YARN TALES

Cotswold Fleece Redeemed & Dye Inspiration

2008-05-30T13:54:00.002-04:00

After posting about the raw, super-long stapled Cotswold fleece last time, I thought I might share what it's become before it leaves me and goes on its merry way to whomever decides it would enhance their stash :) Please excuse the goofy shadow in the photo ~

Granted, there's only 9 ounces there and it's for sale on my website, which is a shame for me because this would be so perfectly lovely to comb and spin. It's nice and open and silky (though not soft, really ~ it's cotswold!) and ready to just jump onto some combs and be somebody's sexy playmate. Alas, I am in the business of selling fiber and my personal stash is just about as guilt-inducing as it gets, not to mention that it's spilling over its allotted space, which is considerable. I'm on a bit of moratorium as far as personal stash goes. Not a complete moratorium, but a BIT of one.

And, as I was dyeing up the curly lock part of this fleece, I managed to harvest these:

How awesome are those things???? 8-10" long perfectly organized OMG GORGEOUSNESS. sigh...

I originally didn't think I could get anything like this out of the fleece because it was dense and needed a lot of teasing/picking BUT I managed close to 2 ounces of the Kelpy colorway above and 3.4 oz of these in my Jester colorway:

And, there were curls as well from this fleece so all-in-all, a great harvest from the small amount I managed to wash. And I *did* manage a little pile of this fleece in this colorway for myself that was really picked out a lot and didn't have much lock structure left and wasn't REALLY enough to offer for sale on the site. And really, I DID have some space in my huge "Lock Basket" which is where I store all my bits of dyed locks for art yarns. It's on a shelf and there's still ROOM in there so :p

Wednesday was a 13-hour long day of dyeing (and packing and shipping) and out of all of it, this simple little colorway made me fall in love and realize why I do what I do...I mean, it's not an In-Your-Face OMG WOW thing but it's sweet and simple and I think it's lovely.

So, I dyed some yarn too because I adored the pale silvery lavender in there ~ I hope like hell I can do it again!!! I did take notes but it makes me nervous to love this so much and be disappointed because there was some weird little mojo that day that left me and won't come back.

On my google homepage, I have a widget called "JS Nature Photos" and I get a lot of inspiration from there. These are freaking fabulous photos taken by a man named John P. Sercel and you should go check them out. Amazing!

What I'll normally do is see the photo as I'm checking my email account, then quickly write down a name and a list of colors to use. I generally don't look at the photo again before I do the colorway, which is usually down the road so what I come up with is sort of a very loose translation and more "my own" that way than trying to nail the exact photo. When I try to nail exact photos (for example, I rip out a lot of magazine ad pages and use them as I'm working) I'm more often than not disappointed. I'm ALWAYS happier when I see something, write it down and then go about it. I don't often compare my work to the original photo but sometimes I do. And sometimes that makes me happy and sometimes it doesn't. But translating amazing photography and nature's wonder into wool with powder and vinegar isn't exactly an exact science and I'm not really a perfectionist.

I did that with my Big Sur colorway and shared it on a Ravelry dyers group and several people commented that it really DID capture Big Sur perfectly and that made me really happy. Of course, I worked from the heart as well as a photo on that one because I've been there and find it to be one of the most beautiful places on this planet.

Some of the colorways that I've come up with using that method...

It came from this photo here: Independence Pass Nature Photo If I were to pick it apart, I could say that the green isn't "green" enough or bright enough or deep enough and the lavender isn't silvery enough or intense enough in spots but hey ~ I still like it! And I did that fleece in the top picture in the same colorway, which is actually closer to my original intentions. Yarn and fleece or roving are two different animals when it comes to translating colorways.

For my May colorway contest one of the gals sent me a picture of this bird: Blue-Bellied Roller and I came up with this colorway on roving:

I feel like I'm having a bit of an intensity issue here but it's still pretty. And then I worked from a magazine ad and did NOT hit my mark and this sort of bums me out so I'm going to keep trying. The result is pretty enough but it's NOT WHAT I WANT DAMMIT!!! So as soon as I get over myself (roflol!) I'll give it another go...

Of course there must be a shameless mercenary plug here since all of these are available on my website. The yarn is not but will be in my Etsy shop soon :)

My knitting mojo has gone and left me. I hate that! I really need to finish some UFO's but I keep starting (and actually finishing!) really simple little projects so I'm still knitting while UFO's are grumbling and mocking me from their hiding spot in my wool room. Screw 'em! They aren't going anywhere. It's seriously time to frog at least one of them and commit to the rest because there are SO MANY cool sweaters I want to knit. Sooooooooo many. Damn Ravelry anyway.

I've been spinning some of the Sea Mist wool/silk laps I sell on my Ashford Traveller and they're working out really nice. I pulled out 8 oz for myself and am trying to spin them into fine singles just as they are. I think most folks who buy them drum card them but I just sorta pull 'em into roving-like strips and do what I can that way. I've got a couple of smallish slubs here and there but it's not awful or anything.

Of course, I don't have a bobbin photo but just looking at that picture makes me all hot to get home and put on that other bobbin for the last four ounces and get me some YARN BABY. (it is Friday night, which is "Do-Whatever-The-Hell-I-Please-and-Screw-Working" night. Oh, and I don't cook on Friday night!!!)

It'll probably look something like this, only sea green and not azure blue :) Mmmmmmm ~ I can still feel that skein like I was holding it. Have I knit it yet? Ah..... no. But that's only because I have a little bit more of that stuff (which is superwash and silk) to spin and THEN someday it'll leave it's cozy home in one of two huge handspun yarn baskets and make it's way to the needles.

And last night, in my So-Tired-I'm-Stupid situation, I took out a spindle and started spinning this really fine as well. Really fine for ME that is, which isn't exactly lace weight. I think I'll get light fingering weight though.

This is some Alpaca, Merino, and Tussah Silk roving I had made up for a particular sweater I'm going to do one day from the Classic Elite book "Make it Modern". How spoiled am I???? This stuff is really delicious and it's only fault is that either the silk or the merino noiled a bit in the processing but that's ok. The yarn has cute tiny little white nubs that will be very subtle in the plied yarn and give it a bit of a rustic feel, which is perfect for this awesome sweater I think. (excuse the crappy lifted-from-the-catalog photo. I still need to order the book. I adore Classic Elite patterns!!)

Did I already blog about this sweater? Probably, cuz I'm totally in love with it. Anyway, just giving the fiber a bit of a test spin since there were a couple ounces left over from what I put away for the sweater and the little bit I had left over to sell. I'm spinning it up on my lightweight carved rosewood spindle and it's lovely lovely LOVELY! I hope to have enough for a lace scarf or neckwarmer. I doubt there will be enough for any kind of real scarf but a sweet little neckwarmer is likely :) Or some cool wristers to go with my awesome sweater. Or something.

See what I mean about the moratorium? This is constantly what happens. Of course, this was never meant to be business stock ~ it was all mine all day!!! Just so happens I had more than enough and could share with my business. I'm a bit nervous about attempting to spin for that particular sweater but I think I can handle it. I'm an expert at subbing yarn anyway since I never EVER have knit a garment using the yarn called for in the pattern.

If you'd like to check out my knitting projects, they're in Ravelry and I'm YarnoraTale there so check it out and be my friend :)

And I've been promising a pug picture so here's Miss Lily, my adopted creature whom we ADORE and is just the best little snuggle buddy on the couch or on Saturday morning in the bed that there ever was as far as four-legged creatures go :) She's a constant source of amusement and smiles and the occasional urge to wring her neck. But she's so damned cute that will never happen (and I'm not a hideous animal abuser nor is my husband!) Yes, she has a bum eye and we have no clue what happened to it. But she can see amazingly well with the one that's left :)

And, here she is playing with a hanger (and yes, that's my under-construction laundry room and my dirty laundry and it's embarrassing but hey ~ when you're in the midst of home renovation, pride has no place in your existence!!!) Apparently, many pugs play with plastic hangers, if the half a dozen other photos in my pug lovers Ravelry group is any indication. I'm tellin ya, pugs are like the Borg...

Cotswold Fleece Processing, Color color color!!

2008-04-21T14:30:00.002-04:00

It is I, crappy blog-keeper-upper :) But that's just because when I'm not working outside my home business, I'm doing my home business thang, which is processing raw fleeces by hand, dyeing or working on my website. And Ravelry has nothing to do with it. Honest.

Anyway...Cotswold fleeces. Hmmmmmm.....

I wish I could say "yum" when it comes to Cotswold fleeces but I'm afraid I can't do that. They aren't anything like the near perfection of some recent border leicester fleeces I've worked with and some of them are just downright icky. Like this one. Very dirty and icky because it has incredibly long staple length ~ like 8-10".

I've been searching for long staple length cotswold to wash and dye so I could sell the locks but what I've discovered is that if the fleece remains on the sheep for the life of 8-10", there are some issues, which is probably why you don't see lovely organized 8-10" cotswold locks for sale out there much (if at all????)

Generally, a fleece on the sheep long enough to attain that sort of impressive length has a few things going on: Lots of dirt and VM gets trapped in there and the fleece gets dense or matted up. Denseness isn't a totally bad thing, particularly when you're going to send it out for processing. Of course, a lot of mills won't process a fleece that long either. And I've read that cotswold is notorious for "cotting" or matting on the critter and it's also very prone to doing the same damned thing when you hand wash them in your sink.

So, as far as long stinky cotswold goes, this fleece was a gem. It was a tad dense but fairly open with long long long locks. Thing is, unless I wanted or could spend days and days organizing each lock in a mesh bag and subsequently selling them for $212.00/oz, the stuff was going to get disorganized in the washing and the necessary teasing as it was drying because if you even look sideways at a cotswold fleece in the water, it gangs up on you and gets friendly with it's fibery neighbors.

These gorgeous things in the above photo are what I fantasize about ~ and I could accomplish this to a certain extent by carefully sorting locks that are all separate like this out of the dirty fleece then laying them all nicey-nice into a mesh bag or basket and washing them by hand for a week or so. But I don't have the luxury of that much time and I don't need 10" perfect cotswold locks for Santa beards or anything.

The best I could get for the time and energy I have to expend is this:

This is lovely and clean and gorgeous and not all matted up. The lock structure is visible enough so that someone who wanted to spin from the lock could do so relatively easily. I have to keep my costs reasonable so that I can actually sell this fleece to someone, dyed or undyed and it takes more time than you imagine washing something as nasty as a long-stapled cotswold fleece by hand so that it *is* nice and clean and relatively free of VM and still open and nice. But how awesome is that staple length, eh???? I have more of this to wash and I list the clean white stuff on the website for sale until I can get it into the dyepot.

