sweetgeorgia

A little less tomato juice, a little more “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

Didn’t you know… this blog is 98% knitting and spinning and 2% vampire slaying?

Anybody who adds a little slayage to their singing is ok by me, no matter how corny their video is. But back to being a productive grown-up, here’s the weaving in progress…

This is the handpainted silk/wool warp that was overdyed in cochineal. We had a little adventure deciding on what to use for the weft… weaving short sections with some plain weave with silk noil, some twill with more handpainted silk, twill with black boucle, twill with natural-coloured silk/camel… It seemed like most weft yarns would take over the fabric and obscure the handpainted-ness of the warp yarns. Even the plain, natural coloured silks were taking over with their high shine factor… So I finally decided on using a single strand of natural tussah silk noil (not shiny). It blends right in so that the warp yarn really becomes noticeable. But it also helps to desaturate the whole fabric a bit.

The scarf is actually all cut off the loom and finished now — I did a twisted fringe to finish both sides (after ripping out the test weft sections) and washed the scarf in Eucalan. It’s all ready for close ups this weekend.

That basket is full of carded puffs of Gotland now… and I’m still not done carding! Even with an electric carder, the process is still slow slow slow. I think it took me about 2 hours to card 150g of fibre. Maybe I’m being too fussy about it, but I’m flick carding both ends of the staples and then feeding in “cut” side first. But being fussy allows me to do a single pass rather than splitting the first batt and then re-carding a second time. Garbage in, garbage out, right?

The handspun Gotland project is going to be a big blanket woven on a floor loom at Place des Arts. They have a loom that’s already warped and ready for blankets. All I have to do is tie on each of the “ends”. So that’s 450 ends at 10 ends per inch to make an approximately 45″ wide blanket. I will probably do 3 yards of warp. So I need to spin about 1350 yards of DK to worsted-weight yarn for the warp… And then another 2500-2700 yards for weft. I think that’s enough to keep me busy for now.

Going Loopy

My first efforts in spinning bouclé were pretty ugly, but this is my more recent attempt:

Spinning loop bouclé is something I need, and want, to practice. There’s a grace to be had in whipping mohair singles around a core yarn in just the right way so that it forms those pretty loopy circles.

This was my three-step process. Spin crazy handpainted adult mohair top into a Z-singles (spinning clockwise). Then take those singles and “ply” it together with an already plied core yarn (I used black wool from the school stash) — this is plying counterclockwise or “S”. When I say “ply”, I really mean pushing the mohair (held in the left hand) at right angles to the core yarn (held in the right hand) so that it wraps around loosely and forms little loops. Finally, take that loopy plied yarn and ply it again clockwise with a binder thread (I used copper-coloured metal thread).

I usually run in to problems with bouclé because I spin the initial mohair singles too thinly. Then when I try plying it with the core yarn, it refuses to loop and instead plies back on itself forming little “eyelash” bits. So, I just need to remember to spin a little thicker and not so hard twisted. Ta da, yarn that looks like Christmas lights.

Adventures with Bugs

Thank you so much for all your lovely comments about the shawl! It is so satisfying to complete something finally! I’m trying to use the momentum from knitting the shawl to finish my handspun Lotus Blossom Shawl…

Sunday’s post with the mystery photo was, yes, cochineal bugs. I took the opportunity while the DH was away in Ottawa to wash some smelly fleece and dye with bugs…

Cochineal is a scale insect that feeds on a kind of cacti in Mexico and South America. The red pigment is from carminic acid which the insect produces to repel its predators. Maiwa sells whole cochineal bugs which need to be ground up before using. At about $9 an ounce, it’s expensive stuff… compared to say, $2 an ounce for madder.

I was gifted a “Magic Bullet” food processor from my father-in-law who bought one and got one free… He seemed less than enthusiastic when I said it would be perfect for grinding up bugs for dyeing. I should learn to keep my thoughts to myself sometimes! But it is fantastic for grinding the bugs to powder in seconds.

Maiwa’s instructions recommend 4 to 8% WOF (per weight of fibre) of cochineal. Since it’s so expensive, I opted to go with 4% — so about 17.5 g for the pound or so of Gotland I was dyeing. Oh, here’s the raw Gotland fleece:

I basically weighed a big chunk of raw fleece, washed it with Dawn and let it dry so that I could weigh it again afterwards and figure out what I would be left with*. In this case, I lost about 20% of weight after washing the fleece — that’s all dirt and grease! I was left with just over a pound of fleece that went into this dyepot. It was mordanted with both alum and cream of tartar because I wanted a real fuschia red/pink colour. Without the cream of tartar, I think the dye ends up a warmer red.

The powdered cochineal was boiled up with a touch of vinegar and some water for about 15 minutes and decanted. I repeated this two more times, so there were in total three decantings of the cochineal. I saved the powder that was left in the pot for a future dye session (maybe mixing it with logwood or lac?). The decanted dye solution was returned to the pot and I added the mordanted fleece:

The fleece dyed slightly unevenly with the tips, of course, being a lot darker than the rest. Since I know the yield (80% of raw fleece) for this fleece, I’m not planning on washing and drying anymore of it. I’ll wash it, mordant it right away and then drop it in the dye pot. The extra drying and wetting times just increases the handling of the fleece and increases the chance that it will felt or get all messed up.

Even with just 4% dye, the dye pot wasn’t even close to exhausting, so in mild panic, I dropped in some other skeins of yarn in an attempt to exhaust the pot. There was a handful of silk noil, some corriedale wool roving and two skeins of stuff I had handpainted…

None of this extra yarn or fibre was mordanted, but still took on a lot of colour. The lime green portions of the skein turned into a really interesting green-gold colour — not really something you could easily mix from synthetic dye powders… it just seems like a whole other layer of colour. Very very interesting.

I’m using this skein as warp in my next weaving project. And even after adding these extra fibres to the pot, the pot still didn’t exhaust. So not wanting to be wasteful, I kept the rest of the stock for next time!

* My bad: Yesterday I termed this “degreased wool per raw wool” as “shrinkage” — but shrinkage is loss of yardage. If anybody knows the proper term for this (yield?), let me know please!