Fledgling Spinner

Nothing beats that feeling of the postman delivering something other than bills. Packages are an extra bonus. My mom, the delightful fiber enabler, saw to this latest indulgence.

Inside the pretty, purple paper were three fancy bundles. In each, the ultimate in fiber exotica. From cashmere cloud to baby alpaca and back again, yak, camel, and silk. Each one was like a little bit of fiber butter, begging to be touched and stroked and nuzzled.

From Wild Orchids Fiber Arts, this is the exotic luxury fiber sampler. Now, I haven’t the foggiest idea what to do with these little packages of precious, but it takes all the willpower to not throw them on the floor and rub them all over. Really. No one told me cashmere was that pornographically soft. Nature was very very naughty.

The Tour de Fleece is over and baby stayed on the inside, so the only newness in our house is 318.5 yards of worsted weight yarn! I spun most days, although I may have missed one or two official ones – don’t tell anyone! The singles were amazing to look at but it was hard to predict where some of the more unique shots of bright magenta or turquoise might land. I was completed winging it as I matched first single to final single bobbin, but I think it turned out to be a nice two ply, 10 wraps per inch (WPI). Click pictures to see details!

I am thinking the perfect destination for this yarn is a simple garter stitch project, something that will really show all the colors without competing like lace or cables might.

While baby continues to make himself comfortable, I am thinking of tackling another part of the stash, maybe the soy/silk I started on a drop spindle so many months ago. I might also dive into a secret fiber surprise I received yesterday – I will have pictures of that as well, but bit of fiber porn will have to wait; the fall Interweave is sitting here, begging to be read.

The Tour de Fleece is well underway, and I have been diligently trying to spin a little as required, despite misgivings about reaching the end of the tour. With the little man due a mere three days after the tour, it is quite possible that this is an exercise in futility. However, I am willing, at this stage, to chance it since it is fun to try something new – spinning with sparkly batts.

I have spun from batts one other time, the butterscotchy amber colored Cappuccino batts from my mom. The rest of my spinning has been mainly from rovings and my own rolags and hand carded fiber. These batts I am tackling are also from my mom, a surprise she purchased me from BohemiaFibers, and the colorway is Scottish Highlands (click on pictures to see larger size).

All at once I was overwhelmed with how many colors are in each batt. The variation and layers are what I imagine geologists and botanists would find in the highlands themselves. A gentle blend of corriedale, silk, and firestar, I wasn’t sure where to start, but settled on making a two ply, since barber poles, where two colors swirl around each other when you ply, seems unlikely to matter with so much variation.

My prep was simple:

I decided to lay out all of the batts, to get a sense of the overall colors. In this case, the variations in the wool weren’t significant, but the silks varied from batt to batt, so I tried to picture how it would be best to distribute them as singles. I decided I would just pull each batt apart, ripping them into quarters, and then drafting them and making little piles I could pick from randomly.

A far more clever planner and spinner could determine how many bobbins of singles they might spin, let’s say four, tear batts into the same number of sections, and then use one part of each batt on each bobbin in order.

I took the lazy way.

I drafted into balls of soft fiber, ready to spin up. The fibers were meticuously prepared, so there were not a lot of chunks to contend with, as I have observed in some smaller carded prep samples.  Any thick/thin issues I had were my own shortcomings while drafting the fiber between my hands.

For a great tutorial on drafting to prep to spin, check this video out or this one for drop spindle.

Into the second bobbin, the colors are just delightful shifts and highlights with sparkle throughout. Can’t wait to see how it plies up, but I need to wait because I WILL be following the rules I read somewhere that say you match your last bobbin with your first bobbin, second with the second to last, etc. Keep your fingers crossed that it works out ok!

When I first set out to make the fiery red yarn, my intent was to spin up the 4 ounces of wool I had and Navajo ply it. I figured that a three ply any other way would be a pain in the behind and a tangled mess to make without a fancy, tensioned lazy kate. Most of those are horizontal (as opposed to my vertical three bobbin holder) and have a strip of something that keeps them from spinning out of control when you pull yarn off of them (like the line and springs and hooks on the scotch-tension wheel). I thoughts without one of these, I would have three singles coming off the kate, dragging, twisting, and tangling. In the end, I was completely mistaken.