The way I washed this was to separate hunks out of the fleece ~ meaning you could see how the fleece was arranged and there were long strips of it that hung together during shearing ~ the butt end was obvious. I took off 12" lengths of it (or a little shorter than the width of my sink) and then did my best to organize them carefully into a sink that was full of super-hot tap water and dawn dishsoap. I gave them 2 soapy soaks and 3 rinses. In that process, if you're not VERY careful with cotswold, you can have terrible issues with it matting/felting so be SUPER careful with them. In that process, they manage to get disarranged and then they get even more disarranged when I take them out of the washing machine spin cycle and tease them apart gently to remove any large VM pieces and to make sure they aren't matted up.

So, I had a bit of a rude awakening since I was under the impression that I could get my paws on some lovely 10" long cotswold fleece and all the locks would be nice and separate and life would be easy and lovely. I'm not saying that what I got is bad, or that what I had to do was bad by ANY means ~ I just learned a little bit and I do love the results, even though they're different than what I expected.

I have better luck with super curly little cotswold lamb fleeces as far as lock structure goes ~ see?

(DISCLAIMER: I am NOT a cotswold breeder nor a cotswold fleece expert. I'm a hand spinner/business owner/dye artist who works with cotswold fleeces. If you have beautiful 10" long cotswold fleeces that aren't matted, CALL ME!)

And then there's color, which is a huge part of my life and business these days. I've been doing a monthly contest with folks that are on my website's fiber news list ~ they submit colorway suggestions and if I chose one of them for one of my new colorways, they get 4 oz of their colorway. Here are the winners so far:

Wendy on 100% bright white Rambouillet roving

Under the Sea on a romney/mohair blend roving ~ this was submitted by James and didn't turn out anything like either one of us thought it would but, as James says "close enough for government work!"

"Jam" , another winner from James, also on 100% bright white rambouillet roving.

This one is one of my all-time favorites ~ Big Sur. It's evocative of my Big Sur memories and Big Sur is one of the most beautiful places on this planet (according to me!) This was one of those colorways that just happened exactly right the first time. I LOVE it!!!

The following colorways and Big Sur came out of my own head ~ I get my inspiration from all sorts of things. Nature, of course, magazine ads, photos, and sometimes I just reach into the dye box and pull out three random colors and try them out no matter what my brain is telling me about whether or not they go together. I actually think that's how Melon Balls happened, except I tweaked the yellow somewhat.

This is a little number I'm calling "Bounty" ~ I was trying to get to the same place as a magazine ad I was working with and didn't really get there ~ it needs more of a brown in the green and more pink than the peachy color BUT it's very pretty in its own right and actually sold right away. Sometimes those "mistakes" are wonderful things :)

The Rock Star colorway that is "Melon Balls" ;> ~ on bright white 100% rambouillet roving. This colorway has been really really popular and it *is* a lot of fun!

Swwooooooooooonnnnnn ~ this is the 100% kid mohair pencil-roving like stuff ~ I have so little of it left to dye up, it's making me REALLY sad. It's amazing! This is Spring Dreams . This isn't a colorway I'll be reproducing, although I did take notes ~ it was, however, some leftover dyes from a dye session and while I can probably come close to it, it won't be the same. The fiber isn't what I would call easy to spin ~ it's SUPER slippery and a bit fragile but with the right feather weight spindle, it's pure joy. One of my customers spins it from the fold on her wheel. I've been saving odd lots of it from dye sessions for myself and have at least a pound I think of various and sundry colors to someday do something ultra cool.

And lastly, Melon Balls in mohair locks The picture isn't doing it justice but all the same, this batch didn't come out with as much pink as the other batches. Still, it's cool canteloupe-y oranges and honey-dew greens and some yellow....yum!

I haven't been getting in a whole lot of new and interesting knitting. If you do want to keep up with my knitting projects, Ravelry is probably a good place to look right now. I'm YarnoraTale there and would love to have you stop in and say hello.

Don't Worry...I've been dyeing lately....

2008-03-14T13:40:00.007-04:00

Crazy. That's my life. I work four days a week at a job, and I try to keep up with my online fiber business, my booth in town, my Avon sales (don't ask!) and my REAL life with husband, home, hearth... I. AM. BUSY. Therefore, my blog suffers horribly. My husband suffers somewhat but he's as busy as I am. My Hearth wails in dispair 75% of the time. I'm quite certain that when I settle in to knit or spin, I can hear it tearing its hair. My UFO's suffer the most these days and they are LEGION folks. Anyway...enough boring whining...photos would be good, eh?

LOVE THIS! Cotswold Curls in my new Jester colorway and you can buy some HERE along with other colorways ~ I really love working with cotswold fleeces.

Above is Montana - grown rambouillet roving. I bought this stuff and it had some VM in it, which bugged me but it was the right price that I could resell it and experiment with colorways and I do blab on and on about it on the site so no one is disappointed when they get it. I dislike dyeing fine wool like this (and merino) because it compresses in the dye bath and there's not really a damned thing you can do about it. But this stuff is SO BRIGHT white that I couldn't stop myself. Mine isn't felted, mind you, but it did change somewhat from its natural state of open-ness. I'm just super careful about handling it and pre-draft while it's damp so it's absolutely spinnable. I spun some up before I listed it for sale and it was great ~ easy enough to draft and the remaining VM that wasn't dealt with in the dyebath and the pre-drafting popped out readily enough during spinning on the wheel and plying. See?

I dig this colorway too ~ it was an experiment that I'm going to add to my colorway portfolio. The yarn is soft and lofty and bouncy and light. It differs from Merino (to me) in that it seems a bit "firmer" and not quite as buttery or squishy. Which is probably a good thing for certain types of projects.

These are, sadly enough, some of the last of my 100% Kid Klouds. Very very very very sad! I do have about 8 oz left to dye up and will probably keep them for myself. This colorway sold right away ~ it's delicious and fun and bright. I did this whole layering thing in the dyepot, which is different than I usually go about it. Worked out well and I'll do it again. The colorway is so fun that I made it into sock yarn too:

You can buy this killer little skein, which is about 300 yards of a sport weight, 70% wool, 30% nylon, by going HERE :) If you must have more, that's a distinct possibility ~ JUST ASK!

Let's see ~ I have adopted a pug since we last spoke. She's a freaking RIOT of a dog packed into a 15# bundle of doglet and we named her Lily. Good thing, cuz she sheds like a fiend so pugs must be cute and funny and entertaining or no one would keep them. I have photos of her on my home 'puter so will add one in here soon. I adore her. Truly truly love the heck out of her. And Tasha, our doberman, is crazy about her too. And so is the DH. The Original Nay-Sayer of New Dog Acquisition. HA. He's terribly squishy on the inside :)

I've been spinning. Mostly for other people, or samples, or handspun-for-sale type spinning but spinning nonetheless. I have been spindling and I have a new spindle too but, like most of my new handspun photos and my new spindle photo ~ on the home computer and not uploaded to Photobucket. Sigh. But here are some handspun photos to check out:

OH YUM! This is an awesome heathered grey roving I had made up ~ Kid Mohair, Merino Wool & Tussah Silk. Way wonderful ~ it's hard to sell it on my site but I've come to the realization that A: I'm in BIZNESS and B: I can't keep all the good shit for myself. Believe me ~ this whole Keeping The Good Shit syndrome is difficult to overcome. I'm greedy. But I do share and I do sell Good Shit on my website. Really. But sometimes a fiber comes along and it wrenches you to part with it ~ any of it! But I'm a giver, deep down. I do share.

So, I consoled myself with 12 oz and listed 4 pounds for sale on my website. It's awesome. I spun that on a spindle and it was like eating chocolate. Godiva Chocolate even. I hope there's enough to make this little shell with a detachable cowl that's in Weekend Knits by Falick. Thing is, that little number is made with Kidsilk Haze, which is 22 wpi and I don't think I can spin a two-ply that fine but I can try! Moving on...because I'm going to get really sad that I'm not home spinning something wonderful RIGHT NOW....

This is Bearnese Mountain Dog fur swirled with some merino that I spun for a truly cool man and his wife in New York. I spun it all fat and bulky and it was a blast and sooo hard to send away the yarn. I spun 4 pounds of it ~ thank goodness it was bulky. I love me some bulky handspun!

Sigh...I'm reduced to showing you Handspuns of the Past. I had overdyed some cinammon-colored alpaca and spun a natural single and an overdyed green single then plied them together. I sold it at Northern Michigan Lamb and Wool last year to Chris from Briar Rose, which was a huge compliment cuz her work rocks! I love that it's mostly dark and moody colorways. She bought this huge skein and one just like it but with blue instead of green. She's a really cool person with vast amounts of color talent.

Oh ~ wait! I've found some spinning projects buried in the bowels of photobucket :>

Behold! The Nastiest Fiber Evah! Really...this just about made me hate Rambouillet forever. And Ever. I got it in a swap/trade/buy thing with the nicest woman whom I will never contact about the nasty stuff because I adore her. There was this white, and some brown. I bought it cuz I'd not tried rambouillet before and wanted to (and didn't realize I had some in stash already!)

Well, I managed the brown alright. Not an impressive yarn by any means but the white? No. Way. And folks, I will spin just about anything ~ I hate like heck to throw fiber away. But this was unredeemable. Thank goodness I found more NICE rambouillet and now enjoy it very much. This was noily and nasty and noily and gross and noily.

The Brown. Plied and plied up still on my sweet little Valkyrie Turkish spindle. Kind of OK ~ it was noily too and a bitch to spin but I managed on my spindle and have combined it with some other kinda-weird-not-so-perfect yarn (a white montadale and a blue cotton/wool blend that's faded) for my first foray into Fair Isle ~ I want to make the Amber Hat on Mag Knits for my first Fair Isle project and this fiber was meant to be a chores outdoors hat anyway. I hope I can get gauge and that I have enough brown for the main color. I spun up four oz so I'm sure it'll be fine ~ gauge? We'll see! Here's the brown in Not So Fab Roving Form:

Rambouillet is cool for a hat cuz it's very lofty and light and bouncy. And using Ugly Stash Handspun for a first Fair Isle and a hat that will have angora rabbit hair stuck to it most of the time is a good idea, I think :)

Ooooooooooohhhhhhhhhh. AAaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Remember how I love me some bulky handspun? This is an experiment with the waste I pull out of the laps I sell on my site. I sort them out and pull out tangled nasty parts so that my customers only get the really nice parts of the laps. I have this for sale on the site right now but am seriously considering pulling it down and spinning up what I have, dyeing it with food dyes, and marketing it as a baby/kid yarn. As a matter of fact, I've just now this minute reduced the amount for sale on my website to 2# and am keeping the rest :) (Hey~ in case you're fixin to accuse me of Keeping The Good Shit, well, let me tell you ~ this stuff hasn't sold. It's kinda pricey, I do admit, but I paid quite a bit for it. So. They had their chance. For at least 6 months) Anyway, I digress...this was a blast to spin. It's very thick and thin and slubby and hands-down some of the softest yarn I've ever felt in my life. It's buttery and squishy and fabulous. I've since dyed this skein an orchid color ~ it's pretty small, about 60 yards, and I'll probably make a baby hat out of it. It's some ridiculous wpi like 6 :)

I have other fab merino laps for sale on the site too ~ they're just not organic. But, they are delicious and soft and buttery and squishy. This is a skein I spun (above), just straight out of the bag like I sell them. I'm planning a tutorial on spinning laps (more of a cloud/batt than a roving) for my site and wanted to experiment some. I love that the yarn is so lofty and soft ~ there are a few slubs but that's probably because I am NOT the Best Spinner of Merino in the Universe. I kinda suck at it, actually. I think it's hard to spin.

