handmade drop spindles

I am getting into spinning my own yarn. I have one drop spindle that I bought from etsy. I have since bought more roving and my spindle is getting full. I've been looking online for ways to make drop spindles since money is tight and I don't want to but 5 more. Also, I'm and instant gratification person. There are all kinds of tutorials for making CD spindles, but where the hell do I find a rubber grommet? Even if I did go to a hardware store I wouldn't know where to begin to look. So I looked at my spindle from etsy and thought that there had to be a cheap way to mimic that. I looked around craft stores and had some ideas in my head when I did see the perfect solution! I think it ended up costing me close to $5 to make 4 drop spindles and I would just need to buy another $3 bag of wheel to make another 4. So, here is what I did. (I got the wooden supplies at Hobby Lobby - and they were on sale!!!! The cup hooks I got at WalMart)



I found a bag of wooden toy wheels in many sizes and I picked the largest size.




The hole size was 3/8 inch so I bought a bag of 12 inch long dowels 3/8 inch diameter.



I bought a package of the smallest cuphooks I could find.



I decided to make top whorl spindles. My husband drilled a small hole at one end of the dowel and screwed the cup hook in.




I slid the wheel up the dowel towards the top. Since it slid pretty easily I wrapped some scotch taped around the dowel a few times where I wanted the wheel to stay. It works great. I haven't used a top whorl before, so I sometimes have a little trouble with the yarn not wanting to twist around the hook after I wind it around the shaft and start spinning again. But it was cheap, easy and fast!