I had already started spinning one bobbin full of the wool, not really paying attention to how the two were divided when I took those stash pictures. I knew that the original kit, a gift from my mom, was for socks and included 4 ounces of superwash wool and 2 ounces of silk. They were all dyed in a colorway called ‘Fall Maple’, perfect reds & oranges with small sections of magenta. They were Blue Ridge Silk Works from the Dye Pot. Somewhere halfway through the second bobbin, I started to feel guilty for not using the silk. Most of my silk spinning experience has been with little clumps in batts or roving – how the heck was I supposed to fit 2 ounces of silk in with 4 ounces of wool? Sometimes I am not very clever.

Once it dawned on me that a 3-ply made the most sense, I tried to eyeball-portion out the remaining wool onto the two bobbins, then tackled the silk. If you have never spun with silk at a wheel, you probably know more than I did when I started. I changed to one of the smaller settings on the wheel so it would make more rotations for every treadle-push I made. It was slippery, but almost in a fun way…..I can imagine how someone with more control could spin whisper-fine singles to make lace-weight wool. I just tended to lose the end of the single as it got whisked into the flyer. In the end, I had three respectable singles of spun stuff.

Plying them together was much easier. Stacked on the lazy kate, I just tied the ends of all three together with the leader and spaced each of them between my fingers. No fancy kate or diz or tool required; just my hands. The close up show you how my three wobbly singles come together. The silk was obviously milkier in color, even though I am sure these are the same colors of dye. It gave such a neat shimmer to the final wool.

I should note that my estate sale find also helped make this possible. The wheel originally came with this kate and four bobbins. Since you need to have one bobbin on the wheel, this can make things kind of tedious (especially when bobbin #4 is still full of black alpaca singles). Since I have the spare kate (which was missing the fourth bobbin) I was able to just change things out without stopping to wind off the bobbin to make room for more yarn. Here they are! All 93 and 115 yards, respectively.

Thing is, I have more yardage and a slightly smoother-looking yarn than if I had defaulted to the Navajo ply. Don’t get me wrong – that technique seems perfect to me for painted rovings with large blocks of distinct color. This just seems more practical and now I have less silk abandoning guilt. Score one for the stash-busting!

Knitters have stashes, at least, most do. I have yet to meet another fiber crafter who didn’t keep a reserve unit of projects to-be-completed. Sometimes they are built on impulse purchases or gifts. More often they are built on the remnants of those as well as best intentioned projects.

While working hard on the fiery wool for the wee devil hat, I realized that my yarn-to-be stash was growing to the same girth and proportions of my already-yarn stash of things -to-be-knitted.

So here is most of my stash shame. The only missing component is the fleece that started it all – the alpaca. I have, in my defense, fallen victim to the allure of the prepared (washed, carded, not sandy) fleeces seen below. Some of them are also shiny!

It did get me thinking, though, if I made yarn out of all of these, it will just make my knitting reserves larger….so I had better get a move on. I decided that I might be behaving badly, taking the fiery red wool away from the silk that came with it. That’s it there, in this image, nestled between mohair, cotton bolls, braided KnitWitch roving (the rest of that Tuscany) and just southwest of the two giant balls of Corridale meant to be blended with the fur beneath. That’s actually Newfoundland dog fur, ready to be blended for my mom’s knitting pleasure…or blending pleasure if I never get to it.

West of those goodies are some sparkling BohemiaFiber batts, ready for my experimenting with not-making-a-mess-spinning-batts. Then there are the handspindles, little changed from the last time I showed you.

Now you have the photographic evidence and I have a mission – bust down the spinning stash and then tackle WIPs and yarn stash.

It’s gonna be a long summer.

So I know this batt was called cappuccino something, but it keeps making me think of warm amber, more so than it makes me imagine a frothy beverage.  All told, it delivered nearly 140 yards of a scrumptious two-ply that was nearing even in some areas and seems fairly balanced:

When it was all said and done, I cast on to make the ribbed edge of a sweater (which ended up in the frog pond for size related reasons). My intent was to fill the body of the sweater, actually a vest, with this Arctic Blue heathered wool I got from KnitPicks. The two colors looked amazing next to each other, so all was not lost. I proceeded to use it again to make a hat….also ending up with size issues, which I think was still pattern related.

