Carders vs Populus balsamifera

The kids decided to collect poplar (cottonwood) fluff to make doll pillows... And I couldr resist the soft white piles.

Well, it turned into a bit of a war. There definitely was no spinnable fluff after the war was over and this photo is what my hand cards looked like after trying to clear the fluff out of them.

But, I won in the end. Me and a trusty vacuum cleaner!

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.9

Resolutions

Some people make New Year's resolutions, others, like me, can't be bothered. I read somewhere (can't remember where, sorry!) something about instead of making a New Year's resolution that was all-important and hard to achieve, instead try to take something small, a skill, a project, an idea, and work on that one thing only. Something small and achievable. In that vein, I am going to spin and knit a sweater from Alberta wool, by the time Fibre Week starts at the end of June.

Okay, you can stop laughing now. I realize that this is neither small nor perhaps even achievable, but I am trying! I have never spun enough of anything to knit a sweater and I have also never knit anything as large as a sweater, but I figured it was time to try.

So far I have spun about 300m and have another two bobbins ready to ply, but I need at least a 1000, so I still have a ways to go. I am spinning a 3-ply aran/almost chunky weight natural gray yarn and with it I am going to knit (so far) this pattern from Knitty. Sorry about the pink cast to the photo, the actual colour is a clear gray nice oatmeal.

Bison Down

We visited some friends who farm bison the other week and they dropped a little pile of darkness on me that they'd just picked up in the corral. It's not exactly shedding time up here in the snow, but someone lost a bit of blanket I guess. Anyway, it was lovely, soft, and very clean. All I had to do was dehair it, which I did by grasping the hair in one hand and the down in the other and gently tugging until the hair came loose. I did that for the whole pile (only a few grams) and then rinsed the down in the sink to get the dust off, of which there was very little, being as all our dust is covered in snow, lol!

I wasn't sure how to deal with it though as the staple length is only about 2 cm. It is very crimpy though and so soft you almost can't even feel it! I did some internet research and decided that rolling it into punis was the best way to go and it worked very well indeed. I have never rolled a puni in my life (my husband things that sounds kind of dirty...hmmm) but since the fibre did not get all mussed up when I rinsed it, the whole process of carding (barely) and rolling was very easy. Spinning Spider Jenny has lots of good posts on carding and rolling punis and I would say that is where I got the most helpful info.

I spun the punis woolen style on my lightest spindle which I used supported. It's a bottom whorl with a fairly flat tip, so it was fairly stable on a flat surface. I used a cookie sheet on the floor or the kitchen table if I was standing. It took a LOT of twist, so much that I didn't actually get enough twist in the last bit and it kept falling apart when I plied it. I mean a LOT of twist. Lots lots lots. Like you are going nuts. Really. I navajo plied just a little bit to get enough to knit the sample above and then did the rest as 2 ply almost lace weight. It also really bloomed so the yarn was a bit bigger than I anticipated. I only have maybe 10 metres, but it is so soft and lovely. What to do with 10 metres though?

Here are some link to my favourite posts from Jenny Bakriges blog, the Spinning Spider Jenny. She has a new book due out in the spring which I can't wait to see. If it is anything like her blog, it will be a treasure. Many of my best spinning skills were gained from reading her blog.

Making Punis
More on Punis
Please Don't Kill the Baby Bird
Drafting Techniques for Handspinners
Opinions on Drafting Techniques for Handspinners

And three posts on hand carding:
Hand Carding Wool Locks For Spinning
My Dad & more on hand carding
Hand Carding: Keeping Colors Clear and Fiber Blends

Thanks Jenny.

My Hand Carders

Here is the completed pair. I've never done any wood burning before, so I am happy with the result. The pattern is taken from a Scandinavian embroidery book.

Hand Carders

I bought some hand cards a couple of weeks ago to start an ambitious project of blending some wool & silk to spin and knit the cover sweater on the Interweave Knits Spring 09 issue.

I looked at them today and decided to make them a bit prettier. It's my first attempt at wood burning and I'm doing it with a fabric tool, but so far, I am pleased with the result. I have always loved this design which is from the cover of a Scandinavian embroidery book from the library.

They are not done yet, my wrist has cramped up so I had to take a break. Not quite sure how to fill in the solid-coloured parts. Each carder has a slightly different design. I'll post a photo when I'm done.

My Adventure With Flax

I really, really wanted to try spinning flax. I don't know why exactly. I love linen, but I knew I wasn't going to get anything like linen, so that couldn't be why. In any case, on my last trip out to Celeigh Wool, I allowed myself one bag of fibre and after some thought, I headed home with a strick of Euroflax long line flax.

I have to admit, my first experience with flax was pretty comical. I got back to my parents' farm where we were visiting and opened the bag - whew! - what a stink! The heat and tightly closed plastic bag had gathered hours worth of that flaxy smell. Heady, wonderful - ah, no, I don't think so. I called up Marg in a bit of a panic and left what was either a hilariously funny message or a horribly offensive one, depending on how you'd take it. At any rate, I asked if I were perhaps meant to air the flax out on the laundry line prior to spinning? Or perhaps wash it? And did it really always smell that way? I think I likened it horse manure . . . lots of it.

