sweetgeorgia

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 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.

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.

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!

Wicked

Isn’t it wonderful how you can be wicked tired, barely able to drive down Highway 1 without falling asleep, and then perk right up just talking about dyeing. Then actual dyeing causes you to go hyperactive… But who wouldn’t be all excited about this:

Last night in spinning/dyeing class we dyed up some raw Romney — I dropped in about 3/4 tsp of CIBA dye powder and the pot didn’t exhaust. There was about 12 oz of raw fleece and we calculated the dye powder at 1 tsp per pound — I guess we were so excited about putting colour on wool, we forgot a couple things: raw fleece is heavier than clean fleece (hence too much dye powder) and greasy fleece resists the dye (hence too much dye powder). But here it is — a wicked indigo, moody blues kind of colour — washed in Dawn and dried, kind of teased, and ready for carding. I think we are making boucle with this next week.

Wicked Carding

In other whoa technology kind of news, take a look at what a bunch of local girls have done to their Pat Green Beverly carder… How smart is that?! Maybe I should have called these girls before I went and bought my drum carder!