I had dyed some and then tried to spin them and while I *could* spin them after dyeing, they just weren't so nice as the undyed to work with. The laps compress a lot more than top or roving , I think, because they aren't so perfectly organized in the first place. I really don't recommend dyeing them first unless you're going to card them afterward.

This is what they look like right out of the bag ~ you can take them and pull them into roving-like strips and spin away :)

And Dyed....

See what I mean?

But, I forged on with them and ended up plying them with a singles of the wool/silk laps dyed in the same type of colorway but with more white because the color of the merino was so "bleh" . The wool silk certainly did perk it all up but I don't really like the whole colorway so am selling it in the booth.

The top skein is the merino with the wool/silk and the bottom is the merino plied with itself. The top one is a bit livelier, eh? Very slubby and bumpy and cool ~ someone will love it, I'm sure. I just don't adore it. The plain merino is much more matte and the wool silk, aside from being a bit brighter in color, has that silk sheen which helps things along.

This is a sample spun from the Kid Klouds I sell on my site. Sweet stuff! 100% kid mohair and soooooo silky and very soft with awesome halo. A bit easier to spin just as they come, in cloud form, on a wheel than a spindle. You can certainly spindle them though, no prob, if you treat them like locks... (sorry for the sad crappy flash-at-night photo!)

I think it's a bit easier to grab a handful and head to the wheel. I did card some up but didn't find that any easier to spin than just grabbing a handful. You can see what they look like in the Melon Balls Kid Klouds photo at the top of the post ~ the locks in this sad photo are not a good rep for the klouds at all :) The colors above in the yarn are different from the locks. I do this "sponge" thing when I'm dyeing ~ I take odd bits of fiber or yarn and use it to soak up dye that hasn't (and won't) exhaust in a dyebath so I don't have to rinse like a mad woman and hurt my fibers. I get really interesting muted colors and generally just keep them around for spinning up myself and selling or spindling for me :) I've gotten some interesting yarns that way too but generally end up selling almost all my hand-dyed yarns.

As a matter of fact, I was cataloging all my yarns (yes ~ Cataloging, like a librarian) because I have such a complete embarrassment of yarn that I need a database to handle it. Seriously. I'm working on entering it all into a database so that when I find a pattern I want to do, I can look in there and sort by wpi, fiber type, amount, etc.

Anyway, while cataloging over 250 different yarns (in various amounts ~ some small, some large and I am NOT YET FINISHED!) I discovered that I have zilch in my own hand-dyed yarn. Almost nothing at all. Pitiful. I have such a hard time keeping up with my dyework that I usually sell everything fairly quickly. I do, however, have a lovely assortment of white and light grey and/or tan goods to dye for myself for projects should the opportunity present itself.

I plan to catalog my personal spinning fibers as well right quick, and then will move onto the yarn in my biz inventory and the fibers in my biz inventory as well. That should keep me away from blogging for another month

Lastly, just in case you're all horribly jealous that I live in Michigan, get a load of our Mid February 16" snow storm. Nice, eh? yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty. I know that. But c'mon ~ where were you fickle snow in DECEMBER???? Today, March 14th, it's 48, sunny, and you can almost believe that Spring is coming. But, we're going back down to the 30's and *might* get a nice sunny day on Sunday. Bring on the Mud, sez I!

I'm off to screw around for hours on Ravelry (you can be my friend there ~ YarnOraTale ) Next time, I will blab on and on about the perfection of some truly fabulous Border Leicester fleeces I've recently acquired, share some KNITTING content and some mo' handspun goodness. Probably some dyework too, cuz that's what I do :) Now, be nice and go shop on my SITE! It's fun there. I promise ;> Your stash is probably really pitiful and needs some cheering up. And NO. I did NOT keep all the good shit

The final result of the Polypay fleece odyssey....

2007-12-27T12:52:00.004-05:00

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday so far and that you're still enjoying some R&R before you have to go back to work. Me? I'm at work, knitting socks :) Not knitting socks on dp's or circs, but on big ass commercial knitting machines. More on that part of my life later, I promise!

Above, behold the final product of the 10# of polypay fleece I blogged about last time. Voila~from raw fleece to yarn! I'm pretty pleased with the colorway ~ I used 1 pound each of turquoise, charteuse and violet with 1.5# of natural white. I was surprised that more violet didn't show in the mix ~ very weird. The turquoise and charteuse blended together more than I expected as well. Had I done a swirl instead of a variegated roving, they would have each remained more distinct. The next variegated I do will be higher contrast in values...ie: dark purple, pale charteuse, medium turquoise. Like picking colors for a quilt :)

This is a photo of the roving itself.

Several surprises with this fleece. I pretty much expected it to noil in the carding, and it did. It's fine wool and didn't have awesome staple length. I would say it was less than 3" for the most part. The other surprise is quite pleasant...almost no VM remained after all that hand picking and I fully expected there to be more since there were small pieces I just couldn't get at. Looks like the carder at Zeilinger Wool Co did a great job of getting rid of the rest for me:) Had I blended this with a bit of mohair, the noiling wouldn't have been so bad but polypay is really quite soft...lots of the same properties as merino but not quite as fine...and since I'd never worked with it before, I wanted to see what it would be like all on its own. It has a lot of elasticity and is nearly as soft as merino. My other option to eliminate the noils would have been to have it processed into combed top, but I only had ten pounds of raw fleece, which became like 6 after washing soooo...

If someone wants to spin a fine, even, smooth yarn, this wouldn't be the roving for them. If you want a bouncy, playful, kinda slubby thick and thin then get some! (It's going up for sale on my website this weekend) I first tried to spin the sample on my beloved Valkyrie Turkish spindle but it was way too slow for a fine, short stapled fiber like this. I mean, it would spin but the yarn was just ~ eh. As I gain more spindling experience, it's easy for me to know right away that the spindle is just wrong for the fiber and that the fiber would love to be spun on something else. Had I kept trying to spin this particular roving on that particular spindle, I would have found it ugly and frustrating. Back in the beginning of my spindling career, I probably would have just struggled along on the same spindle and I know that many of you probably only have one spindle to start with, and that's OK. In that case, you can try spinning thicker or thinner to see if it helps (and I've found that to be really important too!). But, sometimes, having at least one more spindle option can make a world of difference.

So, I switched to a much lighter, faster top whorl spindle and off we went! The roving requires quite a bit of twist and I found the new spindle made it possible to spin in more of a long draw fashion, which suited the fiber just fine. The little colored noils made fun slubs in the singles and the resulting 2-ply is soft enough for a child's garment with lots of bounce and fluffiness. This would be an excellent fiber to use as a fat single to ply with a thin commercial yarn or thread for some of that fun, artsy yarn without a whole lot of jumping through hoops to get there. It would be a really fast, easy spin on a wheel :)

This is some of my very first handspun ~ actually, it *is* the first handspun I ever did that was more than one small ball of slubby, nasty stuff.

I actually knit it into something kind of weird, kind of cool ~ not quite sure which! It's a scarf vest out of the TV issue of Knit 1 magazine and it was really easy to knit. Of course, it was nearly impossible with the uneveness of the yarn to get consistent gauge and the garment ended up a tad large but that's OK.

I ran out of handspun so did the collar and half of the fringe in some of my wool/silk laps, which worked out better, I think, than a collar in the handspun would have. Plus, the yarn has a lot of mohair and not-so-great wool and is a bit picky so the wool/silk against my neck is a better deal anyway.

I spent the week before Christmas spindling some lovely stuff for my Mom ~ I'll blog about it next. I also just recently (pre-Christmas) started spinning some of my very first Rambouillet, which is interesting. I have enough of "black" (really dark brown) and white to knit a funky little hat for going outside and doing chores. I'm not sure if the roving is just not-so-fab or if what I'm experiencing is typical of rambouillet...it's kind of annoying to spin. ha! I'm spindling it ~ my wheel is going to be really occupied for the next couple of weeks as I have 4# of bearnese mountain dog swirled with some merino to spin for a lovely gentleman out east. Should be quite an experience ~ he wants it bulky, bless his heart, so I'll be sure to post about it as well.

Here's hoping Christmas was lovely for you! I got a Black and Decker "Mouse" sander from the DH...our home is still a construction zone and I've got a lot of furniture sanding in my future so believe it or not, that gift made me really happy :) I'll be back to blog some more soon ~ and I do want to say thanks to everyone that left comments and are glad I'm back ~ thanks so much!

Preparing and dyeing a Polypay fleece for processing...

2007-12-09T15:28:00.000-05:00

First, I have to say *something* about my gross negligence to my blog. It's been nearly a year since I posted and man, that feels awful! All I can say is that the past year of my life has been kind of horrendous ~ I'm sure I'll catch everyone up on that as I go along with my regular posting again. But, that's not how I want to start right now :) I'd like to start again posting something useful and helpful (I hope!) by sharing my process for a current project and that is getting six pounds of clean polypay fleece ready to be sent in for processing.

I'm planning a variegated roving and will certainly share photos of it when I get it back this next week (it'll be for sale on my website) I've not worked with polypay before and got a decent bargain on ten pounds recently via the internet so thought I'd give it a try.

First, I had it washed at the mill where I work (Zeilinger Wool Co) and what was once 10 pounds is now six. It's fairly fine and was pretty greasy. And while the seller told me there was some VM, there was more than I like or expected. This photo is of the washed fleece. The tips didn't come completely clean, but I didn't expect them to. The staple length is OK...2.5-3" but, again, I prefer a bit more. This should work really well for the long draw woolen spinning method in the roving though :)

I talked to Jim (who runs the carding machines and does all the swirls and fancy rovings) at the mill about colors ~ how many, etc. It's best to have high contrast in a variegated roving (as opposed to a swirled roving, which you can see HERE) since there's a lot of blending going on :) So, I decided on charteuse, turquoise, deep violet and white). Then I weighed out one pound of clean fleece for each color, with 1.5 # for the white. You can't really see it but there's lots of VM in there folks!

I use a huge enameled pot for my dyeing and while it's quite large, it can still only handle about 12 oz of fleece comfortably. It's about 15" across and 8" tall. A taller pot might work better for vat dyeing solid colors, but I like this one for hot-pour too.

I start out by running hot tap water into the pot and I apply the powdered dye directly to that water and use a whisk to mix it. It's probably a better idea to paste the mix first with boiling water, but I wasn't worried about perfection with this stuff.

