Rambouillet Wool

 This morning I finished carding my washed Rambouillet wool.  The stuff is springing and fine. The cotton handcards were just the right tool.  Two hours later, my bobbin was no longer empty, but my rolag bag sure was!
I was spinning a medium weight woolen yarn.  The rambouillet was smooth and easy to spin!  I can't wait to do some more!

Holey Yarn

 Check out the hole I discovered in my yarn!  The hole is huge--3/16" across!  This is yarn that was balled years ago and has been stored in the open in my craft room.  When did some bug eat its way in --or out--of this ball?  Your guess is as good as mine!

As soon as I discovered the hole, I put the ball in a ziploc bag and put it outside in the freezing weather.  After a day or two I brought it inside and started unwinding the ball to see what I could salvage.  It turned out that the hole was about a 1/4" deep.  I unwound from the center of the ball and had a lot of usable yarn.  I'm saving the external wraps (the ones that have been chewed) and may be able to use them as texture in some handspun yarn.

Color Block Vest

The last issue of Spin Off Magazine had the pattern for Susan Douglas' "Color Block Vest".  The idea behind the vest was that Susan often spun only bits and pieces  and never had enough handspun yarn for a sweater.  Rather than change her spinning habits, she designed a sweater vest to use bits and pieces.  Pretty cool!

I was feeling extremely selfish over the holidays and cast on a project for me.  The sides and edges are a purple; the back and fronts are a variegated purple & green yarn.

The back (which isn't visible in this photo) is beautiful!  The color repeats in the yarn change nicely with the variations in the stitch pattern.  The front, well, I don't like it.  The color changes are ok, but the overall effect doesn't have the slim, trim image of the original.  Right.  My body is not the same as the mini dressform used for the original photo at the top.  My color choices are not as well chosen as the original either.  I think the dark stripes on the front provide accents in in-opportune places.

On the other hand, the vest blocked nicely on my duct-tape dummy.  It's the first time I've used the dummy.  It was nice to have it!

And, a last, interesting note...This vest weighs a ton!  The yarn must have been spun in my typical, dense, worsted style.  It has given me a good reason to practice spinning lofty woolen yarns!

Fleece Blanket

After our wonderfully warm and cuddly Christmas blanket got put away for the season, my husband requested a warm and cuddly replacement blanket.

I just happened to have some fleece in my stash and in a few days pieced together this sunshine blanket.  It has been a hit!  It's warm, it's fuzzy....and if it falls to the floor I don't complain (as opposed to my nice, handwoven blanket that I dislike finding on the floor!).

We love sunshine!

The yellow rays are machine stitched to the red background.  The last piece was the central yellow disc.  The back is plain (no rays) with a second yellow disc.  The red fleece started life as a poncho for my father-in-law. Apparently it didn't work right for him and it was given to me (with neck hole nicely finished).  The sun does a great job of covering the neck hole (I did cut off the finished edging) and no one is the wiser--except you and me. :)

Color Inspiration & Blending on a Drum Carder

I stumbled across a new-to-me website where four dyers have created a "Color Co-op".  Each of the four artists use the same photo as inspiration and interpret the photo with dyes on fiber and yarn.  Members of the co-op receive yarn or fiber from the different artists over time.  It sounded really cool!  

The top photo is the inspiration for their Jan.2012 colorways.   It inspired me!  In fact, I was already to hit the dyepots when I remembered that I had some blue wool in my stash.  "Some" turned out to be an understatement!  I had number of batches of blue in my stash!  The two main colors were  "brilliant blue" and an "aqua/turquoise" blue.  Instead of the dye pots, I pulled out the drum carder.

My first step was to identify some of the colors from the photo.  I used photoshop and the "eyedropper tool" to pick five colors from the photo.  Then I made a swatch where the amounts of each color were proportional to the amount of each color in the photo.  I created another swatch where I added a few more colors in the light range and then started my blending.

The basic blends are:

Sky blue:  pale pink; aqua & brilliant blue, white.
Med. blue: aqua & brilliant blue & some white.
Mountains blue: magenta, brilliant blue, and dark grey
Black: dark grey plus a bit of magenta & brilliant blue for visual depth
Water blue: aqua & brilliant blue, dark grey

Each roving was carded to open it up and make blending easier.  The weight of the wool for each color was calculated and the component colors were weighed.  Then the colors were blended (big sections like the sky and water were separated into multiple batts to fit on the carder).