On the handspinning front though, knitting with this two-ply brought home an interesting point to me. First of all, I do not “set the twist”. I am not really sure what that means or why I should do it, but I haven’t had any issues with my handspun yarn, so I don’t do it. Maybe it’s like gauge, where you regret it only on occasion. What I did notice was random splitting….which ties in with a video I saw on Interweave’s previews which suggested that if you spin the singles clockwise, and ply counter-clockwise, sometimes the resulting “twist” of the yarn may not suit your final purposes. I never gave it much credence, but apparently as an English style knitter (sometimes called throwing in that I tension and move my working yarn with my right hand), counter-clockwise plying may be best for me….while someone knitting continental-style (where tension and such for the working yarn is done with the left hand) might prefer a clockwise spun ply…..Crazy the things I still have to learn!

Anyways, my knitting is growing along with my belly as I work towards more baby related knitting projects. I have a hat in mind for the wee guy that has horns and needed a red yarn. I only have red roving handy, but the fiery colors in it will hopefully make the perfect yard for a Lil Devil Hat. I’ll try to keep you posted.

I recently had an opportunity to participate in my first swap. I know there are all kinds of swaps out there….knitting, sewing, cooking, etc. Just a little extension on the old penpal idea I guess. This one was a Ravelry swap with a vampire and Beltane theme, and since I am practically a Beltane baby, I hopped aboard the swap wagon. I had been wanting to knit this cowl for a while. I had made one before with a very pale lavender mohair and purple beads for someone who was a fan of purple, but it was lost nearly two years ago between here and a city in Canada. Neither the USPS nor Canada Post claimed to have it, but somewhere there is a cowl with a set of handknit mittens, languishing.

I digress. Since this was a vampire theme, I decided that the beads could be red (for blood droplets) and we could call it Blood Queen. Behold, her majesty.

I honestly love the way it turned out, but still kinda hate knitting with kid mohair. There is absolutely no way to tink back rows when you spot an error. And forget an easy unravel of a provisional cast on. I used the smoothest yarn I could find and still struggled for almost an hour to take it out. Now that I have unleashed the swap package out into the world, I have turned back to my wheel. Since my energy levels dipped to the lowest station during the winter, this lovely basket of drafted wool has been gathering dust. It was a yummy “Cappuccino” batt that I tore into strips and drafted like you would prepared roving. I think this one has wee blobs of silk mingling in it as well.

I am still not sure if I want to make this a Navajo or two-ply yarn. I am leaning towards a two-ply, planning to fill two bobbins worth. I don’t want to get into a Navajo-plying rut (I adore it because there is no leftovers on the bobbin at the end. When you do two-ply, there is always one bobbin with more than the other.) but I do love the color. I have been imagining blues and ambers lately. Mostly because of a scene from a movie we watched recently that was done in those two colors and looked so inviting.

I may be blog-quiet, but I have not been idle. With a belly o’ baby, I can also say I am actively doing something no matter how idle I may appear! I have been trying to clean up some old projects, and hoping to reduce the active Ravelry queue on the right hand side of the pages. I finally started to spin again after what seemed like ages. The fibre-y highlight to the recent days, though, was a chance to glimpse into the long life of a fiber enthusiast.

Prompted by a Rav post for a nearly local artist’s estate sale, I (and my fearless escort) braved the early Saturday morning highway to a seaside home that was filled to the brim with spinning and weaving and dyeing products from a bygone era. Most of the items were rusty, touched with damp, and completely lovable. The preceding image was a cute little book from 1943 that was hidden among a few moldy primers on dyeing and weaving. The giant cone of wool behind it was a natural mill spun 1-and-something pounds from Augusta, Georgia in the 1970s.

There were also two great wheels. Not a euphemistic great, but a stand up and spin great wheel from the pages of a pioneer book. They were gorgeous, and my trunk was small.

