sweetgeorgia

Thankspinning

There has been much spinning and much dyeing. How can you not be thankful when you wake up in the morning and see this in the living room:

I’ve decided that I love, love, love Blue-Faced Leicester (BFL). It’s said to be the softest of the long wools and takes up dye beautifully. It’s much less prone to felt than merino and fluffs up amazingly when you pre-draft it. Awesome, I say. The top-left and bottom-right corners of the photo are BFL. The pink/brown and the red/orange/brown fibre is Superwash Merino — another new favourite. I love things that don’t felt!

And yes, there’s more sock yarn in the shop… along with some new handspun yarn. Like this merino wool that was dyed by the Fleece Artist:

Singles are crazy when they come off the bobbin — then you set the twist and they straighten out and behave themselves nicely! I’d love to keep this skein, but I know, being a “Winter”, it’s just not my colour!?! sob…

I need to get these yarns off the bobbins (or buy more bobbins!). The multicoloured bobbin at the bottom is the above merino bulky singles. The two orange/gold coloured bobbins are also Fleece Artist merino (courtesy of my brother!) and I might ply the two together. In the top-right hand corner is a bobbin of superwash merino that I dyed blue/navy/brown. I’ve since Navajo-plied that one for socks!

And finally, that’s my spinning class homework. That’s right. Homework. It’s a four-ply cabled yarn and took about 6 or 7 hours to spin! Crazy. I spun four very fine singles in “Fleece Artist 70% Kid/30% Silk”, then two-plied two singles, then two-plied the 2-plys together! Phew. It’s about 12 wpi which is now “worsted” weight. Wow. I think this week, we are spinning merino/tencel in class!

Oh yeah, there was knitting this weekend too — I am 3 rows (and a bazillion ends) from finishing Electra.

The man they call Jayne…

Here’s the finished Jayne hat!

I used 10.5 US (6.5 mm) needles for the hat and definitely got 3 sts per in for gauge. I loosely followed one of the Firefly hat patterns and cast on 64 stitches. It’s a BIG hat with a circumference of about 21-22″ around. I think this is too big and if I was really really OCD, I might actually rip the hat and re-knit it at 56 or 60 stitches. But I won’t. I also thought about felting it just slightly or trying to block it a teeny bit smaller, but I’m still unsure about that action. I don’t want it to end up being a thick felted fabric. Ugh.

This hat was super fast to knit — I had already cast on before we sat down for the Firefly marathon, but I think I finished it around the fifth episode.

Kaylee: I think it’s the sweetest hat ever.

Smooth, even and perfect

Wednesday night was the start of my new “Spinning & Dyeing” class at Place Des Arts. There’s quite range of experience in the class from people who have never seen a wheel or spindle before to those who are spinning and plying silks and wools. I assume this is because it’s kind of a continuous class…

But for this first class, Irene passed out some batts of washed and drum carded Romney wool — some of us started spinning right away while others learned to pick, tease, and card the wool with hand carders. The beginners then tried some drop spindles and by the end of the class were practicing treadling on big bulky spinners. To those of us that were spinning already, she encouraged us to spin “smooth, even and perfect” yarns — for now — because it is the jump point for learning to spin more experimental or novelty yarns.

In the same vein, I just received my copy of Pluckyfluff’s (Lexi Boeger) book “Handspun Revolution”. If you haven’t seen her yarns yet, take a peek — they are fun and inspired! (I love one skein that she made a while ago called “Koi Pond” that had orangey-red nubs spun into a turquoise base single yarn — it looked just like little goldfish in a stream!) It’s easy to pass this off as “bad” spinning — a lot of it is overtwisted, uneven, kinky or even felted — so I was delighted to read at the start of her book, “Challenge yourself to spin perfectly straight, even and balanced yarns. This is the only route to truly creative spinning. You have to understand the rules before you break them.”

She also encourages all spinners to do all their own fibre prep — learn to wash raw fleece, pick, tease, and card it yourself. This is to appreciate not only “what yarn is, but what it was“. The idea that if you only explore the narrow window of commercially and perfectly prepared top, you are missing out!

I also love her concept of how using handspun is a collaborative project or play between spinner and knitter. It seems so very… organic. But it also empowers spinners to make their yarns creative projects in their own right, rather than spinning soley to match commercially prepared yarns for use in knitted projects. Anyhow, I quite like this book (slim as it may be — although Mabel Ross’s “The Essentials of Handspinning” is even skinnier) and it gives new respect to cult spinning!

Here’s some of my own, not so cultish, spinning from this week:

And here’s some merino/tencel blend that I dyed up — this stuff spins up so shiny!

Happy Friday everybody!

Wild and Wooly

…that is, spinning “fat and hairy”… The yarn for the Jayne hat is spun up!

Usually when I spin, everything feels so precious. The need to make everything smooth, fine, even and perfect is overwhelming. So everything about spinning woolen yarns — unsupported long draw, fibres that are perpendicular — it’s the exact opposite of my nature. But spinning for this Jayne hat, I just relaxed and spun thicker singles, ignoring the slubs if they happened. It was cathartic.

The orange yarn was made by carding bits of yellow and red together and I think it worked quite nicely. Nothing is perfectly even either in colour or grist. It’s all so very rustic… I plied these using the homely centre-pull ball method and set it in hot water with some lavendar-scented Eucalan. The skeins bloomed beautifully into chunky, wooly and ta da, perfectly balanced yarns.

And of course, I did some dyeing and spinning this weekend, so the Sweet Shop is updated! There are handpainted sock yarns (including some in that blue/gold colourway) and also some handspun yarns. Take a look »

http://sweetgeorgia.etsy.com

Thursday, whatever.

I’m feeling a little scattered (scatter-brained) right now, finding it difficult to concentrate on one thing at a time. I mean a little knitting, a little spinning, a little dyeing. Tonight, we’re planning on going out to a movie so I’ll be able to get my sock finished — knitting plain stockinette in the round, in the dark, is the best. And I am but inches away from finishing the sleeve cap of the Manly Sweater, so hopefully that sweater will be blocked, seamed and done by the end of this weekend.

But anyway, while my mind is racing between current projects and future fall projects, here’s the sock yarn I dyed a few days ago:

Over the past few weeks since the trip to Salt Spring Island, I spun up a bit of angora fibre that I bought there. I found this fibre kind of “high-maintenance” — I mean the staple length is really quite short and the fibre itself is slippery, so I found that it would break often or I would lose my spinning… But here it is, plied and skeined.

It’s not yet finished — I’m planning on felting it a little as I’ve heard is good with angora. You alternate between washing the skein in hot water and ice cold water to shock it and then whap it against the table to agitate the fibres. All this helps the little slippery fibres hold together better. I guess it is all worth it though, this yarn is so soft!

And finally, I’ve gotten to the end of the first ball of KSH on Birch. It’s nearly six repeats. Notice the new needles? They are blue! (And the 5mm ones come in lovely lavendar!) They are Boye circulars — less than half the cost of Addi’s. I bought these on Wendy’s recommendation and they are actually quite nice for KSH. The tips are pointier, the painted aluminum finish is not as slippery, and the join is sufficiently smooth. I like. The only thing I don’t like is the cord — it’s stiffer and has a mind of it’s own.