The direct comparison between the original photo and the photo of my carded wool shows a marked difference in overall color.  The photo is much more uniform, almost monochromatic, purple/blue than my wools.  Aside from that, I am pleased with the variation in colors that blending produced.  I can easily imagine sky, mountains, something dark (a road perhaps) and then water from the wools.

December Quilt Block

December's quilt block is the "Ohio Star".  I snuck in some of the fabric left over from the original quilt for the points of the stars.  

Here are the twelve blocks together (in no particular order).  I will be working on finishing the tops in 2012--I plan on setting the blocks on point and adding some sashing between them--and maybe, just maybe I'll start some quilting too!

Evolutions

I came across these "evolutions" at Twisted Fiber Art's website the other day.  I love the transitions from one color to the next and I love how the overall color progresses without returning to the original color.  This particular colorway reminds me of the blue sky over sand hills.

I'm not sure how I want to use this ideas in my own dyeing.  I usually dye rovings (which Twisted Fiber Art will also dye into evolutions), but I'm not sure if I really need to put all those colors on the same roving to get this type of end result.  In theory, I could just spin light blue and then purple and then dark brown and then tan and then yellow without having to have dyed them together.

Sarracenia leucophylla hybrid (aka Pitcher Plant)

While I think about that, here is a photo from KathyW's Web Space.  Check out the color evolution/gradation in the flower petals!

Alpaca Scarf

 This looks like the start of a weaving project.  Technically, it is the middle of a much larger project.  You see, a friend of mine owns alpacas.  Black, white, tan, beautiful alpacas! A year or two ago I talked her into giving me a bag of fiber so I could show her what could be done with the soft, wonderful stuff!  So I did.  I combed and carded and spun and knit and wove and gave her an idea of what could be done with her fibers.  This year, she sent the fibers off for processing.  The roving is luscious!  I spun 4oz of the tan and roughly 2oz each of the black and the white for this project.

 The scarf wove up quickly and I am pleased with how it turned out.  The tan yarn was set at 14 epi and the black and white together at 12 epi.  The structure is a simple 2/2 twill.  The ends have a twisted fringe, but no hemstitching.

I tried the scarf on and discovered a problem. It was scratchy!  See the culprit in the photo?  There are thicker hairs in the alpaca that I hadn't paid much attention to while I spun.  I should have paid attention!  I was able to pull many of them out of the finished scarf--which is a little disconcerting....can the whole thing be pulled apart fiber by fiber?  I think that these thicker hairs were easier to pull out because they were thicker and less tightly twisted into the yarn.  I hope so!

The alpaca scarf has gone to its new home where it will be loved by a mutual friend of both the alpaca owner and the weaver/spinner.

The Emperor's New Clothes

 I feel like I am weaving the emperor's new clothes.  There is a pattern in this piece, but I can't see it!  More realistically, I can see that there is something there, but I can't see the pattern I was expecting to see.  After trying two different packing densities, I gave up, checked my draft on the computer and went to bed.  I'm debating cutting this off the loom and seeing if wet finishing will make the huck lace patterns show.

Check out this photo of me threading the heddles.  As I sat down to work at the mighty wolf, I realized that the reed was going to be in my way.  So I unscrewed the top bar and took the reed out.  Now why didn't I think of that long ago with my baby wolf?  It worked great to reach forward without reaching over the reed!

Mighty Wolf 8H loom

 Thursday night as I was looking at various things on-line I checked the classifieds at Weaving Indiana.  Lo and behold, a friend of mine was looking to trade looms--her 36" wide Mighty Wolf for a 26" wide Baby Wolf.

A few emails later and my Baby got packed up for moving and was replaced with this beautiful 8H Might Wolf!

I am thrilled!  In fact, I'm off to my books to decide which project goes on the loom first! :)

Skeinsgiving -Strauch Petite

This "red, white, & blue" batt was my favorite.  The main fiber is a super soft wool.  It came out of Beth's huge fiber baskets and I didn't ask what was in it.  It is soft enough to be merino and I wonder if it has some angora in it.  I blended it with a tiny bit of white silk and added a touch of a blue wool and a touch of a pink/maroon wool.  It was so pretty!

The carder that I used was my favorite too: a Strauch Petite.  It was easy to crank, easy to clean, and made lovely batts (I fed the blue and pink through prior to adding them to the blend).  Ahhh.  It was very nice.  Guess what I've added to my wish list?

