sweetgeorgia

February Fibre Club + Luxurious Fibres

It’s quite thrilling to be surrounded by a mountain of freshly dyed Wensleydale fibre for our new fibre club…

Wensleydale is crazy stuff. I was originally drawn to it when a fellow guild member was spinning up some hand dyed Wensleydale… it was kind of glossy and shiny like mohair, but slightly lighter and loftier. And it took colour so well! Since that time last year, I’ve spun up Wensleydale in several forms. From very fine 2-ply to make a thin but strong sock yarn to thick bulky lumpy bumpy singles that are weighty and glossy all at the same time. The fibre itself has a very long-staple and is very lustrous with a broad, wavy crimp. Wensleydale fibre is generally considered the finest of all the longwool breeds. When you first start spinning it, you’ll immediately notice the long staple length and adjust your spinning and drafting. However, you spin it, I hope you enjoy the colours! They blend upon spinning and create a lovely heathered and mottled look which I find a little mesmerizing.

And if you have some time tomorrow afternoon, think about joining us for the “Spinning Little Luxuries” session on Saturday, February 7th from 1pm to 4pm. We have space, four different wheels you can try out (Schacht Matchless, Schacht Ladybug, Louet Victoria, and Ashford Joy), and a TON of new fibre… including the cashmere and silk 50/50 fibre above. We just received two shipments of luxury fibre including yak, baby llama, black diamond carbonized bamboo, soysilk, silk+merino, camel+silk, cashmere+silk, tussah silk, and cultivated bombyx silk. You can still sign up for the class here: http://shop.sweetgeorgiayarns.com/collections/classes-at-the-studio/products/spinning-203-little-luxuries and I’ll also be offering many of these undyed luxury and exotic fibres on the shop site here: http://shop.sweetgeorgiayarns.com/collections/undyed-fibre.

Happy spinning!

Surrounded by yarn. Please send help.

Despite catching some crappy flu on Sunday night almost immediately after I finished teaching my very first dye class, then nearly passing out at my brother’s birthday dinner, and tossing and turning through a long night of fever and chills last night, I’ve been experiencing a ferocious wave of energy. It’s partly an unsettled feeling of wanting to do so much and create so much while only having a limited amount of time… but it’s also a massive push from the energy I gained from being at the TNNA trade show. I met so many beautiful, young, talented women who had taken charge of their lives, their passion and their careers… women who had built or re-built their lives on the design and creation of contemporary textiles. It makes me feel like I could feel perfectly at home doing the same with my life. It also makes me feel like I should stop being so timid about how much I love what we do.

After spending a weekend rooming with Cecily Keim of Such Sweet Hands and Kim Werker, two girls who wrote the book on crochet, I came home with a pressing need to crochet something… anything. Currently, I’m obsessed with the Babette Blanket. Pictures soon, if I ever stop ripping out what I make. These girls could make a crochet-convert out of anyone. I did teach Cecily how to drop spindle very quickly… and then she did order a new loom from the Glimakra booth. That would be a double yay. I’m excited to see her excited about trying out weaving. Her eyes were seriously sparkly with the thought of being able to mix crochet and handwoven fabric. I love that.

I’m also currently obsessed with spinning this silk/merino fibre that I dyed last Thursday. It still has bits of undyed roving which give the spun yarn a bit of lightness and sparkle.

And I have grand plans for this simple, kettle dyed olive and apple green coloured merino wool.

But this wave of uncontrolled energy has me running between projects, creative and admin, all day long. I don’t stop for lunch until about 3 in the afternoon when I remember that my stomach is empty. I’ve ripped and re-cast on for some really silly project about six times in the last two hours… while also warping the Spring loom with new Malabrigo yarn, dyeing a pound of cashmere/silk yarn, weaving mistakes into my bfl scarf, snapping other warp threads on the Baby Wolf, and packaging about two dozen silk/merino fibre packets. All the while, thinking about the sportweight sock, Trekking sock, and my brother’s hat that I’m knitting… and not thinking about the February baby and Baby Surprise that I am also knitting. Forget accounting (for now).

So in the midst of all this (gentle) madness, I need to remember that I am not a machine and that while some things require my hands and eyes, other things do not and should not. This hand dyer and business owner seeks test knitters at all skill levels. If you are interested in doing some test knitting, please drop me a line at felicia [at] sweetgeorgiayarns [dot] com and let me know what you like to knit and what you are typically comfortable knitting. I would love to hear from you.

Also in the mix is a weaving workshop that will be happening on Wednesdays at the Studio starting early February. If you are interested in working through some of the very basics of weaving and getting started with either a 4-shaft loom or rigid heddle loom, I’d love to hear from you!

Now, back to that Babette Blanket.

Using your handspun

Sometimes when I’ve spent a zillion hours dyeing the fibre, spinning fine singles yarn, then plying the yarn (ending up with half or even a third of the original yardage) and then soaking and setting the yarn… I feel done. All I want to do is just want to rest and stare at the lovely yarn I’ve spun. My eyes travel along each strand of the yarn, inspecting the twist, the consistency (if any!), and the oh so subtle shift in hue. It’s literally mesmerizing. And then the handspun yarn that I’ve lifted to “too precious” heights ends up sitting there on the shelf for ages, admired and loved from afar. It’s too bad, because handspun yarn calls out to be used.

