SPINNING WHEEL SLEEPING BEAUTY

MADE IN NEW ZEALAND

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Sleeping Beauty Wheels In the mid 1960s, Alex Baillie of Auckland (then a consultant for Woodturners NZ Ltd) noted increasing interest in spinning and weaving. Ashford wheels were scotch tension and he felt there was a need for double drive band wheels.

Mr Baillie designed a wheel based on one which the late Jean McDonnell (proprietor of an Auckland shop, long gone, called The Wheel and the Loom) had purchased from the Ranfurly Veterans’ Home. The whereabouts of that wheel are now unknown but it must have been like the one at right (if not the actual same wheel). This wheel comes from the UK; it has no markings and though it has been suggested that it could be a Dryad, it apparently isn’t.

Parts for the new wheel were produced by Woodturners NZ Ltd, and the wheels were at first assembled by Ross Maxwell, bearing his label. They were marketed by Alex Baillie (trading as Baillie and Watts) under the name Sleeping Beauty. The picture at left shows one of these early Sleeping Beauty wheels beside the English wheel, and the similarities of “look and feel” are obvious. One odd feature of both wheels is that the whorl and bobbin grooves are square in profile, a rather unusual shape which may have proved unsatisfactory.

The differences are more subtle, other than the bar between the maidens on the UK wheel. This might have been to secure a scotch tension cord as there is a peg for it but no obvious place to fasten the other end; the wheel is currently set up for double drive. The Sleeping Beauty wheels designed by Alex Baillie (except the Pixie and the Princess) are exclusively double drive.

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