Once a year my local woolly/spinning group have a tabletop sale where we all bring in handmade items to show off our making skills and pick up a handmade bargain from our friends.
A few people have admired the little kumihimo cord that I use to attach my orifice hook to my spinning wheel so I thought I’d make a handful of them to sell at our next ‘makers market’ and share how to make them here at the same time.
The orifice hook shown here is the smaller, simpler one that came with my Electric Eel Wheel Nano 2. I much prefer the delicate size of this one but it does have a tendency to get knocked off the magnets and inevitably lost. When my number of e-spinners significantly outweighed the number of Nano orifice hooks I could lay my hands on I decided to take action to ensure I would always have an orifice hook on every wheel.
I could have just tied the hook onto my wheel with ribbon but there’s something quite satisfying and slightly recursive about making accessories for my e-spinners out of yarns that have been spun on those same electric spinning wheels.
I have a little bag of ends of precious handspun yarn that I want to use for this project. The kinds of lengths that are too short to knit anything of substance with, but just long enough to make up a single strand of Kumihimo braid or used to tie a skein of handspun yarn. Please tell me I’m not the only spinner who can’t bear to throw away even the shortest lengths of handspun yarn…
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As I want to make several orifice hooks and cords, I’ll be making the braid on my Kumikreator. I picked out the finest gauge yarns from my stash so they were all sport weight (UK baby weight) or below. The main disadvantage of making kumihimo cords on the Kumikreator is that the bobbins are very small so I will achieve a longer cord with finer yarns.
You can also read about my experiments with filling the bobbins using various thicknesses of cord here.
You don’t need the Kumikreator to make these as all the cords can be made using a regular 8-braid Kumihimo weaving pattern.
Kumihimo on a disc, with its slow, rhythmic, repetitive movements is one of the most mindful and relaxing of hobbies, but it does take a while. Making one cord on a disc would be satisfying, but I would find making 24 cords very tedious...
If you’re making just one cord, I recommend getting hold of a kumihimo disc, some bobbins, and a kumihimo weight and giving it a go. It’s very meditative and relaxing.
(I don't own a kumihimo weight, so, in the image above, I'm using a large metal bearing and a quilting clip. The 3D printed shape is just there to stop the clip from passing through the hole in the bearing.)
The easiest method I've found of winding the yarn onto the Kumikreator bobbins is to thread it onto a tapered paintbrush end or 6mm knitting needle and then rotate it. This way you are not adding any twist to your yarns as you wind it on.
To work out how much yarn to add to each bobbin, I picked one of the thicker yarns, wound it on, and then removed it to measure it.
As most of the spinning wheels in my craft group are natural wood, I found myself picking out some of the more autumnal hues so that my final cords would all complement the wheels and each other. Eventually, I wound off 48 lengths of handspun yarn which should be enough to make 6 different cord patterns.
Materials Used to Make an Orifice Hook With a Kumihimo Hanging Cord
Fine Yarn or embroidery thread
Sticky Tape
Needle and thread
Metal cord ends (N.B. These are listed as 4mm OD, which is the outer diameter of the barrel. My embroidery thread cords were about 3mm thick and only just fitted.)
Kumihimo Cords Using Hand-Spun Yarn
I loaded the Kumikreator in the usual way, securing the yarn ends under the white tab and rotating the bobbins until all of the yarns were under tension.
Please take a look at my earlier blog post for a better explanation of how to load the Kumikreator.
This animated gif shows the movement of the bobbins in real time. It really is quite captivating to see the cord growing right in front of you!
Once the spring-loaded arm had fully extended, I removed the yarn ends from the white tab and taped the ends together. I lowered the arm again, attached a quilting clip to hold the cord under tension behind the white tab, and continued winding. (The cords I made were too narrow to be held in place by the necklace-cord-grip on the spring-loaded arm.)
As soon as one of the bobbins ran out, I pulled the rest of the yarns off the bobbins and taped them together to prevent them from unraveling.
Here’s a close-up of all 6 handspun cords.
There are very subtle differences between the cords as I varied the colour placement with each one, but from a distance, they’re all quite neutral and autumnal.
To allow me to cut the braid in half, I stitched through the cord several times, right at the point where the yarns start to form a cord. I then wrapped the thread tightly around the cord for a few mm and then secured the thread again with 3 small stitches on top of each other. I repeated this in the very centre of the braid and again at the opposite end.