Looms, hand carders, all of these things that we pursue with delight were laid out as people filed by and I kind of felt a sadness……who could go through our stashes when we pass and know what we meant to do with each thing? Would anyone be able to imagine why I bought a braid of pink and purple roving? Would the smallish balls of sock wool be treasures or would they seem like waste? I scooped up the big cone and tried to imagine what she bought it for……or if she had just found it in a sale somewhere. I can tell you, she had great taste in chairs and I found a comfy bottom-catcher for spinning more yarns….yarns I might label with their own little stories to share one day with strangers.

This month being my first Phat Fiber contribution, I have been enjoying the excitement that surrounds release and capture of said Phat boxes. My own arrived today, quickly opened and poured over by yours truly and a visiting Mom. But before I sit down to plan the inevitable smallish projects with all these wooly wonders, I wanted to take a bit of time to share photos of the blessed event. Video of contributions can be seen in the link on the prior post while following the boxes happens on the Rav group and the Phat Fiber Blog.

Since the December theme was space-y, I plucked some starry fabric from the stash to protect against pine needles in the yard while I tried to take advantage of fading winter sunlight:

This is a shot of everything from a distance……fleece in the back, coupons and stitch markers in the middle, and yarns up front. I also received two great patterns hiding in the wings there.

The yarns were lovely and I have to admit that “Pigs in Space” moniker that a couple of people used brought a smiley memory for me. I also love how creative some of the tags and cards are – everyone has wonderful designs AND colors for yarn. There was a great blue combo from Alaskan Nancy, Pigs in Space pink dominated blend from Gale’s Art, a great fingering called Moon Beam from Dame Emi that I keep trying to guess content on, a surprising and soft lovely from Anzula luxury fibers, almost earthy “Meteor” from By Rebekah with Love, and great greens from Wabi Sabi.

Here’s the two patterns, mostly covered up to not infringe on anyone’s pattern-y rights – one from Michelle Miller and another from Kira K. Also the clever wee WC Mercantile package, a rich, green merino hiding from FromEwetoYou, and a couple of the great stitch markers from winemakerssister and My Fair Bag Lady.

More fluffs – totally in love with the natural dyes from Vibrant Fibers and the feel of the BFL from Vivid Creations…also, can’t help but love the almost ethereal Natchwoolie sample. There are two hidden stitch markers – one fantastic big snagless from Dawning Dreams and a cute beaded one from Lampyridae.

On the other side, the large batt from Lampyridae is a delightful combo of fibers and Color Bug Yarns’ Pigs in Space is a fun wee sample plus what I think is a lamp work bead. Even though I have the wrong side facing, there is some recycled yarn from Jags Funky Fibers hiding in there, too.I still haven’t opened the Woolen Mill St. Yarns bag of bamboo cause I fear that I won’t stop touching it and it will get in the gingerbread I have to make later. Still a sucker for the cuteness of wee braids in the Unwind Yarn and Gems sample.

Overall, many , many hours of fiber feely lay ahead for me.

I have not been very holiday spirited this year. It has probably been a few years since I felt the full warmth of holidays…sometimes I imagine they are more for younglings who don’t have bills, work hours, and project timelines. This year, though, my mom is visiting for the holidays so it does inspire at least a smallish portion of enthusiasm for the season. Since I am spoiled having a fiber loving mom, I have already scored all of the knitting and spinning gifts for the visit as she unpacked her suitcase.

I am in possession of my first skeins of Noro and need to think of something to do with it (all I know is that I will not make a scarf since it wouldn’t get much play in FL). I have some lovely lace weight wool and sock wools as well. Fleece gifts were also tucked in there including some amazing silk with a handpainted spindle. I assume the spindle is a “lace” variety since it is smaller than any I have seen before although I could just be making that up – here it is next to a simple bottom whorl.

The fleece is absolutely amazing but I still feel like I need to master the weight and coordination of spinning on a drop spindle before I attempt it with silk blends…even of the soy silk variety. The recent brown mix soy silk has not been worked on much since I spend more time wrestling with the fine wisps not drafting or all getting bound up when I don’t want them to. I still need to practice on plain, 100% wool. It is definitely more forgiving. Maybe I should save the silks for the wheel for now….

In other craft news, I cut and sewed the fabric that came on Friday and put the new bag up in my shop. I am so excited I have asked my designing spouse to make another one for me. I hope everyone loves it as much as I do.