Then I submerge the dry fleece in there. I wouldn't do it this way if I were trying for a really solid color in roving or yarn (I would wet the fiber first and then heat the water a bit on the stove before adding the wet fiber and dye) but this is going to be picked and carded and blended together so some variation in color is fine by me. I let it soak in there while it's heating up and when I feel like the color has moved through the fiber, I'll add the acid (vinegar is what I normally use).

The polypay seemed to be a little more difficult to dye than some of the other fibers I've worked with. Part of it could be that there's still a bit of dirt in the fleece even after having it scoured and that makes it a bit harder to exhaust the dye....the polypay took about twice as long to exhaust as the merino laps I was dyeing at the same time. I let the fiber cool as well since the last remnants of dye will exhaust in the cooling process if the dyebath seems stubborn, as these did and I knew this wasn't because I was using too much dye....I used about 2 teaspoons of washfast acid to 12 oz of fiber, which is a little lighthanded according to most directions. I'm still a bit new at the dyeing for processing thing and I may need to use more dye to maintain the deeper colors in the carding ~ I'm not sure how much the white in the mix will affect the other colors yet.

This is the charteuse after dyeing and then spinning out in the washing machine. It's hard to see all the VM in it, but there was still quite a bit. While the fleece was damp, I started teasing it by hand, and in the process, a lot of VM was shaken out. I also picked out the larger pieces as I went along. I'll grab a big handful and just start pulling at it, from one hand to the next, opening up the locks. This reveals the larger pieces for picking out and also causes a lot of the smaller stuff to fall out. I know that the picker at the mill will be doing the same thing but the less VM I send in, the better the end result will be.

This is what came out from just teasing and shaking the dyed fleece...the stuff I picked out by hand is in the green pile of fleece. It's really quite a bit!

And below is the fleece after all that teasing and picking ~ there's still some VM in there but I'm hoping that the picker and carder at the mill will remove most, if not all, of the rest.

I wish the photos showed how much VM was actually still in the fleece...much more than I expected there to be and while it's a bit of a pain in the butt, it can still be dealt with if you want to take the time. Most people would just send it off like that, I guess, but I really don't want to offer customers a product I know I can improve by just spending a little extra time. I don't think it's FUN to hand tease and pick 3+ pounds of dyed fleece and I still have to do the same to the 1.5# of white that's going in with it but not tonight :) I started running out of steam working with the violet and it's not as well picked as the charteuse or turquoise but it looks pretty good.

I hope that what I get back is worth the effort and if it isn't, well, I learned a lesson!

I'm a little nervous about how the polypay will card up since I've not worked with it before or had roving made from it. My concerns are the staple length and if it's fine enough to noil on me...it's really softer than I expected it to be and I think the roving will be nice even if there are a few noils in it.

I still have 28 ounces of clean polypay fleece to play with...I'll probably dye it and do my hand picking/teasing thing and sell it on the website for someone who wants a clean, dyed fleece to hand process :)

I played with some other new dyes today and had some disappointments with splitting in my new green dyes...sigh...I'm going to have to find out what I can do about it since I tried several different things and one in particular...Washfast Herb Green...split no matter what. Bummer, because what I can see of the color would be fantastic. I'm avoiding mixing my own colors at this point but I may not be able to avoid it much longer. I'll try and blog them this week if I'm not too frustrated with the whole thing! I did have good luck with the Moss Green and Pine Needle Green though, and the yellows worked out fairly well too ~ Lemon Drop, Mustard, and Gold Ochre ~ although the gold didn't dye very evenly, it didn't split on me but I think that's more of a problem with darker colors like the greens and the chocolate brown that I can't get to behave either!

Fleece Washing as Inefficiently as Possible...

2007-02-18T16:29:00.000-05:00

Oftentimes on the lists, there are folks asking lots of questions about washing fleece. Wonderfully experienced fleece washing folks answer them with admirable ways of washing fleeces at home.

My preferred method is actually sending out a fleece to the mill to be washed for me (usually by my husband) but sometimes I approach fleece washing in a hobbyist fashion ~ meaning my method is horribly inefficient, time-consuming, and something I do when I want to play with raw fleece. I also prefer to hand-wash my finer fleeces this way. If a fleece is really dirty or not super-fine or I don't want to maintain as much lock structure as possible, I send it out and for a few bucks a pound, I get back a clean fleece ready to dye, etc.

Fleeces I like to wash by hand are merino, mohair, blue faced leicester and some of the finer cross fleeces I've acquired lately, like the one I washed in my kitchen today. My best friend stopped by to chat and have some coffee and while we were chatting, I stood at the sink and leisurely washed a portion of a fleece, probably a little over a pound raw. I guess I should also mention that I don't normally wash an entire fleece this way, and if I do, it usually takes a couple of days.

I started out with a full paper grocery bag of some fleece that I actually sorted out of what I'd sent to the mill to be processed into roving. Its a corriedale/border leicester/lincoln cross and the stuff I kept was a bit of a shorter staple length than I wanted in the roving. It had a lot of crimp and was really greasy, but very very little VM. Perfect! So, my very scientific method of starting out is to grab a great big handful from the bag...you can see the amount here, in my standard sized stainless steel sink next to a small bottle of original blue Dawn. Not a whole lot, hence the inefficient label :) The whole mass is probably the same size as the bowl when it's dry.

Then, I get out one of the great big plastic bowls I bought at the discount store and squirt in a couple teaspoons of Dawn and super hot tap water. The bowl is sitting in the sink :)

I I then drop the gob of fleece on top of the sudsy water and use a spoon to press it through the soap suds into the water in the bowl. I do this really gently.

You can see the dirty water after pressing it down in the photo below. Actually, this isn't nearly as dirty as I've seen before.

I let it soak for a bit, but you don't want the hot water to cool much at all because if that happens, the lanolin can settle back into the fiber instead of coming away. I let it soak for about 5 minutes, then I pour it gently into the other side of the sink and wearing rubber gloves, gently squeeze out the dirty water. Then I fill the bowl with plain super hot tap water and drop the fleece back in, pressing it down into the clean water. You can see the water during the first rinse, which is kind of cloudy but not brown. This is pretty unusual...I usually have dirtier fleeces and they require a couple of Dawn soapy washes before rinsing. The time the fleece stays in the rinse is shorter than the wash...I really want to rinse away as much lanolin as possible in these steps and the hotter the water, the better that works.

I do the same thing...pour the fleece into the other sink, gently squeeze out the water and repeat. The last rinse is pretty much clear (I only had to rinse this twice, which was amazing to me!) It maybe could have used another rinse but I was satisfied with it. My tap water may not be hot enough to get out all the lanolin, but it's not really greasy either...I like the balance between a teeny bit of lanolin being left behind because the fleece is in no way dry or brittle at all ~ it feels really good!

I take the clean fleece and put it in the washing machine for a spin. At that point, out it comes onto the counter top where I thoroughly enjoy myself by shaking, fluffing and teasing ~ any remaining VM can be easily picked or shaken out during this time and the more I fluff and tease and shake, the faster it dries. I expect that it'll be dry before I have to get dinner ready, which is good since every inch of my counter space is covered in clean fleece :)

And that is how I spend many happy leisurely afternoons washing fleece. I have a real fear of felting the finer fleeces and while I know that using the washing machine to soak and spin and doing a whole bunch at once makes more sense to most folks, doing it this way leaves me with really clean, non-felted fleece.

I enjoy doing it this way when I have an afternoon or morning kind of free to just putz. If I don't have a friend to chat with, I can work on the computer or do some housework or laundry between rinses. By all means folks, feel free to be super-efficient master fleece washers but if you're anything like me and don't mind taking it easy...try this out! It's great if you don't have anyplace to dry an entire fleece at once too...just wash as much as you have room to spread out and finish the rest tomorrow :)

NOTE: NEVER EVER EVER EVER AGITATE YOUR FLEECES IN THE WASHING MACHINE!!!!!

Redeeming a Nasty Fleece...

2007-02-16T08:37:00.001-05:00

Whoa...if you read my blog and have been sadly disappointed at my lack of posting, please accept my apologies! I've been working on a couple of team blogs ~ one is the Selfish Sunday Knitters which you may know about and the other is the UFO Knit Club...we'd love to have more team members so if you're interested, email me!

The pile of circus bright fiber above is part of a Shetland fleece that I purchased online...it was not at all what I would have expected...much coarser than I liked and literally packed full of VM...PACKED! sigh...but, I sorted it out and sent the best parts out to the mill and it came back much nicer than I expected ~ not as soft as I want shetland to be but still really nice and not dirty. There's a bit of VM that pops right out in spinning. That was a relief and I can't wait to dye it! I took the matted, really coarse part that I skirted out and washed and shook and picked and then tossed it into the dyepot with a ton of different colors and out came this pile of crazy bright dyed fleece.

I proceeded to hand-comb the nasty dyed fleece:) This took me forever, but I finally finished it. It's now dead winter with about a foot of snow on the ground and the pile o' fleece pic is probably early fall on the deck! I ended up with a lot more birdsnests than what you see here...I spun a bunch before I remembered to take a photo.

Now, combing is a serious amount of work, there's a lot of waste in a fleece this nasty (more on that later!) and it's just shocking how much time I spent to get the resulting 88 yards of combed, spun fiber. ACK! But, the result of the combing was something sooooo lovely to spin...I was just enamoured of this combed top I made while I was spinning it!

The lesson I learned with this stuff is that you can get some very cool color blending done with combs (particularly when you have to comb and comb and comb....) The teal-ish birdsnest at far left is the result of just grabbing a handful of fiber with a lot of colors in it. It blended far more than I expected it to but still had some variation in color. The gold bit is the result of grabbing in a more "controlled" manner...meaning I just pulled a chunk of the lighter orange, which still had bits of the other colors in it but was more yellow orange than not :) Some of the colors that came out were totally unexpected but cool! But, even a small amount of another color in my handfuls yeilded a color that I oftentimes didn't expect at all, and the predominant color in the whole mess was a teal...the purple also tended to dominate as well. When the colors blend though, you do end up seeing one color at first glance but the depth is amazing...at closer examination you start to see different threads of individual colors...very cool!

This is how the singles spun up...I put all the little birdsnests into a paper bag and just reached in and pulled them out at random, spinning whatever I ended up grabbing. The combed top was just so lovely and smooth and way silkier than I expected this wool to be...the spinning with combed fiber is just about effortless.

The bottom skein in the picture is what I ended up with from those singles. Not much yardage and I haven't weighed it yet. But, the waste (super fluffy in volume) about filled up a paper grocery bag and I didn't want to felt it and I didn't want to toss it. The top skein is the waste that I decided to play with and spin.