She kind of laughed at me. " I love the smell of flax!" she says. "It's supposed to smell like that!"

Oh.

She did advise me on how long to boil it once I had finished spinning it and that it wouldn't smell quite so strongly after that. And of course, she was absolutely right. It ended up lighter and softer and definitely not smelly.

Anyway, I did really enjoy spinning it and the smell did ease considerably once the strick was out of that suffocating plastic bag. It really just needed to breathe. I rolled it in a towel, like Marg recommended. Lee Juvan describes the various ways of dealing with a strick in her article for KnittySpin and that includes several photographs of how to wrap in a towel. I did find that my towel needed some hair elastics around it to keep it neat inside. Otherwise it kind of ended up as a bad hair day. A hairdresser's worst back-combing nightmare would be a good comparison. At any rate, once I kept the package rolled a bit more firmly it wasn't so bad and the flax pulled out fairly smoothly.

The unspun flax is quite stiff and hairy feeling, kind of like a horse's tail. The back-combed snarls I was getting seemed familiar too - kind of like trying to untangle that same horse's tail full of a winter's worth of snarls. It was kind of nerve wracking having to spin a whole bobbin full at one time. I rarely sit down for that long with three kids underfoot. I spun the flax wet, as recommended ( a towel on your lap is definitely handy!), which means that you need to get it off the bobbin as soon as you are done, or you risk warping your bobbin or having mildew attack your freshly spun flax. So I was a bit paranoid and went on a spinning marathon to finish each bobbin at one go. I wound the first two off on my niddy-noddy and left them skeined until I was done the third and ready to ply (a week later at least!). Then I wound them back on bobbins with my wheel and a swift.

Here are the yarn stats, all singles spun S, plied Z: 3-ply, 220 m, 12 to 14 wpi, 172 g, 640 ypp. I made up the last 20 g into a 2-ply once I ran out of the first bobbin's length, but I didn't write down how many metres I had before I wound it into a ball - oops!

I was aiming for a sportweight, but I ended up with more like a DK. It is much softer, but still a little bit stiff, and has a nice lustre, which sort of shows in the first photo. I am really happy with the end product though and if I ever get around to finishing up the projects I already have started, I want to make this bag, also by Lee Juvan and published in Knitty Spring 2008.

Blue Chocolate

Ah the loveliness that is merino and silk . . . This is a present for my aunt, who is fabulous and spends a lot of time with my children and me. She is great and deserves some beautiful yarn to knit for fun. She is on a yarn diet. That's a sad, sad thing, a yarn diet. Hence the name Blue Chocolate.

Anyway, not that my yarn is anything amazing, but I am happy with it. I was aiming for laceweight, but I ended up with sportweight. Oh well. It isn't super consistent but it's better than I've done before. I spun the whole 28 g on my broken spindle since my wheel does not seem to have high enough ratios (only 6 and 9). The fibre is from Louet and is 80% merino, 20 % silk. The yarn is a 2-ply, sportweight, 13 or so wpi, 15° twist angle, and measures in at 2500 ypp. Since I consider myself still to be a new spinner, I am happy. And besides, it is such a pretty colour!

While I was at the whole yarn statistics thing, I made up a table of all the neat little facts I looked up. It used to be called a Yarn Grist Table. Isn't that an ugly name? I had to rename it The Twisted Facts of Yarn. It's so much less grisly sounding! I'd really like to share it with you but I have yet to figure out how to upload a pdf to Blogger. Anyone know how??

Wooly Loveliness

Here is some lovely BFL that just arrived in the mail from Margaret at Celeigh Wool in Millet, Alberta. I already have some here that I am spinning (slowly) into what will hopefully be a sport-weight 2-ply, but after the success of the Mushroom Cap Hat, the kids and I decided to do a little project. We are going to dye this loveliness with Kool-Aid, split it into manageable strips and the kids (4 and 6) are going to spin it with my wheel. I figure that I can set it to pretty much just wind-on and that will give it enough twist for a 3 wpi singles. That is what I did for part of the Mushroom Cap and so it should work again. (Famous last words, says the little sniggering sheep on my shoulder.) Once it's ready , I can knit for the 4 year old and the six year old can knit for himself (sort of). He's been practicing.

We have a little rhyme that I got from a blog I found one day, Food & Family, which roughly goes:

In through the door,
Around the back,
Peek through the window,
And off jumps Jack!

It is in her June 2006 archives in a post called Knitting. I tried to link to it directly, but couldn't for some reason.

I posted a while ago about spinning exotic fibres and some silk/merino blend that I found. This is more of the same and the green is even the same colour as what I had before, so now I will have some to match what I had leftover. In the back is some Shetland in a dark dark brown. I have never spun Shetland before (which is odd, because you know, having been spinning for soooo long, a whole two years now, you'd thinkI would have done everything by now, hey?) I am feeling very sarcastic today, I must have eaten something odd.

