“But doesn’t the wheel have to have a groove on it? Mamma’s machine wheel did,—grooved, you know, so the band couldn’t slip off.”
“No, if I remember rightly, the big wheel on grandma’s spinning-wheel was very wide, or had a wide tire, and the band was so narrow there was no danger of its getting off. There probably was a groove on the little wheel, and our spool will fix that, you see, as well as if it had been made specially; but I don’t see my way clear yet to making that barrel-bottom carry the band. Maybe I can char the edge and make a groove in it.”
Investigation proved the bottom of the barrel to be made of two pieces which would come apart as soon as the pressure of the staves was removed. That, however, was remedied by nailing two bits of boards across the two pieces.
Where did she get the nails? Well, she had been saving them up for a long time. Two of them had been in Davie’s apron pockets when they came to the Island, and one had chanced to be lying in the bottom of the lunch-basket. The others had been picked up one time and another in bits of driftwood on the beaches. Most of these were too crooked and rusty to be good for much, but there were enough good ones to fasten the pieces of the barrel-bottom securely together. Then they knocked off the hoops and staves and released the round piece, and burned the center hole, and another near the rim to put a handle in to turn it by, as Marian had said.
By this time she had abandoned the idea of charring the edge and making a groove. She gathered a lot of little straight pieces about five inches long and varying in width, some round but most little flat pieces, and in the center of each she cut a V-shaped notch and pounded them down tight on the edge of the wheel till she had circled it entirely, in that manner, then tied two strings round near the ends of the little sticks to bind them so they would not loosen up and come off.
She decided to use the same iron bar for an axle for the wheel to turn on that she had used to burn the holes in it with, and she pounded it into a crack in the rock wall of the wickiup. The outer end of the bar had a sort of knob on it,—it might once have been a nut,—so that the wheel would not slip off, and to keep it from wandering in the other direction up to the wall she twisted a bit of rope round the bar and tied it to make a good-sized knot on that side.
She was not quite satisfied with the rim of her wheel, and she worked a long while, weaving and winding fiber in and out till she had it all smooth with no chance of any of the little pieces being knocked loose. For the rest of her apparatus she had to do some searching for materials. She spent a full half-day up in the pasture before she found what she had decided she must have,—a straight little tree that divided into two branches about three feet up. She cut it close to the ground and trimmed off the top, leaving the forks about six inches long.
A piece of driftwood flat on one side was taken for the base, and a hole was burned in the middle of it and enlarged till the forked stick could be inserted and made snug by driving in little pegs where it did not fit tight. Two little holes were burned through the two forks. She used a big old nail to do that, for she did not want such big holes as the bar would have made,—besides, the bar was tight in the wall now with the big wheel swung on it. A little round stick that fitted snug into the spool was then made into a spindle. It turned nicely in the two little burned holes in the forks.
THE SPINNING-WHEEL