The combing waste...nasty nasty nasty! But, I thought I'd try to spin it up. Hey...I don't take my spinning too seriously and this stuff was bright and I'm easily amused so what the heck? I just grabbed handfuls, didn't try to draft and ended up with great huge slubs in the singles, which I actually plied into this massive bulky neppy, gnarly stuff. I wouldn't recommend it for a garment, that's for sure! And that whole bag of waste ended up being only 30 yards of super bulky weird yarn.

My plan was to felt it but there isn't enough to felt anything except maybe a coin purse, which is fine :)

The ball shows the singles before plying and the bottom photo is the plied yarn. The skinny photos show the singles in progress...ick, right?
I need to take both skeins to work and weigh them today to find out the ratio of good spinnable fiber to waste fiber from combing the nasty skirted out parts of the fleece. The skirting I had to do wasn't skirting out tags, etc. It was skirting out the coarse, matted, VM loaded part, which was probably neck wool.

All in all, this was a fun day of playing at the wheel :) I adore the combed yarn I came up with and have decided that combing is so worth the effort because what you end up with is pretty seductive.

This weekend, I hope to blog about some hand-dyed and spun wool/silk "crack" fiber that I've been playing with and some awesome Lincoln locks I dyed up for the shop/website :) Thanks for checking out the Nasty Fleece Redemption and I hope it inspires you to take out something less than perfect and see what it can become :)

Oh Joy! Plucked blue angora!

2007-01-08T15:26:00.000-05:00

What a terrific day for this english angora bunny Mom! My baby, Phillip, is finally molting off that baby wool ~ YAY!!!!!! He's 6 months old now, and while he may have molted before this, I have always just brushed him and if you've been reading the blog, you know that his baby do has been a source of fits for me...it's very fine and mats easily, it gets weird neps at the tips, it's just a PITA, frankly. It's incredibly soft but ack! Anyway, he was a bit neglected over the holidays so I've been dealing with a few mats behind his ears and around his face and today, brought him in for some more grooming and discovered that baby hair just flying off the critter! Big handfuls of it!

So, in this box is a huge pile of blue chin english angora baby wool, which I'm dying to spin up but I have a few more days of serious plucking to go on this critter. The entire box isn't full of the plucked baby hair...there's a light layer of Phoebe combings at the bottom, that I was originally going to mix with the baby hair, when I didn't realize how much there would be. Phillip's coat is super dense and there's going to be a LOT! I've been brushing him since I got him in the fall, and had about half that box full already, but the other half I added today. So, when I'm done plucking him, I'll start spinning :)

Not sure if I'm going to blend this with anything. It's not going to be the greatest stuff, since it's super fine and will probably pill up fairly easily. I plan to spin it with quite a bit of twist and possibly ply it with something else and make a cute hat. Anybody have a cute pattern for an angora hat to share?

I'm very pleased because he seems like he's acting nicer too...he didn't get handled every day and at the first couple of groomings, wanted to bite. And it's not easy to figure out how to discipline a rabbit. But, I discovered if I hold his ears, I can work very easily around his chin and mouth and he never offered to bite even once today so that makes me happy too :) I do handle my rabbits...I pet them and talk to them and take them out every couple of days to check the bottom end and make sure they're clean but I don't have a lot of time to play with them. We do spend some quality time together once a week for grooming sessions and if not much grooming is required, we cuddle more.

My rabbits live outside and they don't really care one way or another if I cuddle with them...they're in the garage with their heat lamp for the winter and they do love to see me coming with breakfast and dinner :) The heat lamp set up we have is just a 100 watt red floodlight bulb...it does the trick for taking off the worst of the chill and if it gets really bad cold (like it does in Michigan sometimes!) I can add another one. In the worst weather, I'll put in cardboard next boxes with flannel in them...Phoebe has one all the time now but Phillip just tears his up so we're going to have to make a wooden one for him soon. They have blankets over their cages as well at night so they're pretty cozy.

I'm just so relieved that the nasty baby do is on it's way out! It's just amazing, the difference in maintenance between the 2 rabbits right now. Phoebe is a dream to take care of...rarely mats and stays really clean. Phillip is clean, but requires so much more care right now than Phoebe. He may *always* require more care, particularly if his coat stays this dense. I mean, that boy is just a pouf ball! It should get easier, though, once the guard hair starts coming in.

Anyway, just a fly-by posting about my happy discovery!

Dyeing Wool and Silk and Locks and recovering from furious holiday knitting...

2007-01-07T10:49:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone! Long time, eh? I was so busy during the holidays and so burned out after that I sort of just melted and got nothing much done, including posting on blogs.

I finally got my butt back into the dye studio (ok, it's my kitchen!) because I had a couple back orders to catch up on and the usual happened...it's like sex, you know? Even if you don't feel like doing it, just DO IT and then you go...hey, I like this! This is fun! ha!

I managed to reproduce a favorite colorway that I had happened upon by accident one day. The original had sold but I vaguely remembered what I'd done and gave it a shot and came up with it! And I actually wrote it down :) I call it Summer Peaches because it reminds me of the inside of a really ripe peach...the darker reds are hard to see in this photo but they're there. This is some of the 50/50 wool/silk sliver that I cull out of the laps and dye for sale. It's amazing stuff! It's not in one continuous piece, but most of the pieces are pretty long and it's not a pain at all to spin like that. It's very open and kind of delicate after I do some post-dyeing pre-drafting, so I always roll them up into birds nests.

These are the same thing, rolled up. I don't do yellow a whole lot, but I love it ~ it just doesn't sell that well, which is a shame. It's such a great color! I always buy it when I see it at the shows because it's really kind of hard to find.

I've mostly been dyeing wool/silk laps, but also threw in the last of the border leicester locks from a recent fleece purchase.

The locks here are dyed with Key Lime...lots of variation there, because I never shoot for solids. I figure you can buy solid roving all day long and why go there? It's hard to do anyway. These are some of the locks I skirted out...they must be from around the neck because they weren't in the best lock structure and were a bit matted but teased apart, they're still quite nice.

These are dyed with a fiber reactive dye, one of my favorite colors to play with, Sunset Red. (it's a component of the Summer Peaches colorway) These locks are just the red alone, but it did the variation thing in the pot and has lighter and darker reds and orange/reds and even some yellows.

When dyeing locks, I put hot water into a huge enameled pot, with a tiny drop of soap and some vinegar, then sink the locks in and let them soak awhile before I turn on the heat. I usually add the color at that point, since the water is already hot and the vinegar will make it strike fairly quickly, which gives me the variation.

I do stir some, and try to keep the fiber moving around a bit while it's coming up to heat. The fiber reactive (which I use as an acid dye) takes longer to exhaust than the Sabraset or Washfast dyes I normally use. When the dye has exhausted, and I'm done adding dye to make sure all the locks get color, I turn off the heat and let it cool completely.

Then, I rinse once and put it into the washer to spin out. While it's drying, I tease it and keep flipping it around so it all dries and more of the VM comes out. I give it a good hard shake sometimes too, since with this fleece there was a LOT of VM. So much that I sent it off to a local mill to be scoured...it was way too hard to clean myself at home.

The locks are from a BL lamb and are pretty long ~ I found that they're best prepped by combing. The yarn isn't super soft, since it's BL but it's very lustrous and strong.

More of the wool/silk sliver that I dye and sell. I can't even describe how soft and yummy they are! This is a colorway that I'm calling Swamp Thing because, at first, it looked really dark and gloomy in the pot even though it didn't end up so dark and gloomy but I couldn't come up with another name. This just wouldn't be the dark and scary Swamp Thing..maybe his cute cousin :)

The laps on the right are a deep purple, blue and violety rose colorway, in the B grade wool/silk laps. I'm not a huge purple fan but lots of people are so sometimes I have to play with purple!

And finally, the same colorway in sliver, rolled up. It's really darker than it appears in the photo.

I figure all of this dyeing took me about 8 hours...there's more than this, but I worked on it for 2 days, just not all day. I have about 3 more colorways that I didn't show here

On the knitting front, I'm totally burned out but did pick it up last night and kind of half-heartedly worked on a scarf. Didn't last long. This whole Christmas burn out thing is NOT happening next year! I've actually started a UFO Knit Club, for which there will be a blog soon, and I plan to work in some sort of Christmas Knitting Club as well. One lady on the list said she tried to have all her holiday knitting done by Thanksgiving...what a perfectly lovely thought! I'll blog about the holiday knitting another time...I'm damn sick of it at the moment!

And I have to get to work around here...the buns need some attention and so does the house. We're starting to remodel and that's a whole 'nother post my friends! I haven't had much spinning time and that's starting to get to me, but I have been playing with some "spindle crack"...tune in next time for more info on that or read my post on the SSK Blog

Warning ~ Extreme Bunny Cuteness Ahead

2006-11-21T15:22:00.001-05:00

I love to hold my rabbits (both English Angora Phiber Phactories!) upside down like babies in my arms and check out how cute their faces look in this position. It's also a great way to feel around underneath them to make sure there aren't any nasty bits or mats or anything lurking on the bottom side of the bun! This isn't the optimum pic cuz I was holding little Phillip with one arm and trying to get a picture (blind!) with the other but there it is. Amazing bunny cuteness! I'll have to have DH take one next time or better yet, hold the bun while I take the photo like I see it when I hold them this way.

Here's Phillip during our weekly grooming session..you can just see his bright little black eye! He's still got the funky baby English Angora hairdo going on...not the nicest stuff, baby wool. That's all the little neppy tips you see. I didn't cut it all off since it's been cold since I got him and I figured we'd just comb it out eventually. He had some matting issues when I got him but they are few and far between now. He's about 5 months old now and has grown in a BIG WAY. I think he's probably three times the size he was when I got him the first of October. No kidding. He was eating so much I couldn't even believe it. The eating has slowed down now so maybe he's past the major growth spurt but wow! He could pack it in, that boy!

I do a fly-by grooming once a week to get out stuff that shouldn't be there (hay, etc) and check for trouble spots and mats and all that. Today's mission was pretty basic and took less than an hour for both bunz. Definitely not fly-by when they're molting, that's for sure! More than once a week and way more than an hour per bun if you're plucking, like I do. That's only about every 3-4 months though.

Here's Phoebe hunkering down in the nippy wind (not that she's cold...she's just doing the scared bun act) with the grooming rake I use to go through their coats to remove all the hay bits, etc. that naturally get stuck in there over the course of a week. Phoebe just finished molting not long ago so her coat isn't as dense as it will be soon. She's not as dense as Phillip by any means...she's an older rabbit, and I don't know if that really matters but I suspect it does. I use a finer comb to take care of the super fine hair on their ears and behind their ears and to get the fine bits out of their facial furnishings. The silky stuff on/behind their ears loves to get all matted up so I keep up with that! The big pouf of wool over their eyes makes 'em look kind of ridiculous sometimes, I think, but I never cut it off.