When you made the yarn, didn’t you have things in mind for it? Didn’t you design it as a 3-ply instead of 2-ply because it would be stronger? Incorporate nylon binder for added durability? Did you strip the handpainted roving lengthwise or crosswise to select for colours? Of course. When you spun the yarn, you designed it for a purpose that was already in your mind. Sure, sometimes it’s relaxing to spin mindless bits of gobbledygook, but most of the time, I have reasons for all the teeny tiny decisions I made during the handspinning process.

Lately, I’ve been going through my handspun yarn stash determined that no yarn is too precious to use. And so some of the very first Navajo-plied handspun yarn that was originally destined for socks is now being knit into Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Baby Surprise Jacket. Actually, my thinking was that this lovely yarn was too nice to be pushed into boots and worn underfoot. Now, I do think that I’ve muffed the instructions for the jacket though… forgetting where I left the instruction book for a few days and trying to figure it out on my own… never a good idea. I see that they have these BSJ “Row Keeper” notes on Ravelry… seems like a good idea. I’ll have to go back and start counting.

Handspun yarns in weaving… I think I had always heard not to put handspun yarn in the warp, but really, it’s about making decisions while spinning that will make your handspun suitable for weaving. Warp yarn needs to be strong (handspun or not, cashmere yarn in the warp REALLY blows), so that it can withstand high tension and abrasion by the reed and heddles. So make your joins in the handspun yarn nice and strong. Plying your yarn adds strength too, although Paula Simmons swears by singles yarn (says she’s never plied in her life). And if you really want to put slubby singles on your loom as warp, maybe try to find heddles that will stretch or bend to accommodate the yarn (like texsolv…).

Yesterday, I received a shipment of the new Schacht Cricket Looms and managed to quickly warp one up with my handspun merino and silk yarn. I know some weavers will turn up their noses at rigid heddle looms, especially one that is tiny and only 10″ wide, but rigid heddle weaving is seriously one of the quickest ways for people to see how weaving works. I was able to build the loom, warp it, and start weaving on it within an hour. It’s a good, inexpensive way to dip your toe in the water and see if the weaving bug bites. For me, it offers nearly instant gratification to see my handspun in woven fabric.

Handspun yarn is beautiful. It’s full of life and precious… but nothing is too precious to use and enjoy.

Accidents in carding.

It was not a happy meeting today, the skin of my hand and the sharp metal teeth of my electric drum carder. However, it was a fantastic meeting this morning with a lovely fellow fibre fanatic who inspired me to unleash said drum carder. But rather than obsessing about my scraped hand, let’s obsess about the pretty puffs that it produced…

I swear, I’ve been trying to be completely authentic with this fleece. Purchased in raw form, I was on my hands and knees by the bathtub washing this thing. Then, delicately dyeing chunks of it in natural dye… my plan was to then card and spin all of it into worsted weight yarn which would then end up in a handwoven blanket… and then I got bored.

I didn’t want to spin a whole pound of cochineal-dyed fleece and then another pound of logwood-dyed fleece, etc. So instead, I just started to randomly drop hand teased fleece into the feed tray of the carder. These are like happy accidents. I hope they’ll end up spinning into some nicely heathered and randomly coloured yarns. And, most inauthentic of all, I have a large chunk of fleece that I overdyed in green acid dye. I thought all those natural pinks and purples needed a hit of green.

And for a nice hit of colour to dream about this weekend…

The gift of silk and light.

Years and years ago, a fellow blogger, Freecia, was inspired to buy me something at a local fibre fair and send it to me as a gift. This was completely and totally out of the blue. She wrote me this lovely note and sent it along with a bit of the most divinely smooth and glowing cultivated bombyx silk fibre. Bombyx silk is still like the caviar of fibres to me. Absolutely delicious. I was very touched by her thoughtfulness and saved the silk package in my A-list stash… and sadly, it stayed there for years.

Late last fall, when I came to the supposed crossroads (why do I keep meeting this crossroad?) about whether or not I could continue to dye, I happened to find this gift and the note that accompanied it. And after my year-long hiatus, this was the first thing that inspired me to dye. I ventured down into the cold, dark laundry room and randomly dyed the package of silk in turquoises, blues, greens and browns. Distraught and sad at the time, I absentmindedly continued to pile on colour after colour… until I realized, “hey, this doesn’t look good at all”. The whole pile of silk seemed like it had been covered with murky, black dye and looked like a disaster. What a waste of a beautiful gift? I had ruined it! I was angry and disappointed with myself, even more convinced that I should just give away all my dye stuff and walk away.

Anyway, I set the dye with a bit of steam and then let it cool and exhaust. Days later when I finally went back down to the laundry room, I poked a bit at the crinkly dried silk roving and all this lightness came pouring out. I had been so absentminded that the dyes hadn’t penetrated all the way through the silk! I really was a dumbass. What I thought was a complete disaster, ended up being this beautiful, subtle mix of blues, warm greys and light. I spent a long time going over the roving, looking at the transitions between colours and values. Maybe I see things where there isn’t anything, but to me this was all about how things really are never as bad as you think they are. There is light in everything. Sometimes, I just need to be patient and I find light where I least expect it.

Thank you Freecia.

* Okay, honestly, my mistake was dousing the silk roving in too much vinegar to begin with. So as soon as I put dye on it, it would strike and fix to the outside of the roving. If you’re going to dye silk roving, use less vinegar in the soaking bath OR work the dye through the roving really well OR gently spread the roving apart so you can access all the bits of silk that need to be dyed. Personally, I don’t really mind undyed bits because it’s like “whitespace”. It offsets and makes the colours more interesting.