It’s a new year and here is an update on where I’m at with my current projects.
This first project isn’t a new product, but is inventory management. I want to get more people into fiber arts by making affordable fiber tools. To do this my tools need to be in stock and last year many were out of stock for large parts of the year. I’m happy to say all my current products are now in stock (EEW 6.0, EEW Nano 2, EEW Yarn Counter). Going forward I’m going to try and keep things in stock.
The EEW Cone Winder is going to be my next new product and I’m working hard to get it ready for manufacturing. Right now, I’m targeting shipping in December 2023, but if things go decently during manufacturing it will hopefully beat that date. That said, manufacturing and shipping delays are much more common these days than they were a few years ago so I’m going to leave the target date as December for now until I get farther along in the process. This is my top priority work, but so much of it depends on my manufacturing partners that I don’t spend a lot of my time working on this.
I’ve also mentioned the EEW Pro in this email newsletter in the past. It’s meant to be a more expensive and higher end eSpinner with lots of new features, some never seen in an eSpinner before. I still don’t have a working first prototype of this, but significant progress has been made on both electronics and mechanical parts. There is just so much new stuff that I’ll need to spend lots of time figuring out what to include and what should be dropped to make it the best eSpinner possible. I still think this is probably two years away and is a massive project. It’s still even possible that if some of the most important features don’t work really well that I could just drop this whole project, but right now most likely it will get released eventually. I’m also thinking some of the new technologies I’m researching might migrate down into updates for my other eSpinners.
A new project I just started working on is an updated version of my Lazy Kate. If you have experience with Lazy Kates and want to help go fill out my Lazy Kate poll with some questions about the improvements I should make. This is the same poll I put on Ravelry and Facebook last week so if you already filled it out there is no need to do it again.
Future Product Poll
I have a long product pipeline and to keep myself busy so even though I’m busy right now I want to figure out what I should be looking at next. One way I often come up with really creative solutions is by letting ideas sit in the back of my head and put a few hard hours of thinking about them each week. It lets me take a fresh perspective at the problem each week. I have a very long list of possible projects, and I’ve narrowed those down to a smaller list that you can vote on here. I will use the interest expressed in this poll to help me determine what project I should work on next so please vote here on what projects you’d like me to do next.
Custom Bobbin Generator
There are already 3D printable bobbins for all my eSpinners online, but I often get requests for files for other types of spinning wheels that have expensive bobbins. To help these people I created a file that can generate bobbins to fit different spinning wheels. You just need to measure your bobbins and enter in those parameters. You can access the 3D printable files here, or I made a video that gives more of an overview. While I don’t get a direct benefit from these projects, I like to do things that I think benefit a lot of people. Basically I’m giving up a small amount of my time to give others a big benefit so it’s a net win to humanity (this is how my engineering brain calculates a lot of things). If you or your friends were looking for 3D printable bobbins for some other spinning wheel now you have these.
Product Updates
Below are estimates and the dates may change.
- EEW Cone Winder – December 2023
I don’t accept pre-orders in my store, but when I get a batch of products there should be enough for everyone.
– Maurice Ribble
(Inventor of the Electric Eel Wheel)
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