Friday, September 5, 2008

New Niddy Noddies

I thought I'd show you what I made the other day. Maybe "put together" would be more accurate. I've been reading about PVC niddy noddies and thought they sounded like a neat idea. They say you can leave the yarn on to set the twist in warm water if you want. Using them to measure handspun, though, is what I was more interested in. I have a wooden niddy noddy I ordered about the time I got my spinning wheel. It's pretty and all, but it's some odd measurement, making it harder to figure out how many yards you have.

We had some PVC pipe out in the garage left over from something, so I confiscated it. There was enough pipe to make two niddy noddies: a one-yard and a two-yard. I thought the one-yard one would be better for setting the twist since you wouldn't have to have such a big container. I think the directions I've seen call for a smaller pipe, but since I already had this, I just went ahead and used it. It's 3/4 inch. I bought the T's and end caps for a total of $3.08 plus tax. Here's what they looked like to start with:

And here's what they became:

I hammered the pipes in place and then tried the small one out. I pulled the end cap off to remove the yarn and realized that the short pipes were too long to slip the yarn over. I finally decided to fix it so that rather than taking the end cap off to remove the yarn, I would just leave one of the short pipes kind of loose so that it could be pulled out to take the yarn off. I haven't tried setting the twist with them yet, but otherwise, they seem to be working pretty well.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love your resourcefulness.

So, how long did you make your niddy noddies?

Brenda said...

The long middle pipe is the one where accuracy is necessary for measuring. I originally made them too long because I didn't take into account the addition of the T joints. I started with an 18 inch pipe for the two-yard one and a 9 inch for the one-yard one. (Because you actually go four lengths of the pipe on each pass as you wind the yarn on.) So to make them the correct length, I cut off 2 1/2 inches from each, making the two-yard 15 1/2 inches, and the one-yard 6 1/2 inches. The measurements would be different, though, if you were using smaller pipe since the T joints' diameter would be smaller. These are the lengths needed for 3/4 inch pipe.

Wow, that's probably more information than you wanted! :)

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