Mushroom Cap Hat

So here is the skein of the wool I spun the other day. Silly me, I thought I wouldn't need all the fibre . . . but that turned out to be a good thing. I did much better prep on the remaining fibre and used my wheel instead of my spindle and got a much more consistent yarn. And as for designing the yarn for the project, well, three tries later I finally had the colour pattern that I wanted! Of course, I had to knit the hat three times anyway. I used 15mm needles the first try and I had a hard time getting the tension right, so I tried again with 12mm and decided that the fabric was too stiff. In the end I went back to the 15mm needles and had a much easier time, I guess it just takes practice to use such enormous needles!

In the end I ran out of yarn and had to borrow some strips of Blue Faced Leicester sliver that I am using for another project. I didn't bother spinning them, I just twisted them as I knit the last couple of rows. Probably if I had been more consistent with the first batch of yarn, I might have had enough. Who knows!

Here is the finished hat. The pattern is my own, such as it is. Cast on 30 stitches, knit plain up to about 12 cm, then decrease 5 times every second row until there are 5 stitches left. Pull the yarn through and voila! — a new Mushroom Cap Hat. The yarn worked out to about 3 wpi and Barb, one of the owner's at River City Yarns, where I picked up the fibre, says that she is certain it is Merino. It is definitely soft!

Ultra Bulky

On the weekend, I saw a woman wearing a toque that had a stitch gauge of 4 stitches per 10 cm. Yes, I am not kidding, a stitch per inch. It was very cool. The hat was all about the stitches, the colour didn't really matter, although it was a lovely blue and the hat was entirely done in stocking stitch to more effectively show off the ridiculously huge stitches. I loved it and since I am totally sick of frogging my cabled hat, I decided a new project was in order. So with kids in tow today, I headed to my LYS and picked up this lovely bit of top and tried my best to spin an ultra bulky yarn with my Ashford Turkish spindle. I haven't really used it before and the yarn was obviously too heavy for the spindle since it was backspinning on me all the time. But I ended up with this . . .

It is my first truly planned yarn, as far as colour goes. I split the fibre into colours and chose the sequence. It has been shocked and whacked and the twist has set with not really any extra twist in the skein, which is nice. It has a very sheepy smell, which I am enjoying, oddly enough. I have no idea what the fibre is, other than that it is wool. It seems as if it is naturally coloured as opposed to dyed and the shades of cream through grey to walnut are really lovely. Hopefully tomorrow I will get a good photo of the skein and maybe, if I am very blessed with a peaceful house, even a hat!

Exotic Fibres

Click for bigger image.

My favourite yarn shop, River City Yarns, was hosting an evening session on spinning exotic fibres the other week and I got to go! Yay! We spent three hours playing with all kinds of fibres new to most of us: cotton, bison down, silk, ramie, alpaca, bamboo, llama, and soy protein. Birgit Rasmussen guided us all along the way and was a fantastic instructor. Very patient! Above is a shot of my mini skeins from the session.

The alpaca blend was definitely the softest. It is verrrry cuddly. I have no idea what it was blended with however. We were just given a sample to spin and it was a mystery to the instructor as well as she had been gifted it earlier by the class organizer.

The bison down and cotton, both raw cotton and prepared roving, were definitely the most challenging. My drop spindle had quite a few crashes during those experiments, poor thing. The bamboo was quite lovely and the regular bamboo had a really nice sheen. The carbonized bamboo was interesting and still quite soft, though without any gleam at all. I didn't like the ramie and found it more difficult to spin than either silk or any of the other more slippery fibres.

All in all, it was a very interesting evening. I will definitely consider incorporating some of the nice shiny fibres into my spinning. Of course, since I have no way of blending the fibres, I am probably stuck with whatever I can buy for now!

A couple of years ago, I bought a beautiful merino silk blend and spun it into a thick and thin bulky weight two-ply yarn and knit a head-band for my sister-in-law. (No pictures sorry - we were on vacation during the knitting and gifting!) I am using her spinning wheel on indefinite loan ;-) and thought she deserved a gift. It spun up very nicely and I didn't find it too difficult. It ended up being a very pretty yarn.

Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid, I Love Kool-Aid

Actually I don't, I think it's rather vile. However, it makes grand colours on wool! Here are some mittens that I knit up from bits and pieces. No real pattern, just a hodgepodge of patterns thrown together. These are the first mittens I ever knit! The green yarn is wool that I spun and dyed with, you guessed it, Kool-Aid.

This is the mitten yarn ready for steaming.

Just to see what the colours ended up like, I did a small sampling of flavours.

More Kool-Aid yarn. This is the roving that I spun into this.

(Scroll to bottom of post.)

And this is a mishmash of yarn, spun and ready for something.... some of it ended up in the mittens. We seem to have lost the mittens recently. I am very sad. They reminded me of parrot fish from a long ago trip to the South Pacific with my not-yet husband.