And here she is looking a bit more lively and still having hay bits here and there. I had trimmed her facial furnishings last grooming (those are what's around their face/mouth area) so she looks a little thin through there. She hates having that part groomed (esp. under her chin!) and will sometimes gets mats there so I just cut them off. Hey...she's not a show gal so if she occasionally looks a little funky, I'm OK with that :)

I keep the fiber I get from these fly by grooming missions in a separate box and will spin them up together when I get enough. It's not the greatest stuff to spin since there will sometimes be hay bits in there or tiny mats or whatever and it's not aligned. I can comb it and get great aligned fiber or I can just spin it and get the slubby funky yarn, which I like. I've been just mixing Phoebe's combings and Phillips icky baby wool together the last couple times. While I dislike the baby wool (its super fine and webby and all that) I think it would be nice to have a Phillip Baby Wool skein :) I've been getting lots of prime plucked from Phoebe this year and can't wait for Phillip's prime plucked...he's SUCH an amazing blue color!

This is the bit I got today for my efforts...not much (just a handful) but something to add to the collection :)

I think the tort and the blue fiber mixed together will make something really pretty. Someone came into the shop the other day wanting to give me a blue/black buck and I wasn't there and I've resisted calling her back. I would LOVE another rabbit but the space I have for them at the moment is full right now and I don't have another cage. And. DH. Would. Shoot. Me. Maybe :) He doesn't mind that I got Phillip but oooh boy...maybe if I cleaned out the garage and made more room in there and got a free cage with him it would be OK. Mmmm...a black addition to the Phiber Phactory would be really nice! And I'm not finding them to be too much of a chore...I was a bit nervous when I got Phillip but it's not so bad. Would a third put me over the edge? I dunno.

Since I've got such a good thing going on with the housework issue now and am more relaxed and less stressed, I think it would be OK. And a black angora...sigh....

Ahem. Back to bunny cuteness!

Here's all of Phillip in his wooly glory. Yep, there's them baby neps at the tips again. Thank goodness most of them are gone by now. And here's a more frontal view...

But you still can't see his face. I imagine on a "good" english, you shouldn't be able to see the face for wool! The wind wasn't helping. I was freezing my ass off out there because I *thought* it was going to be the big 50 degrees today and it wasn't and I was in a thin white t-shirt like a dolt. But my hands buried in that wool were really warm! Awwww...I wanna go get Phillip and hold him like a baby again. He's a brat though. He was into the biting thing last grooming session but I just flipped him over and held him on his back as sort of a "punishment" in a way, and he didn't try it again this time around. I handle him quite a bit...not every single day but I always pet and feel around on him when I feed twice a day.

One last bunny cuteness photo before I go lay down! Or knit. Or spin. Or something relaxing since my house is cleaned (and I did WINDOWS today...just a couple!)

Oh! and I'll leave you with WEIRD BUNNY TIP #1...put them back into their cages BACKWARDS through the door. That way they don't get all wild and crazy wanting to leap out of your hands. I just figured that one out today. Yay me! Yay bunz!

Sheep Shawl, Socks, Spinning and All That!

2006-11-20T16:35:00.001-05:00

Once again, it's been way too long since I posted! Life is kicking my butt a little but I'm gettin through it fairly well these days :) Like everyone else, I've got a ton of Christmas knitting to do and a little spinning thrown in for good measure. BUT I FINISHED A YUKON SOCK, BY GOLLY!

This is somehow reminding me of those fake berry thingees in Captain Crunch cereal (maybe it wasn't Captain Crunch ~ but know what I mean? Fake berry bits in some cereal at some point in history?? OK...I haven't ate Captain Crunch or any kiddie cereal for like 20 years...never mind!)

There it is, on my foot even! This sock took awhile and I used the free online Yukon Socks pattern which isn't particularly hard or anything...a bit time-consuming but fun to knit! Except I was using some double-stranded alpaca/wool/nylon and size one needles and it took a loooong time to finish this one sock. And then, I wasn't sure if the yarn would bloom and be nice after washing the way I wanted it to be. Silly, I know, not to wash a swatch but my hubby had made a few pairs from this yarn on his sock machines and I kinda knew what it would do once it was washed. They DID bloom nicely and are very comfy and super pretty on my foot! I won't be casting on sock 2 till after Christmas but I'm motivated to make the other one now that I've had this beauty on my foot:) Here's a detail of the stitch pattern...

It also had a really interesting, easy "band heel" instead of the typical turned, gusset type and I really liked knitting it (seemed like it was over before you even started!) and it fits very nicely. Now...what to wear (shoes and outfit) to show off all that work! I have no idea why it sat on the needles waiting for me to kitchener the toe for a month...ha! The only reason I finished it last night was because I needed my size one needles for another pair of Christmas socks.

Speaking of sox...I've been spinning this stuff up for like a year on my Alden Amos stone whorl spindle

The only reason it took so long (before you die-hard-wheel-only-spinners go AH-HA! See why spindles are useless??) is because this spindle and fiber lived at the shop and I rarely had time to spin on it there. I'm plying it again because I want to make sure that this is twisted tightly enough for good wear on whatever socks I choose to make from it. It's a superwash wool that's very soft and bouncy...love it! I have a little over 4 oz spun up and it's between fingering and sport weight so I'll probably use a size 2 or 3 needle for them.

Here's my Oh-So-Cool Alden Amos stone whorl spindle. You can kind of see the not-so-perfect notching job I did on it but it really had to be done. I think he made this from a rock in his creek or something (so very Alden Amos, eh?)...I got it from a good list friend who was destashing some of her spindles and I really like it. This is what Mr. Amos says about them in his sales pitch on his website, "North Sea Drop Spindle - $35.00 This traditional tool features a stone spindle whorl, about 2-1/2" to 3" dia. 10" tapered shaft, about 5/8" dia. at whorl end. Stone whorl hand bored, rough-shaped for balance. Whorl disk not likely to be 'round', but will spin true. Carved hook & groove on top of spindle shaft. Spindle shaft is oak, ash; stone whorl is local creek bed. complete spindle weighs about 5 oz. "

Wow...I wonder if mine does weigh 5 oz? I'll have to weigh it! It does spin true, though, like he says. And the long shaft is fun!

It doesn't spin forever and has some issues before you build up a bit of a cop but it's unique and rustic and cool and I enjoy the heck out of it. This is the only yarn I've ever spun on it so now it's freed up and I'll have to see what other fiber it likes :) I've toyed around with sending it back to him and seeing if he can't fix what I screwed up maybe for a better spinning spindle but I don't really want him to see my notch job. I believe it was designed to be a bottom whorl too, soooo....I'm way scared to send it to him! He scares me a little, OK? But I get a total kick out of these pictures of them on their site. I'm sure he's a perfectly not-scary guy but....

Speaking of spinning, I'm making something for me out of my very first project-worthy handspun...I discuss this yarn and project at length on the Selfish Sunday Knitters blog...the final plan for the yarn is on the current page if you scroll down a bit and then there's the first evil plan for it that didn't work out HERE. I so want to make this Cleaves thingee someday out of something worthy :) Anyway, this handspun is pretty crazy stuff so I figured that funky scarf/vest thing would work pretty well. Will she have the guts to wear it in publik? Hmmmm....

Had to take a quick brownie break there...I had stashed up some Ghirardelli baking mixes once when they were on sale and just ate 2 of the MOST awesome brownies from their Double Chocolate Brownie box mix. All of their box mixes are pretty fabulous so try 'em out! I needed the boost so I can whine about my KAL...sigh....

I've completed 92 rows on this baby and it ain't been easy, no sir! It's bar-none the toughest project I've ever taken on but I'm enjoying it. Anyway, the KAL I started for the shawl was going alright and a couple of people dropped out, which I expected because the shawl is NOT easy! It's the Fiber Trends Sheep Shawl pattern, btw :) What's bugging me is that no one really posts much on the list and I think a couple of people felt like there wasn't any help, although they didn't really ask for help that much either. I post pretty regularly to it, post pics in the group database, share whatever tips I come up with, try to be a cheerleader, etc. And there are *really lovely* ladies on the list...they are all just so quiet right now it's making me paranoid. It's just kind of a bummer ~ if anyone really lively wants to join us and chat up a storm while knitting their shawl, PLEASE DO! I'll chat away with you every day! There's a link to the KAL yahoo group in the sidebar here. I *like* KAL's but I've never hosted one before and right now I'm feeling kind of like a big loser host. OK...waaaaaaah...enough of that! I'll post my amazing Sheep Shawl knitting insights some other day :)

This is a delicious skein of superwash merino/tussah silk that I spun up from some fiber I have for sale on my website and in my shop. This stuff is awesomely drapey and soft and you can get mega yardage out of it too! I didn't spin it real fine and came up with like 420 yards in this skein (which is for sale on my website as well). Had enough of the shameless commerce yet? There's a pretty hot and heavy pro/con superwash debate on the Spindlers list and this stuff is definitely on the pro side of superwash goodness! If people don't start buying this fiber soon I'm going to spin all the rest of it up and make some amazing sweater or something for ME. Fair warning folks!

I don't believe I ever blogged about this awesome poncho I made for my sweetheart of a hairdresser (who has the shop that's attached to my shop)...we trade knitting for the serious hair maintenance needs I have :) I'm in the red to her right now for a couple Christmas gifts she's commissioned and I have the Cherry Red Highlighted do to prove it!

Not a stellar photo but this thing turned out way cute! Love the shape (it's shorter in the back and straight across when you wear it with the point in front) which you can also wear with the straight edge in front. Super easy pattern from Weekend Knitting by Melanie Falick (terrific book!) in a Mock Cable Rib stitch that you block out to flatten it some. Really cute on (it has that "I feel like a girl" thing going on when you wear it) and a very flattering design. I knit it out of some bulky hand-dyed merino wool. Yummy.

Christmas knitting...yep. I'm doin it too. Lots of it! Secret projects that I can't really blog about since somone or other or two may see. But the misc. stuff that I have in the works are super easy footies or slipper sox for a couple folks, earflap hats (love these!) 2 pair of regular sox, (one featuring yarn hand dyed by me and one in Regia Cotton which is pretty nice to knit!) and other BIG IMPRESSIVE SPECTACULAR stuff I can't talk about. Why the hell did I blog about it, you ask? Well, to assure you that I truly AM doing Christmas knitting and so you don't think I'm some sort of freak who has all her Christmas knitting done already. Meet me back here on Christmas Eve and see how much of a freak I am then ;>

I've been slobbering over Nancy Bush's book, Folk Socks for awhile. I wonder if there's a KAL for it? I'm going to Google it and see. Man...I want to knit them ALL! I do, I do! Not right now. But after Christmas I do! I want to do it so much I may even start a KAL for it (someone slap me now, please????) I even have some handspun Jacob I got from a local gal (I didn't spin it) that will be the Welsh Country Stockings :) I'm currently using the Basic Sock pattern in there for one of the Oh So Secret Christmas Socks I'm working on.

