mid, if you like) turkish spindle. Made by Ray's Spindles, bought from him on-line a few years ago. A fun little spindle.
- Niddy-noddy spindle. From The Woolery. Pretty cool, you wind-on like a niddy-noddy as you spin. Wa-la, skein when done! Not sure how much it holds, but it does actually work.
- Bedouin spindle. From Detta's Spindles, also made by Ray. All purpleheart, pretty cool.
- Flax spindle. Made for me by a local wood turner. I wouldn't recommend it; we tried several models, and never got one to spin satisfactorily. Which may be why the lady in the picture this was copied from looks so grumpy! (Hmmm, I always thought it was Italian, but it says Portuguese. C'est la vie...!)
- Balinese spindle. Bought at Estes Wool Market a few years back. Pretty, no? I've not spun on it, though I imagine it's a support spindle of some sort.
I was asked how well the Bedouin spindle spins.
It's a decent spindle, as spindles go. I love that it's all purpleheart :-) that's fun! I honestly don't think that I've ever filled it full with yarn, just tried it out and used it randomly on scraps here and there. It has a notch-and-groove arrangement, so you can half-hitch it near the top (if you find you need to) and then bring it up through the groove so the yarn comes down the middle of the shaft, for a reasonably well-balanced spin without a hook.
Give the whorl can be removed, it would be handy to have two of them, then you could fill up two and wind a two-strand ball from the two full whorls -- the shape of the whorl would probably keep your spindle-full from rolling away, that is, if you would around the whorl as if it were a Turkish, rather than below the whorl like a top whorl. The whorl piece, however, being one piece, would remain stuck in the center of the ball ~ you would have to unwind the yarn from it.
From a little bit of internet research, it appears that current Bedouin spindles are quite a bit larger ... see this picture in this post, and that they use their spindles as top whorls, filling below the whorl. There was also a man (a man! hooray!) spindling at a Bedouin market. His spindle appears to be a mid-whorl, and he's completely covered it with yarn!
There isn't any mention of the Bedouin spindles in Bette Hochberg's "Handspindles", though she has the whorl shape drawn in her diagram, "Basic Spindle Whorl Shapes". I also don't recall mention of it in any other books, so if you've seen one, let me know!
That about sums up my experiences with it -- happy spindling!
