Pixie Claws/Wool Combs

I have a new set of wool combs!  These are "Pixie Claws" made by Beth Duncan.  I picked them up on Wednesday, and immediately got to work with some Border Leicester fiber I had washed.  The combs do a great job of opening the fiber, removing vegetable matter, and making ready-to-spin top.  I was  thrilled!  I ordered my set of combs with two rows of tines on one comb and three rows on the other.  My hope is that this will give me the extra combing power of multiple rows of tines, but the lighter weight of a comb that only has two rows of tines.  So far, I have kept the three row comb stationary and have used the two row comb in my hands.

 Here is the Border Leicester after a few passes (I think I was doing a total of four passes, then dizing the fibers off).  You can see the "D" shaped handle on the comb in the back.

 The combs have a holding block that allows them to be used as a hackle.

  Turning one comb upside-down on the other  gives a safe way to store the tines.(which, incidentally are not sharp, just pointed.)

 One comb has two rows, the other three (my preference).  These are the medium tines.

Color Blending for Fiber Artists

I was thrilled to have students sign up to take my color blending class at the Fiber Event this year.  My four students blended their own 12-hue color wheel, each color blended from combinations of red, blue, and yellow.  We spent some time identifying colors in photographs and discussing different ways to use those colors in a fiber project.  It was a fun class!  A big "thank you" to all my students!

Supplies ready to go for the Color Blending class at The Fiber Event.

Here are some photos from a color blending project I finished this week and took to show my class.  The little baggies in the center contain fibers.  The bag on top were the original colors.  The lower bag are the colors after I blended them.  I ordered the original colors into an approximate color wheel and then blended each color with some of the colors to each side of it.  50% of the blend is the "main color"; 25% of the blend is from the adjacent colors.  I love how blending the colors ties them together!

The scarf is a modification of the pattern "Wingspan" from Ravlery.  It was once a free pattern, but has been expanded and is no longer free.  I liked having the information on how to tweak the pattern that is included in the paid version.  The scarf is a series of shifted triangles which gives it a tendency to curve.  It didn't take much to make the scarf into a circle for this photo! -- The cast on color is the red; the cast off color is the red-purple.

Here's a closeup of the colors of the Merino fibers.  As dyed on top; as blended on the bottom.

Fiber Call Out!

In connection with "Grandma's Room", a teaching location here in town, I am helping with a Fiber Call Out for Montgomery County.  Knitters, crocheters, spinners, weavers, hookers, dyers of all levels (even wanna-be's!) are welcome to join us.  We will meet on Tuesday, Sept. 11th at Grandma's Room in Crawfordsville, IN at 6:30pm.  Hope to see you there!

Our demonstration for the evening is "Handling Wool".  We'll be playing with wool--looking at characteristics such as fiber length and crimp--and making hand felted balls to take home.  The wools in the photo, from right to left, are Cormo (pink), Shetland (copper), and unknown (dark brown).  Guess which one hand felts the best?  Yep!  The unknown wool.  I don't know it's breed.  I can take some guesses.  I can tell you what it's not...  But it rolled into beautiful felted balls with almost no work!  I can't wait to take it to the group on Tuesday!

Two Dye Jobs

I'm playing with dyes again. I used to do a fair bit of dyeing and would sell my dyed rovings on ebay. Then I hit a bad spell where most of the things I dyed felted...either that or they just looked awful!

So, after taking a break, I'm at it again! Pictured here are two variations on the same theme dyed with acid dyes. The outer two rovings are the initial dye job, and I felt that they were too pale. The inner two rovings are a repeat with 3x the amount of dye. Definitely more color there...I'm not sure about beauty!

It's time to take a dye class!

Flax Seeds

All my flax is out of the ground. This is the batch that I pulled early in the summer. It's dry...I don't know if it's truly retted yet.

I want to keep the seed for next years' crop, so I used my old dog comb (they are such handy tools!) and combed the top of the flax to remove the seed pods.

It's easy enough to get the seeds out of the pod one pod at a time--just roll the pod between your fingers, let the hull and seed drop into your palm, then blow gently and the hulls blow away. I just haven't figured out how to do that on a larger scale! Here's to learning new things! :)

Misc. Fiber Things

My friend was given some llama fiber by her neighbor. She was so excited!! We picked out the longer locks, washed it, carded it, and blended it with some wool roving. I was pretty tired by this point! But the fiber nests spin beautifully!












This is my great aunt modeling her new vest. It's an 8-harness diamond huck lace pattern with bamboo warp and weft.
















This was my "short vacation" project. A pair of mittens for my growing three-year-old. The yarn is a commercial wool/silk blend.













And this is a project for a friend. She won some alpaca fiber at a fiber festival last year--it is beautiful and soft!! The goal is to spin the fiber into a yarn that can be woven with the two blue yarns. What kind of yarn will that be? At this point I haven't decided! It may be a straight two ply alpaca; it may be cabled with the blue yarns...

Flax Flowers

Do you remember my empty square of garden? This is my little plot of flax. It's grown quite a bit since I last photographed it! The center of the square (4'x4') is flowering. The edges have a little more growing to do before they flower.
But, look at the beautiful blue flowers! They are delicate and they fold up in the evening as if to sleep!