There are also a lot of terrific patterns in the Spin Off "Socks" book...I think I'll take a pattern from there for the spindle spun sock yarn I just blogged about in this post. I can see lots of SSK in my future :) Not that I don't have socks...my DH (who makes socks for Zeilinger Wool Company) keeps my feet very well clothed! I have a shocking amount of wool socks and cotton/wool socks and angora socks and alpaca socks and even CASHMERE socks. What a guy! Still, that doesn't stop me from wanting to knit my own socks!

This is a really cool wool/hemp washcloth I worked up as a store sample from the Fiber Trends Bathtime Blossoms pattern (I do have some of this for sale, it's just not up on the website yet!) I really love how the rustic wool/hemp yarn works with the lacey pattern. The yarn is a lot softer than I ever thought it would be and just gets softer with washing. I put it through a wash cycle in the machine with warm water and it came out great! No shrinkage. Please don't mind the plate indentation in the center part...I had used it for a doily under a candle on a dinner plate the other night. The thing really curled up after I sewed up the center seam and gathered the center but once it was washed, it flattened right out...the candle/plate wasn't necessary to make it flat, I just wanted to see how it worked as a doily. It did. :)

I dyed up some of the wool/hemp too and it comes out really nice. I'll be blogging all about that on my shop blog tomorrow. I thought it would be hard to knit but the short rows you work for it are super easy! It's a relatively fast knit too, even on size 3 needles. Faster than I expected it to be. The pattern also has cute matching soap sacks for each cloth (there are 3 of them all together)

I also finally washed and took pictures of 7 washcloths that I knit up and have to write patterns for. I'm going to make a booklet to sell at the shop, something like "A Warshrag a Day" pattern booklet. Ha! Not sure what to call it but there's seven patterns I need to write up and I hate writing up patterns. UGH. Even easy ones. I'll probably offer the patterns free on the website though...not sure yet. At least a couple of them for free though. They aren't fancy like the Fiber Trends lace cloth I just did but they're different. I really have fun using things other than the "normal" cotton that folks "normally" use for washcloths. While the stuff is really great for dishcloths, I like to use different textures and fancier cottons for face cloths and I sell quite a bit of it at the shop.

I've written up one pattern for three lacey washcloths already, using this single ply soft twist cotton and they're quite nice. I especially like the one lace pattern worked up in this mahogany brown...people are like...ew, brown??? And I'm like..."Ewww...eye makeup on a white (pale blue, pink, seafoam green) washcloth????" Hell, even Martha says that brown is the coolest thing for hand towels and washcloths! C'mon...what's not to love about chocolate brown???? And who can forget BACHELOR BROWN, which every single woman knows (or married women remember) is the prominent decor color in most manly type man houses. So do a washcloth in brown for a guy...just don't do lace. He will love you for it! Heck, he may even use it instead of push it to the back of the linen closet before his friends make his life a living hell over a few beers.

Tomorrow I hope to get pics of the English Angora buns...it's grooming, cleaning out their messy garage area day tomorrow. Little Phillip has tripled in size and the little bugger bit me the last grooming session but we're figuring out how to fix that. (NO...I'm not beating him!) I'm stockpiling angora fiber these days and soon, I should list it for sale but it's HARD...it's from *my* fuzzy bunz! It's MINE! What I really need is some Cormo so I can blend it or ply it with that. Mmmmm...one of my favorite blends of all time!

Well, I'm off to work on those Secret Christmas Things. That you can't see right now. And I'm feeling kinda queasy from those brownies. Two might just be TOO many. Ick.

Spinning Beaded & Tufted Yarn

2006-10-29T08:56:00.000-05:00

Is not easy! If someone tells you it is, smile and nod and then think about me. I should say it isn't horribly hard but it's not something you can just breeze through, particularly if you haven't done it before. Of course, I attempted it first and then asked for advice. And I got a lot of lovely advice from the Spindlers list, which I will gleefully follow when I've recovered from my first attempt. In my October 16th post, I blogged about making a tufted yarn (wool/silk with dyed mohair locks trapped in the plying) but couldn't leave well enough alone. The tufted yarn would have been just fine as tufted yarn!

But, I decided to bead it too and well...let's take another photo journey : )

Here are the lovely beads I chose. I strung them on some sewing thread, and I'm not sure but I believe that stringing them all on made it damn near impossible to slide them on the thread while plying. You can see them in a tangled mess there, after I practised on some non-tufted yarn. I put the spool of beaded thread on a kate, but it wasn't wrapped around the spool itself so there was this long heavy length of beaded thread and I couldn't make them slide properly. Eventually, the thread broke on me and they got all tangled up. But I did make a practice skein which ended up like this

Not a good thing. What I was doing was plying in a regular fashion with the thread and the previously plied yarn. I don't recommend this...at least, not plying in a normal fashion where you hold both thread and yarn and the same tension like you do plying singles. What you get is loose thread.

So, I figured that I would string the beads again, this time not as many (and I'm not sure if the number of beads on the spool was the problem or if something else I was doing in holding the beaded thread was it) and I quickly ran the tufted yarn through to ply it tighter, and dug out my workshop info on spinning fancy yarns because I remembered that there's a rule when spinning a very fine thread with other stuff. Ah HA! When using this thread, it was necessary to hold it taut and let the heavier yarn wrap around it, using the beaded thread as a binder of sorts. This is a boucle technique, and normally, you'd go back and ply again with a binder to hold the boucle in place. I was not going to do this. My solution was to sometimes reverse the tension, meaning I would let the thread wrap around the heavier stuff occasionally, and this sort of "locked" the thread in place. It worked too! Here's a crappy one-handed photo of the process of the different tensions when working with a fine binder thread ... it's really the second step in spinning a ratine or boucle but I didn't push the fiber up the thread to make it bumpier.

Onward then! With less beads on the spool of thread, I was able to get the thread to feed, the beads to slide and go on without much trouble. It's a bit of a fumble at first holding some of the beads in your hand and feeding them into the spots you want them. I chose to space them between the tufts and then to put one at each tuft as well. The big drag was, of course, that I ran out of beads on the thread and had to string more then attach it, which I can't believe is the proper way to go about it. But I ended up with this on the bobbin:

Pretty! I had the usual trouble, even using the jumbo Ashford bobbin and flyer, with the locks catching occasionally on the hooks. I don't have a woolie winder but the jumbo flyer hooks aren't too bad and this is some fat yarn with the tufts!

Here's the finished yarn, which I didn't wash and I'll tell you why in a minute! It's kind of hard to see the beads, but they're there and sparkly and pretty. I loved it till I realized that in plying the already tufted plied yarn, I loosened up the plies enough to make the yarn fragile...the tufts weren't locked in as well as they were when it was originally just a tufted yarn. The thread isn't that attractive in it either, although you don't really see much of it. ACK!!

It's gorgeous. It's soft. It's sparkly and funky. It's fragile and impractical. I do not know what the heck to do with it! I'm thinking "art"...wall hanging at this point. I believe that in knitting it tightly, the locks will be more locked in and it'll be Very Very Cool. Someone suggested a scarf, of course, but I'm thinking maybe a collar that you can attach to a jacket. There's only like 66 very bulky yards here. Not enough for matching cuffs. And then, in cuffs, the locks would probably get all matted up eventually from rubbing. It would be a nice roll-up brim on a cute hat as well. I can't felt it to lock in the locks better since its 50/50 wool/silk. Then I have to find a coordinating yarn to use for the main part of the hat. I can make a fancy bag maybe but eh...that's not appealing to me. Wall art seems to be my major thing here but that seems dumb.

What will I do next time? I'll thread beads onto a fine single and ply it with another single, that's what I'll do! Then I'll use a fine binder to lock the beads in place, although a few gals said they didn't really have trouble with beads sliding (and you probably wouldn't if you spun/plied tightly). One gal told me she liked a bit of play in the beads since then you could manipulate them to the front of the knitting much better.

It's balled up into a fancy cake skein, sitting on the back of the couch at the moment. Looking at me. Smirking. Sparkling in the sunlight.

But this little guy here, he doesn't care if I suck at spinning beaded yarn. This is how he looks each day at breakfast & dinner, ready to go, happy to eat, without fail he's always cheerful and optimistic.

This is Frank, my teddy bear type guinea pig, who is now a grand old 5 years old! He's very elderly, and you can tell when you see his hairdo...just not the same as it was a couple years ago. His bright little eyes are a bit dimmer too. But he's just the same funny little thing that's been keeping me company and making me smile and laugh for 5 years now. I know he won't be with me forever, so I'm making sure I enjoy him each and every day. Out of all my critters, he's always been the best...the happiest, the easiest, the funniest. For a gp, he's quite small and really quiet. He acts goofy when you tickle his butt, licks you a lot when you hold him, and tries to bite me when I stick my hands in there to stir up his bedding with a wooden spoon. He never tries to bite when you pick him up, hand him treats, pet him, or do anything else at all in his cage. There's just something about stirring up his bedding that makes him kind of evil. I can live with that : )

Shetland is my new favorite fiber...

2006-10-24T10:31:00.000-04:00

And I need one of those like a hole in the head! But I do love it...as long as it's as soft and yummy as this...

I started spinning some lovely shetland I got on Ebay in four colors for my Tour de Fleece challenge but failed to complete it because I hurt myself spinning...horrible neck pain! I finally got around to finishing it this week and just fell in love with it! I started out trying for lace weight, thought I might get fingering weight and ended up with sport. Ack! It poofed up way more than I expected it to...next time, more twist may be in order. I spun it on my Ashford Traditional. But I love this yarn! I have no clue what to do with the 8 ounces and roughly 525 yards...I want to learn Fair Isle so if anyone has a cool idea for a small Fair Isle project, clue me in! I about busted my butt on ICE...YES ICE...on the deck this morning when I went out to photograph the yarn. Fall leaves abound on the ground around here ;)

I knit these up for DH's sweetest day gift...I'd never attempted a thumb gusset before and it was fun and easy! They look huge on me, but because I used this very cool Custom Fit Mitt pattern and worksheet, they fit his hands very well! I did have to abuse them a tad in the wash because it's handspun alpaca (thanks Mom!) and I know it'll stretch some.

If you read my blogs and know me, you know I'm a mathmatical dunce! So, I had some harry moments with the whole centimeter thing, and my DH helped me out. And I figured out I could turn over my tape measure, too. Ha! But, I *assumed* that when they said to subract one centimeter from the whole centimeter measurement between the thumb and fingers that one UNIT is one UNIT. Inches or centimeters, it's all the same. Right? HELL NO! So, if you're like me and you get to that part, subtract 1/2 inch, not 1 inch! Units are not created equal. Ahem. The rest of it is pretty straight forward. Why on earth I didn't just measure his hands in centimeters in the first place I'll never know.

I'm in the midst of plying up some of the lovely Azurite 50/50 merino and tussah silk I have for sale on my website and it's just lovely! I'm putting the kate way behind me when I'm plying and it does make a major difference in ease of plying and evening it all out. Awesome!

