We made it! Finally, the last spindle – Model 10 – from my Supported Spindle Fashion Show.

You might have already guessed … it’s another Spanish Peacock ninja!

Just look at it!

(Also, it is really, really hard to photograph burl woods!)

This spindle is in my top ten because it is absolutely drop dead gorgeous. The whorl is turned from thuya burl, and the 11″ shaft is Gabon ebony. During the actual Fashion Show live stream, the ninja was wearing a small cop, so at the time I didn’t know its exact weight. But I had to free the spindle for another project (read on for more details), so now I know it weighs 28 grams. Most of my fashion show spindles weighed between 20 and 30 grams (The World’s Most Beautiful Spindle being the most notable exception to that) because that weight allows me to load about an ounce of fiber onto the spindle before the spindle gets too heavy to flick.

I acquired this spindle because it – like several others in this series – was a second, meaning it had too much wobble to be sold as a Spanish Peacock spindle. The burl wood, while beautiful, is very hard to balance because the knots in the grain can have different densities, leading to a whorl that is heavier on one side than the other.

But I’ll let you in on a secret: once a small amount of cop builds up on the shaft, the extra weight helps stabilize the wobble. Before too long you don’t even notice it! I have a small handful of spindles where the wobble is so bad (often due to a severely warped shaft) where this doesn’t work, but most of the time it does. So even a wobbly spindle can be a joy to spin!

Currently I’m using this ninja as part of my 2020 Tour de Fleece spin, a massive (for me) project involving 10+ ounces of fiber spread over 10 supported spindles. (I alluded to this spin when showcasing Model 6). Tour de Fleece had two rounds this year – one in June / July for the original Tour de France dates, and then again in August / September for the actual dates, since it had been postponed due to COVID. I will write a separate post about my Tour de Fleece 2020 project in the near future. Spoiler alert: Tour de Fleece 2020 round two ended September 20, and I’m still nowhere near done with my spinning project!

Hope you enjoyed learning more about my top ten favorite supported spindles! If you missed the original fashion show live stream, you can still find it on Facebook!