Fledgling Spinner

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.

I might have already mentioned, but I know myself and my craftitis pretty well. When I wanted to learn how to spin I bought a copy of this book and tried the “first spinning” techniques suggested in the book. I got a hooked piece of a clothes hanger…the wire ones. I just made a tangled worm of roving. I tried a dowel and CD contraption and ended up with rubber grommets all over the garage trying to get them over the dowel.

Somewhere between off-center cup hooks and twirling fiber in my hands, I got a small bonus and decided that if I liked spinning, I would want a wheel. If I was really bad at it or hated it, the Ashford Traditional tends to hold value enough to find it a new home…

I have never tried the drop spindle until this past Saturday. My mom, the original craft loving enabler constant support of my hand crafts sent me two drop spindles in a goody bag with my visiting sibling:

I must admit – not as tedious or frustrating as I feared! I translated the drafting techniques I am trying to practice and manage some decently even singles on both. The Ashford top whorl on the left holds practice wool of unknown origin. The lovely dark wood spindle has a  50/50 merino & soysilk blend that is a bit too fast for my fingers at my present learning curve, but I love the colors. This roving is from SugarBee Art & Fiber Studios and I found it in She Sells Yarn, my nearest LYS..

I can’t decide if the dark wood spindle is a top whorl on account of the notch/turning details on the end of the shaft. However, there is a hook on the same side as the whorl.

New toys need new homes so I repurposed what I would consider a modern day “train case” for makeup. Those square bags are cute, but I love the rigidity of this MIL b-day gift. Plus there is a wee pocket for my cell phone or scissors.

I knit a little more on my Sideways Spencer, practicing my first I-cord bind off. I still need to do the button band and collar, but after that I can move along and block it….if I am not too busy spinning.

Roving, like yarn, is never a promise of what a thing may become. How I see it, how I work it, and how it unfolds under care of my hands could be world’s apart from what someone else would do with the same medium. I like to think of it as birth because the possible combinations appear reasonably infinite.

Take this lovely roving I oggled and ordered from Knit Witch:

Commercial rovings were intimidating to me at first. I wasn’t confident my spinning techniques were “worthy” or anything other than the alpaca roving I labored over. I was wrong. The luxury (so to speak) of having things combed and ready for your artistry was almost easier than fussing from beginning to end. I digress.

First things first, take the label off the braid and unwind to get a good look at all your fleece has to offer. Note: not all ready-to-spin fibers come “braided” like this. Combed top, slivers, and batts all look different. More on that as my addiction unfolds. In principle, I would say the plan of attack should be the same.

The braid is basically one long run of prepared fibers looped up on each other in a pretty way to keep them together and neat. At least this is my interpretation. I deconstruct the pretty and look at the whole pile.

I knew I wanted to do a two ply so I imagined the best way I could divvy up the fleece over two bobbins. To this end, I laid out the sliver/top (still not sure which is which) and tried to match color repeats. It is SO long there is no way I would predraft the whole length of it so I knew I was going to be tearing it into manageable lengths. This exercise helps me decide where to make the tear.

For this fiber, I divided the whole into thirds, which gave me a blue/silver/teal repeat I could wrap my head around. Each of the three got divided into quarters and I predrafted and wound into loose clouds from the same end for each of the four. I kept the same quarters together. When I was done I had a basket that could be translated into text thusly:

Four balls of blue/silver/teal/silver/blue/silver/teal (you get my drift), four balls of the next chunks of color and four balls of the third. In this way, I could figure on nearly correct color alignment if I took one ball from pile #1, next ball from pile #2, next from pile #3, back to pile#1, #2, #3. Stop, End of bobbin. Then I had two of each left for the second bobbin.

I figured my reasoning was sound. The only complication I considered as I spun is what anyone who braids knows – sometimes the ones that have more overlap are shorter. If I pulled a little less on one of the balls and a little more on the next bobbin the whole thing could be thrown off. But it was as close as I was gonna get.

The next step is to have the Chief Inspector make sure your bobbins full of singles pass his high standards. Then ply.

Not too shabby in the match-up department…..

There it is, all 100-and-lost-count-on-the-niddy-noddy yards of squishy two ply.

I have been “spinning” for over a year now. I cannot say that I have accomplished much. I can honestly tell you that I retain the fledgling part of my name. What I have learned is to just go with my gut…….and assume that if it was really that hard, all those people who developed it independently across the globe, well, wouldn’t have.