Thanks again to Beth at the Spinning Loft in Howell, MI for "Skeinsgiving" and the "Batt Bar".  It was great fun!

Darn

 Today I tackled the collection of handknit socks that were in need of repair.  Darn.  Darning isn't hard.  It isn't exciting either, but it takes less time to darn my socks than to spin and knit a new pair.  So, here's to darning.

This sock got two repairs:  a knit-like stitch up near the toes and a replacement flap knit to cover a gaping hole at the heel.  I didn't have any more of the original yarn, so I used  a chain-ply (3-ply) sample in bright yellow and orange. The flap was knit on 6 stitches that I picked up from the heel, increased to cover the hole and then sewn to the sock. We'll see how well this works.

The knit-like stitch is basically a duplicate stitch where I used a needle and the yarn to re-create the knit stitches.  The 3-ply patch yarn is bigger than the original yarn and it looks a bit odd.

 Here is the same type of repair on a different sock.  (Did I mention that I had a stack of these to do?)  This repair was done with the same yarn as the original and hides nicely.  The photo to the left shows how the original knitting was hanging together by a thread.  It's easiest to do the duplicate stitch repair on holes like this.

 There was a big hole in the heel of these socks too, but I wasn't willing to do another knit flap so these socks got the "weave across the hole" type of patch.  Yarn was sewn across the hole and then woven the other direction to cover the hole. --These are my acrylic house slippers. I don't really care about them as long as they keep my feet warm.  If they were handspun, I might have knit another flap.

 And here is the trio of non-holey socks (well, except for the hole for my foot!) Ready to be returned to use!  Whew!

Skeinsgiving-Fancy Kitty Drum Carder

These photos are from the batt I carded on the Fancy Kitty drum carder up at The Spinning Loft at Beth's "Batt Bar".   The dark green fiber is bamboo.  The glitter is firestar and there is a tiny bit of pink wool.  The bamboo behaved very differently than the wool that day.  When I pulled off pieces of the bamboo roving the ends splayed out away from each other (like fine hair with tons of static electricity).  The wools didn't do that!

I used the Fancy Kitty drum carder at the table.  It wasn't my favorite of the three drum carders, but it worked just fine. (Sorry.  I know that's not a great endorsement....but, it worked.  It didn't wow me. It just worked.--Go to Beth's and try it out.  And then check out the Ravelry Fancy Kitty Lovers group because they are having a drawing for one of their carders for Christmas.)

This is how the mini-skein and tiny bit of reserve batt looked on Monday after I finished spinning.

 This snarl is what it looked like today (Wed) when I found it to take more pictures!  What happened?  I think the fiber and the skein got pushed aside together and the staticky bamboo fibers had a party.  (I also think I got a lesson about the importance of putting things away and not leaving them out on the desk to be pushed aside by the next person who needs the desk.)

The skein is now wound up nicely and the bit of batt tucked into a tiny ball.  One more fluffy batt to spin! (Thanks again, Beth.  The batt bar was loads of fun!)

Skeinsgiving Batt--Cotton Blend-Louet

 The day after Thanksgiving, Beth at "The Spinning Loft" in Howell, Michigan had a sale on fibers and a "batt bar".  At the bar were three different drum carders and four huge (bigger than bushel size!) baskets of fiber to play with. The name "Skeinsgiving" is what Beth called the day.

This batt was my third dip into the baskets.  It is mostly cotton--a blue turquoise and a darker blue turquoise--with some dark green bamboo and a bit of firestar/nylon and pink wool.  I carded it on the Louet carder that Beth had out.

 I played around with the batt a bit as I spun it.  The cotton was not well carded prior to my blending everything else with it.  I tried putting it through the carder first (so it got at least two passes) but it is so short that it didn't get carded very well!

The Louet carder did have a very nice adjustment knob for the licker in drum that made it very easy to adjust!

I ended up just attenuating or pulling on the batt to make it spinable.  Spinning it without attenuating left too much texture for my taste.  Hand carding it blended the colors too much for me. When I spin dyed cotton slivers I usually do this same sort of attenuation.  Pinch the fibers with the pinching fingers about 2" apart and pull gently.  Do this along the length of the fiber prep.

 Here is my very pretty, very nicely textured three ply yarn.  I like this!  It does a good job of showing color and texture and looking like a solid yarn.

Here is the two ply yarn.  I ran out of one spool of singles before the other two, so I made a two ply.  I don't like it as much as the three ply.  It looks scrawny--kind of underfed--compared to the three ply.  The bumps in the singles stand out more in the two ply than in the three.