Wool--Can there ever be too much?

This is my current spinning stack. My dyed roving aren't selling very well on etsy right now...and that's ok because I like most of the things I have dyed and am (ahem) dying for the chance to spin them. The brown tub is full, top to bottom of rovings. The lid (off to the left) is only 4 or 5 inches deep, but it is full too! As I was spinning the first roving today I was contemplating the most appropriate weave structure to use to highlight it's colors. :)




"Baa, Baa Babydoll sheep
Have you any wool?"
"Yes, friend. Yes, friend.
Five bags full."

Five feed bags of babydoll fleeces arrived at my house today. The first bag has already been opened, skirted, soaked, and scoured. It's drying on my patio as I type. I'm hoping that I can play with it some more tomorrow.

A little bit Backwards

Typically when I put a warp on the loom I include extra yardage for sampling. With this dark purple handspun (Look, Dorothy! I'm using that handspun as a 2-ply! It's holding up great!) I did my sampling on day one. I didn't like the color choice (it was a bright white yarn), so on day two I un-wove the sampler and began weaving with this purple yarn left over from my daughter's sweater vest. The variegated purple weft looked so nice with the dark purple warp! I was thrilled! I was excited! I wove a 50" scarf in plain weave.

And then I sampled some other weave structures.

How backwards was that!?!

The plainweave was nice, but this 2/2 twill zigzag is so much better that on day three I un-wove the entire plainweave scarf and started over. This time I sampled the 2/2 twill, a block weave pattern and a few two shuttle color options, before deciding that I liked the twill best. Whew.

But the backwards saga doesn't end there. I am running out of yarn. I debated just weaving a short scarf, but that didn't fly. So, I ended up dyeing a new batch of roving in a similar colorway, spinning like a mad woman yesterday, so some of the yarn will be dry for use tomorrow!

The extra yarn gets to be used in a coordinating hat and mittens.

Roving to be spun.



















The already spun and drying yarn.

A little Batty

With temperatures above 40F I have been able to get the drum carder out in the mud room/porch and prepare a new blend of spinning fibers!

This is commercially processed roving (I think it was a Romney fleece) blended with hand washed and carded mohair locks. The roving was a brownish-grey and the mohair was a black and silver-grey mixture. I used about 75% wool and 25% mohair.

It spins up pretty nicely. This is about 1 ounce. I have 5 more batts to spin and then it will be time to debate about dyeing. I could leave them brown/grey and do a simple cable sock....or I could do 20 yard skeins and paint the yarn for self-striping socks. Hmm. Natural colors may win for this batch!

Alpaca!

I met the owners of two alpaca farms recently. Beth Sheets owns Heritage Farm Alpacas (www.ourheritagefarm.com) and JoAnne Skelton owns Fuzzy Faces Alpacas, LLC--both near Flora, IN. Beth and I spoke a bit about spinning and she sent me home with some of her alpaca roving. It is a dream to spin! I loved it! It's the white fiber in this photo. --Interesting to note, it spun up as a faintly tan yarn. My two main "white" wools both have faint color to them when spun--the Cotswold has a slight blueness, and the Romney tends to be a yellow-white.--The other roving, the black, is baby alpaca roving called Handspinner's Dream. I took the picture of the two of them together because I hated spinning the black and I've been trying to analyze the difference between the two.

Thing one: there are two different types of alpaca fiber, Suri and Huacaya. Suri is slippery and high sheen. Huacaya is fluffy. Check out Beth's newsletter for more details (www.ourheritagefarm.com/Fall2006Newsletter.html#article2). I think her fiber is Suri. It matches the animals listed on her web page, and my experience as I was spinning. (Also, I'm pretty sure that JoAnne's "Fuzzy Faces" are the Huacayas.) I don't know which type of alpaca is in the Handspinner's Dream. It just lists is as "baby alpaca".

Thing two: the black alpaca is a thick roving, the white is thin. I know that this shouldn't make any difference. I enjoy reading Abby Frankemount's blog (www.abbysyarns.com/wordpress), including her rant about being able to spin from any preparation. I believe in being able to spin a fiber regardless of the preparation...but I couldn't control the black roving. It was like a tug of war between the fiber in my hand and the pull of the wheel. I switched to spinning from the fold (and dividing the width of the roving) and it was much less of a fight. But I didn't have any of that struggle with Beth's alpaca fiber.

I don't have any "real" answers yet to the difference between these two. But I know one thing--I'm going to spin more of Beth's alpaca fiber!

Pictureless Posts

This is yet another pictureless post! I hosted a fiber party on Friday and didn't even think to bring out the camera! Ann and Melanie came down from Lafayette. Brenda drove in from Darlington. And Goldie came with her beautiful wheel.

Most hands held knitting (but not me. I was finishing the second bobbin of burgandy for the sweater of previous posts). Brenda, Ann, & Melanie tied in the "Guess the fiber game" and we had to drawn a name out of a hat to see who got to take the hand-dyed roving home! Brenda won!

Thank you to all my fiber friends who help make this wonderful addiction so much fun!