She's here! She's here!

Ooooooh, my Lendrum is here! Happy happy day! I got home from running errands with the Hurricane yesterday, and lo and behold, on my front porch was a big ol' box! Here it is! I was so excited, I almost forgot to take a pic of the box. But it's kind of sad that I actually did take the time to take a picture of a box. A box. Yes, just a box. I am ashamed.

But it looks like the Hurricane was excited, too! Here she is opening the box!

Actually, she just couldn't wait till I emptied the box so she could close it up and stand on it like she was surfing. And that's why she's called Hurricane.

There she is! All nestled safely in her box - well, not really safely. The plying head is broken. The disc at the end opposite the orifice is snapped in half. I'm SO not happy about that, but at least I don't need it quite yet. I'm hoping the person I ordered it from (who I'm also a little peeved at - took over a week to ship it, didn't include any extras like fiber, which almost EVERYONE ELSE DOES, and then shipped it unsafely wrapped so it broke - don't get me wrong, I know she's running a business, but I could have turned around at that festival and gotten my wheel from another vendor) gets me a replacement ASAP (although she hasn't even answered my email yet, that I sent early yesterday afternoon). I'm just a little peeved that I didn't just turn around at MDSW and go to another vendor, I would have had the wheel in my hot little hands and nothing would have been broken (and maybe I would have gotten some extra fiber, too!) But that's my fault, I guess. Anyway...

Thank goodness it was easy to set up, because I was DYING to spin! I put Hurricane down for a nap (don't worry, she was due for one anyway!) and started trying to figure out how to get the brake string attached. The IKEA-like directions for the wheel assume you know about wheel bits, which I didn't. So I did Google searches for things until I found pictures of the wheel set up and figured out where the brake string went, and that it's for Scotch tensioning. Aha! Of course, I'd already asked Natasha, because she has a new Lendrum, so I probably bugged the heck out of her because I was too impatient to find out the info myself - thanks, Natasha, you're a sweetie! So once the Scotch tensioning thing was figured out, I found this site with videos on starting out. Thank goodness for that site, because I had no idea what I was doing! So I figured out how to attach the leader yarn, and got started. Well, not really. I kept losing the fiber into the orifice with no spin on it at all. After about an hour, and a good 6 foot length of merino pencil roving gone, I gave up.

Later last night, I figured out that the problem was that I wasn't getting enough spin on the fiber. So I Googled something to that effect, and actually came up with something! The Scotch tension, which had to be tightened to get the leader yarn to spin onto the bobbin, was too high to get any spin in the fiber. So I loosened it, and bingo! Yarn! This is spun from a batt from this farm.

Now, what to name her?