sweetgeorgia

The Good Girl

I went to Fibre Fest and didn’t buy anything.

Well actually, I did. I bought Michelle and Jo each a “Topknot” from Aurelia Wool & Weaving to see if it would push them over the edge and get them spinning. Heh. They both attended the drop spindle demo and then we spent much of the afternoon going from booth to booth to test the different spindles. The girls finally settled on a couple spindles made by Dave Smith/Shari Hamilton (similar to the one I bought in November at the Langley event). Michelle’s spindle is made from Jatoba. Sounds cool to me.

Over the five and a half hours that we spent shopping, I was such a good girl and didn’t buy anything. But Michelle bought me a ball of Bamboo yarn from Jane Stafford’s booth. Beautiful stuff. Laura Fry’s Weaving Studio was also offering a number of handpainted skeins of Bamboo yarn and I saw it woven up — lovely, soft and drapey fabric. And I heard it doesn’t pill!

I didn’t buy anything because, well, I have lots of stuff to play with already. So, on Sunday, I spent some quality time with my carder and some bombyx silk/merino top that I dyed a couple months ago. I’m in love with the carded batts at The Silkworker, so I decided to take my crumpled looking top and fluff it up with the drum carder.

I took one batt, stripped it vertically a couple times and spun it up from end to end. Andean plied the whole thing and washed the yarn. By evening, it was dry enough to knit up. This is going to be yet another Flower Basket Shawl (Evelyn Clark, Interweave Knits Fall 2004). I love how it feels kind of powdery and crunchy all at the same time — like fresh snow.

So handspun it hurts

Use your handspun. It’s the only way you can determine if your spinning is any good. I read that somewhere and it’s stuck in the back of my mind all the time now.

Last May, I bought 1/2 lb of Ashland Bay merino roving from Penelope Fibre. It sat in the stash for a few weeks because I was intimidated by it and worried that I might ruin it. I sucked up the courage to start spinning it laceweight. Finally, in January, I finished all the spinning and started knitting the Lotus Blossom Shawl.

This is my real first, large-scale handspun and handknit project… and here it is off the needles:

Lotus Blossom Shawl

• Pattern: from Fiddlesticks Knitting, designed by Dorothy Siemens
• Yarn: Handspun Laceweight Merino (I have about half of my spinning leftover! So I must have used about 100 g)
• Needles: US 6 / 4.0 mm Addi Turbos
• Changes: I used a smaller needle size just because I didn’t have any other needles handy, so I had to knit chart 2 twice to give the shawl extra length
• Finished Measurements: 70″ x 35″ (definitely smaller than the pattern specs, just slightly bigger than my blocking board).

What are things that people always say about spinning laceweight… the singles need lots of twist to hold the finer diameter, take all the tension off so that you can get lots of twist in, blah blah blah. This handspun is irregular in grist because I spun it over such a long period of time, was still getting a hang of spinning fine and also because I switched wheels part way through! But in some places, I think the yarn had so much twist that it became wirey and dense. If I were to do it again, I would spin it all a little softer.

This leads me to sampling. What a good idea. It’s like knitting a gauge swatch (which we always do, right?!). How does the fabric feel knit at that tension with those needles. How about going up a needle size, going down a size? Is the fabric too dense? Too drapey? When your knitting with commercial yarns, the yarn itself is taken out of the equation — it’s your job to just pick the most appropriate needle size for that yarn (ok, I’m oversimplifying). But when you are making the yarn, you need to look at how your yarn works up as fabric and if it is appropriate — will it be hardwearing? Will it pill or fuzz? All those variables are under your control now. So, spin a little bit, knit a little bit. See if you like it.

That’s what I’ve done with this new project:

There’s about 2 oz of Cashmere/Silk 50/50 top that I bought from Deep Color Studio this past November… Again, nervous about spinning it up and ruining it. So I tore off a little piece and spun it up laceweight using my new highspeed bobbins and whorl (I’m using 19.5:1 for spinning singles “from the fold” and 17.5:1 for plying). I washed the yarn and have started knitting it up in Evelyn Clark’s “Trellis Scarf” pattern from the Spring IK magazine. I figured if I liked it, I could keep going. If I didn’t like it, I could just go back and modify how I’m spinning it. As it turns out, I like it.

Dyeing for June

For the past few weeks, I’ve been planning to title this post “Cold Sweat”. Maybe because I remember that David Carson-esque magazine spread from a surf magazine featured in Riding Giants. More likely it was because dyeing for June was one of the most intimidating, yet exciting, experiences so far in my fibery adventures…

June was one of the very first people to respond when this flailing beginning spinner posted about her first yarn. Her writing made learning about spinning so accessible — her discussions on the use of storage bobbins, fleece washing, and that amazing handspun wedding shawl — well, inspiring to say the least. So when she asked me to dye some of her first handspun, well, it freaked me out.

All that dyeing of silk and wool/silk that I did recently? That was all to practice for dyeing June’s handspun. I had nightmares before dye day and was actually shaking a little during the dye process (or maybe that was just coffee). But it was so worth it. Go take a look at her close-ups… yeah, that’s her “beginner” handspun. And super soft and squishy too. Absolutely beautiful handspun yarn.

And here it is with my not-so-scary dye job:

Thanks June!

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.