Basically, I press the treadle on the wheel and let the fibers go when I think they have whirled around on each other enough to not fall apart completely. I like to imagine there is instinct for this. Planning helps too. If I pull apart the fibers in a long strand (so-called pre-drafting) then it is already mostly there…..they just need the twist and a little help pulling apart along the thick bits.

The first full spindles of single ply fiber are so rewarding. It has all the potential wound up in there. There are no final ply issues or yardage concerns but the whole color palette of the fiber is laid out, plain as day. Singles are terribly romantic to look at. I think that this roving suits the color on the wheel very nicely.

I have not been spinner only – my spouse has also helped me to properly merchandise my latest etsy products. He created an amazing wee box for Caution: Live Yarns!

I guess that at least once, in the life of every blog – there is a gap of time that posts slow or stop altogether. I am sorry blog, for ignoring you. I honestly had a lot of things to do. There were handknit Christmas patterns:

The shawl is from this Knitty pattern – highly recommended it. It was a fun knit! The scarf is a hybrid of Jean Greenhowe-style animal heads and my strange imaginings for a man’s scarf. (it’s a market bull and bear, for those who wondered)

There was also gratuitous fiber purchasing in the form of Louet silk/merino in Lichen.
There was also a garden filled with yummy treats, some of them too soon gobbled by humidity and heat
So you see, there were genuine excuses. Things that were also fun. Reasons for not spinning the alpaca like I was supposed to…….

With the best of intentions, I have washed and carded the majority of Oreo, the black and white alpaca mama from the big bag. I started to spin what I can only describe in my amateur interpretation as her short and crimped fuzz bounty and am loving the softness. So many lines in the things I have read lend a certain amount of importance to the length of the locks you spin (staple length?) and hers are not too long but bathed in softness. The resulting single is still beset with some lumps and partial variation in thickness but I am determined to make two bobbins full and spin them together to make beautiful yarn. I have carded them after many minutes spent doing what one website calls monkey-picking – using my fingers to pull out the white bits from her fleece (she was named oreo for a reason) and any rogue pieces of grass or whatever – and rolled them in the worsted way (widthwise rather than lengthwise).

As far as set up, I have devoted an inherited tea cart to holding my spinning and knitting in the living room. A quick trip to a local craft store and I had one of those flat , square baskets to hold my roving. As I meandered through the aisles, a woman noticed my basket and asked me if I had read the newspaper. I replied that I had not to which she responded with an amazing declaration that there had been an article extolling the organizing virtues of baskets. “They can hold magazines and other stuff”, she told me. I was gobsmacked. I told her, “I just needed a basket. This was premeditated”. It was surreal. My husband pointed out that the news article was correct. Baskets have been used for organizing – for about six thousand years. We purchased and left. His archaeological accuracy aside, it was weird – no one should need a newspaper to tell them how to use a basket.

The basket use was short lived once it was filled with roving (carded bits of fleece rolled widthwise and predrafted…I think). I spun. And then I turned to knitting. I recently acknowledged that it may be the majority of a decade since I last knit a sweater for my spouse. He selected some wool and a pullover pattern from an older issue of Interweave. Spinning may have to give way to some knitting time as I have ground to make up. At this rate, we would be married half a century and he would only have five or six sweaters to show for it.

…or a week. It has now been seven days – give or take a couple of hours – since I started down this road. It is an incredible thing to see what changes as you learn and also how restrained you can be when it comes to the urge to pet and/or cuddle the first two ply skein that looks so fluffy and soft and inviting.

I give you the yarn bounty:They are organized from right to left in order of completion with a sock stuck in for the day where I began to worry about wobbly spinner’s knee and the funny click my ankle was making. I told my husband that I will have a new rule so as not to overdose on spinning – knit one day, spin the next. Barring work interruptions, I figure that will allow me to process all the alpaca goodies sometime before mid-winter when I hope to present a multi-coloured shawl to the gifter of fleece.

I hope that it will seem interesting to her; a shawl with all the natural colors from cream to black to brown of her alpaca flock (are they a flock?). That is my beginner spinning goal. I also had my first fleece coveting experience today. Never having spun before and then being chock full of fleece, I have never looked on fleece sites to shop.

A quick peek at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair website led me to a woman – Miss Babs – website which has all manner of beautiful colorways and dyed roving & top for spinners. These things will, of course, come later, when my singles lack the slubs (wee patches of thickness along my attempts at thin, even spinning).

I can still look though.