The Wool Merchant's Daughter

Brought home this wheel yesterday:

We changed our plans from going to the annual Spin-In at the Mannings in Pennsylvania and instead went to St. Michael’s, Maryland, for this yellow beauty. We have an attraction for St. Mike’s to begin with, having been married on the lawn of the Talbot County Courthouse in near-by Easton. We are always looking for an excuse to go down there, so when this wheel showed up in St. Michael’s, it seemed an obvious choice.

The seller told us she had acquired the wheel, ironically in New Jersey, some 28 years ago but had never spun on it. She did not realize the MOA was installed backwards, so anyone trying to spin on it would have had some trouble! The seller also told us that the dealers who had the wheel said they had gotten it from an estate sale in West Virginia. Beyond that, she did not know anything about the wheel, except that it might be Canadian. In that, she was correct!

With her MOA put back into proper position, you can see her tilt tensionining:

She has one carved pin holding in her wheel axle, and what a big pin!

Her wheel crank is straight. I had never seen this shape before two weeks ago, and now here is another one!

She has that lovely swooping treadle. The treadle needs to be renailed to the front crosspiece, but this is an easy fix. I like the amount of wear on the treadle — someone obviously did alot of spinning with this wheel.

But, perhaps best of all, she has a maker’s mark:

I did not see this until this morning when we unloaded her from the car. She is stamped “Paradis” on the front of her bench, next to the tensioning device. Now, to figure out if that is Aram Paradis, Lucien Paradis, or another member of the family.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 12th, 2011 at 12:06 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.