It's too late to spin any more tonight....but I have two more batts to play with...Thanks for the Skeinsgiving, Beth!

Quilt Blocks--November

Two blocks of one orientation; one of another.  Guess who goofed.  Yup.  Me. 

I was considering making the blocks different by changing the orientation of the green hour-glasses, but this change was entirely by accident (shh!  Don't tell anyone!).  At least it will help make the three quilts distinguishable!

Scherenschnitte aka "Chicken Soup"

 My good friend Marybeth called this morning.  "I've got some chicken soup for you.  It will help you feel better.  Will you be home this morning and I'll bring it over?"

Now, I'm not sick, but we've been dealing with a whole slew of interesting challenges and I have been a bit under the weather.  And, I know Marybeth enough that when she has something to bring over, the correct answer is "sure! come on over."

Today was no exception.  I didn't need any soup, but Marybeth is a wonderful cook and an excellent canner....and I really expected soup.

 Instead of soup, I received three beautiful, framed scherenschnitte or paper cuttings.  Where Marybeth finds the patience and the steadiness to make these beautiful things I will never know, but I am so awed!

Before she had even left I was staring at my walls trying to decide what to take down to make room for these when she said, "They are for your shop."

I don't have a shop....yet. Maybe someday.  I'm seriously thinking about a shop.  Wouldn't it be fun?  Do you think anyone would drive to Crawfordsville to take weaving, spinning, & dyeing classes or to buy yarn?

Until my "real" shop is open I'm going to have to find a place for these three bowls of chicken soup.  I feel very loved!

Handspun, Handknit Mittens

Just about the time I finished his new green striped hat, my son lost his mittens.  That was after we discovered that the hat was just a bit too short and added earflaps.  What were the chances that I would have enough handspun left to make two (matching) mittens?  The mittens are the "Kennebunk Wooly Bear Mittens" by Robin Hansen from the 1987 edition of Homespun Handknit.  I like the pattern (this is the third pair I've made) and usually make it without the loops of yarn inside.  And, yes, I did just have enough yarn!

Here's my "ninja" mitten man--he says they are ninja mittens because it's hard to make a fist when he has them on, so his hands are in ninja form.

Matchless

It followed me home, Mom.  Can I keep it?  Please?

My Mother-in-Law tells the story of watching my husband half carry, half drag a cat up the walk and into the house.  He may have been four or five.  Once the cat was inside, he turned to his mom and said, "It followed me home.  Can I keep it?"

Well, I went to my local weaving store and test drove a Matchless.  Then I placed an order for one.  Then I drove out to pick up the wheel.  "It followed me home."  I think I'll keep it!

Cotton Intensive

This is my last set of samples for the cotton presentation next week.  The lower three samples are plain weave; the upper three are twills (it's hard to see that in this photo).  Each sample has a different thread density or sett.  My favorite?  Upper right--it's the twill at the closest sett (36 epi for 10/2 cotton).  I love how it shows the warp colors! 

Wool Preparation for Spinning

Preparing wool for spinning

This started out as an experiment to see how well I liked Judith Mackenzie McCuin's methods for washing fleece (from Teach Yourself Visually Handspinning).  It turned out to be an exercise in what not to do with fibers of multiple lengths!

The wool is from a sheep named "Lambert".  I believe he was a Cotswold lamb.  His wool, being just a lamb, has a short staple--about 2" long--and there are lots of shorter bits in the fleece.

After soaking and washing the wool per Judith's technique, I let it dry and then started to prepare it for spinning.

Here is what you should NOT do with a fleece like this:  Don't put it through the drumcarder and expect a nice, smooth, fluffy batt.  What I got was a very textured batt.  The little pieces didn't get carded smooth.  I think there were just too short to get caught properly on the teeth.

I ended up taking the very textured batts and combing them with my Louet mini combs.  There was a lot of waste, but the resulting fiber is smooth and looks like it will spin well.  It doesn't have much luster, but at least it is not full of bumps and unexpected stuff.

In the photo, counter clockwise starting at the bottom right corner are (1) drumcarded batts, (2)-in the yellow tub--combed fiber, and (3) -to the upper left--the waste from combing the drumcarded batts.

I think I learned a lesson.  Don't try to card a mix of fiber lengths and expect a smooth result.  (This might be a great technique for making a textured yarn!)