I applied epoxy glue all the way around the sewing thread sections. Once this was completely set, I could cut through the glued section of the cord with a pair of heavy-duty scissors.
Kumihimo Cords Using Embroidery Thread
Having made cords that were overwhelmingly brown, I really wanted to have a go at making some more colourful ones too. I dug out some embroidery floss and filled the now-empty Kumikreator bobbins with a selection of pretty cotton colours. As the embroidery flosses are finer than my handspun yarn I should be able to get three orifice hook cords from one loading of the Kumikreator, as opposed to the two cords I got from my handspun yarn.
Unfortunately, 3 of the cords had a fault that I can only assume was a tension issue caused by an error in my bobbin winding. The Kumikreator warns against using your own cords, probably because they sell their own filled bobbins, but maybe also for this reason. I can still get two orifice hook leashes from either side of the fault so it’s not wasted but I thought I would share this image to show what can happen if just one of the bobbins isn’t perfectly wound.
After losses, I managed to make 17 embroidery floss cords that were about 29cm long.
Attaching the Cord Ends
I bought some of these 4mm cord ends from Amazon to enable me to attach the orifice hook and jewellery findings to the Kumihimo cords. They fit really well onto the embroidery floss cords but the holes turned out to be too small for most of my hand spun wool cords.
To attach the cord end I mixed some 2 part epoxy and dipped the very end of the cord into it, wiping it down on some waste paper so that the glue wasn’t too thick.
It is then just a matter of inserting the cord into the cord end, rotating it slightly and pushing it in well to ensure that the glued cord attaches itself to the inside.
The epoxy glue that I use has a handling time of 30 minutes and states that it cures in another 30 minutes. I tend to leave mine overnight before I move it just to be on the safe side as it’s usually still a little tacky after a couple of hours.
Making Orifice Hooks
I bought a pack of 25 x 40cm lengths of 0.8mm stainless steel spring wire to make the orifice hooks. (Annoyingly it was cheaper to buy 25 wires from China than just a few from the UK, which is the main reason I ended up making dozens of orifice hooks rather than just a handful.)
Please note, that this wire is only slightly ferromagnetic. I wouldn't recommend this for orifice hooks if you only want it to attach to the magnets on the Nano without a cord.
Stainless steel spring wire is much harder than regular 0.8mm jewellery wire so I needed to use my memory wire cutters to cut the wires into 10cm lengths.
Bending the wire into a loop to attach it to the cord is the most difficult part of this whole process. The spring wire is so hard and rigid that it takes quite a bit of grip to bend it into a fully closed loop.
After a while, I found that the best technique for keeping a firm hold on the wire was to concentrate on keeping the wire in a tight grip while rotating and bending the wire around the pliers with my other hand.
It took quite a bit of practice to work out how far down my round-nosed pliers I needed to grip the wire and how many mms of wire to leave before turning for the orifice hook end. I wanted the hook to be large enough to handle thicker singles but not so large that it wouldn’t fit through the smaller hole in my orifice reducer.
It took me a few failed attempts until I made orifice hooks that I was happy with so I was very glad to have bought extras!
Joining it all together
To turn it all into an orifice hook and cord that would hang off my e-spinner I just needed to add a couple of jump rings.
I already had some 4mm silver plated jump rings to attach the cord to the orifice hook but I bought some 12mm jump rings to attach to the other end. I recommend going for jump rings that are larger than 4mm to attach the orifice hook as I found this size quite fiddly. A 6mm jump ring would have been much better.
If you’ve never attached jump rings before, the best way to avoid distortion is to open them to the side using pliers, thread everything onto the jump ring, and then slide it back into position.
One completed orifice hook with an attached cable!
Here are the hand spun cords. They're much more reserved and will probably complement the kinds of colours I prefer to spin.
Having said that, I love the pretty colours in the embroidery floss cords! These may well be my favourites.
I might have got a little carried away... as usual!
I doubt very much that I’ll manage to sell all of these at our next Woolly Day, but at the very least, I’ll now be able to ensure that my orifice hook cord will always match the fibre I’m spinning.
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At this point, I normally suggest similar related blog posts, however, my list of spinning-related content is becoming a little unmanageable... If you'd like to read more spinning-related content, please take a look at this page here where you will find links to all of my spinning and fibre articles.
Thank you for reading, and happy spinning!
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