FALL FRUITS....

Are one of my major passions. I adore pumpkins and gourds and squashes! DH had to carry this beauty out of the store for me, it's that heavy! I usually go kind of crazy with them as you can see here....

and I don't even have kids! That year (2 years ago), Robert had just left for Iraq and I was really in a crazy frame of mind. I don't have the funds for that many this year, and I may not even have more than the 2 I do at the moment for carving but that's OK. It's not like I have gobs of time either. But I really want a little family of THESE from Martha Stewart's site ....HOW COOL ARE THEY???? I dig those vintage goofy faces! I gotta have them! The black silhouettes on the site are nifty too but I'm not feelin that fancy this year.

These volunteered in the veggie garden this year...I don't know what they are and I think they're some kind of throw back to other gourds I had. They're a great color though! I also saved a few small pumpkins from Bubby for my fall display in the dining room. (If you don't know Bubby, click here!) I toss out all the old gourds and pumpkins into the yard for him each year, and we had a lot of great huge vines all over the yard. But, since he plants them, I guess he feels as if he should eat them. The only ones I saved were those I trained to go over the fence.

So, I have a few small ones to enjoy! I love this sunflower seed head...it grew up in front of the rabbit cages this year and I saved it.

And yes, I love rocks too! This one came from the homestead where my Mom was born in Rogers City, Michigan.

I decided to join the FlyLady's email list this week...I get so down and feel so stressed and horrible when the house is always a wreck. I actually kind of like most housework but when it gets to be overwhelming the way it has since I started the business, I feel awful all the time. Yesterday, I spent all day in our bedroom and master bath and I feel so much better! Robert cooked dinner while I soaked in a bubble bath, which is something I've not done for a long long time and it felt sooooooo nice! I don't know if the email list will help, and I just got the first emails this morning so I'm going to try anyway. I just never know where to start so this has to help! I just can't concentrate or feel good about sitting down and doing my fiber work when I'm surrounded by disaster.

Almost done with the Fibonacci wrap out of marled handspun...it feels sooooo good in the blend of alpaca yarns I'm using. There's some wool and mohair blended in there too. I'm going to call it Nature's Way when I'm done and use it for the November Scarf of the Month at the shop. I'll have the pattern available for sale soon, so check the website for it!

I'm just into the Orchard Lace on the Sheep Shawl KAL...my ladies are out knitting me so I hope to get more done way soon! This is such a sweet bunch of gals...I'm really enjoying the KAL!

Fibonacci, Take Me Away!

2006-10-16T10:51:00.002-04:00

At least, take some decision making out of my hands :) I know, I'm probably really late getting on this bandwagon, as usual, but I fell in love with a certain shape wrap and got all fired up about some of my handspun yarns in natural marls and off I went! First, I decided to read up a little on this whole number thing, which, if you know me, is not my forte! Math and I do not play well together at all! And it seemed easy enough. But first things first...

Notice the scary cheapo plastic spider ring shawl pin?

I designed this scarf for my shop's October Scarf of the Month kit, not being real serious about it and just wanting to play with something fun and wacky for Halloween. But, I fell hard in love with the bias shape and wanted to do something more practical for the shop and FOR ME!

So, with a yummy alpaca/angora handspun in my sweaty little paws, I set about designing another bias wrap, in which my poor husband tried his best to help me figure out how many stitches to cast on for the proper length. It's totally embarrassing how long it took me to figure it out...I won't go into gorey details except to say that I didn't start the thing for 2 days because that whole concept had me in a tailspin. Sigh...but I finally did decide. Before that, I knew I would use the Fibonacci idea because I had several other small balls of natural marled handspun and not enough of the alpaca/angora to knit a generous wrap that would look gorgeous around my shoulders over a sweater. I hate coats and avoid them when I can.

Here's where I am so far. I cast on in Fib numbers, chose the number of yarns in Fib, and planned the rows in Fib as well, eager to see if using this concept made the piece make more sense. I'm pleased with it so far. However, I do not know if the length is going to make me happy yet but we'll see. IT'S A SHAWL...not brain surgery!! I really like the way the marled yarns look together.

It amazes me that people aren't so much into natural yarns these days...I love color too but there's something so *right* about naturals! I'm going to write the pattern for the shawl for the shop and hopefully inspire others to knit up some naturals and discover the joys of knitting with handspun. Email me if you want to know when the pattern will be out for sale :)

Now, I'm thinking about designing a bag or placemats or something felted in the Fibonacci Spiral...look at me and math go! Wheeeeeeee......

Here's the result of the fiber combing I've been doing. Whew...talk about some work for 160 yards of 23 wpi baby alpaca yarn ~ 2 spindles full! This is the second combing teeny bird's nests I spun up on my featherweight. Not as teeny of a yarn as I dreamed of but getting there! It took like 3 washings with Dawn to get all the dirt out of the spun yarn and I'm not sure if it affected the softness but the dirt definitely made the fiber seem slicker and softer, believe it or not! Too bad dirt and baby alpaca scent aren't desireable. I had even washed the fleece once before starting.

I realize the pic makes it look like it's still dirty, but it's not...it's a creamy white. No more brown water after the washings, so I'm fairly certain that this is the proper clean color. It has a lot of halo and those little halo-ey fibers tangled a bit with all that washing but I just pulled apart the strands and it's fine. Not felted at all...and the halo is quite lovely, really.

I had so much shop knitting to do, I was away from my spinning for way too long! So I spun quite a lot over the weekend. I always forget how much I love my Ashford Traditional until I've been away from it for awhile. I finally got all the Shetland spun from my crash and burn Tour de Fleece project and started plying it this morning. I have a pound spun up, in four different colors and should have a good time trying to find out what to make with the resulting fingering weight yarn. Any hot suggestions anyone? I'm not sure I can face a fingering weight sweater even if I could get a couple more pounds of this particular fiber that I got on Ebay...I should have plenty of yardage for something cool though and what a great time to learn me some Fair Isle but on like size 2 or 3 needles? Yikes!

Let's NOT get serious!

What do you think I'm doing with that interestingly spun hand dyed merino/silk and those hand dyed mohair locks? Hmmm? TUFTED YARN BABY! TUFTED AND BEADED YARN!

I spun up some of the "c" grade merino/silk dyed laps I sell on my website (sold out now but more coming soon...cheap, colorful and fun!). I normally recommend that they be used for felting or that they should be carded or combed before spinning BUT I wanted to play with them so I spun up a slubby yarn with them. Then I decided to add some of the dyed mohair locks I have in stock and tuft it. Kind of time consuming but not too bad. You need more locks than you realize though. My tufts are about 8 inches apart but that's OK.

I opted to use longer locks and wrapped them several times around the singles before plying them in, and I sort of pushed them up together before trapping them in the plying. This was really fun and was done during a small Top Chef marathon, which my husband is strangely fascinated with. I worked in restaurants (not cooking!) for so many years, that I'm not as fascinated as he is by what they go through. I know that profession is hell and while I think chefs are generally slightly insane, I do admire them!

This is it on the bobbin. Can't take it off yet because I'm going to ply it one more time with a beaded thread...wish me luck! If my pic quality seems off lately, it's because we're back to a crappy monitor that's losing brightness...hopefully we'll have a new one soon.

If you're going to attempt this, I recommend using a woolie winder or a jumbo flyer deal...the jumbo I have on my Ashford Traveller worked pretty well, but it would get hung up occasionally. I plied it (hopefully!) tightly so that I can ply it back the other way real quick with the beaded thread. Real quick.......aaaaaaaahahahahaha......

I dyed up some sock yarn to celebrate Halloween! It's pretty dark and scary and I hope I have time to knit a pair for myself. This is a sport weight wool/mohair/nylon blend and while not super super soft, it's not bad and will last you for about a zillion Halloween festivities. I have to get it up on the website today. I also designed a felted treat bag for the shop for a Halloween class that turned out pretty cute.

At first I though I would do intarsia for the pumpkin, which I've never done before so realized too late that to do it in the round is not practical for most of us. Thus, the duplicate stitch pumpkin which took me way too long to figure out since I'd not done duplicate stitch before either. Those are little bell earrings hung at the top for embellishment. Cute, eh? Thanks Mom! She gussied up the bag for me after it was knit and felted.

This pattern is available for purchase so EMAIL ME if you'd like to buy it for $2.50 :)

So...I'm off to write patterns and get some of this stuff up for sale on the website. I had hoped to get in some dyeing today but I think that'll have to wait till tomorrow. I cringe everytime I go into our bedroom so that wins today, unfortunately.

Another English Angora, Being a Fleece Harlot and The Joys of Wool Combs

2006-10-10T16:56:00.000-04:00

Wow, been awhile since I posted here! My life has been so busy, it's enough to drive me nuts sometimes. There are days when I feel like I'm getting nowhere nohow noway and others than I feel like I might be getting something accomplished. Today's not a bad day, but my to-do list is still kind of overwhelming. I have succeeded in getting some serious housework done and that always makes me feel better, while at the same time pissing me off because I'm not knitting or spinning!

LOOK AT PHILLIP ~ CUTE, EH?

He's quite adorable, really, but when I first got him at the Northern Michigan Lamb and Wool Festival last weekend he was looking pretty ratty, I must say. BUT WHAT A COLOR! He's a Blue Squirrel, 3 months old and quite a character compared to the more stately Miss Phoebe. He had some matts but they didn't worry me much...they were from being damp in the weather and rubbing against his cage mates. He was also a little thin but healthy. So, I brought him home, where he proceeded to eat continuously and after a couple days, I brought him in and did some serious clipping and grooming. He's just a hoot! Very lively and curious, a hearty eater, very sweet natured and a fab color.

I was somewhat concerned about his coat being difficult but aside from the normal baby softness, I think it'll be fine. He looks much better in just a week and he always makes me smile. Can't wait to spin some of that lovely stuff up but it'll be awhile yet.

Got some awesome stuff at the festival...spent every last DIME I had set aside for it no problem! The last dime went toward ice cream in a waffle cone, of course.

The haul: Some Finn hand dyed by my good friend Suzanne Higgs, some lovely stuff from Ms. Liz Cowdery of Linden Lane Farms ~ merino/tencel and a black/grey/brown Polwarth, Angora, & Alpaca blend (which I'll probably have to email and beg for more!), a gorgeous yellow romney, kid mohair and silk blend called Sunflower and a chocolate swirled Alpaca and Mohair blend called South Island Mocha from White Creek Wool (Sue Baughman and Anne Tullet)...I bought from all my friends there and pretty much didn't have any money left for folks I didn't know. I'll have to branch out a bit more next time (read: BRING MORE CASH!)

I also bought another fleece...a super soft, wonderfully crimpy, long stapled black Lincoln/Corriedale/Coopworth lamb...sigh....the above photo shows the color well but this photo shows the luster and fineness and general crimpy goodness

OK...so you didn't *need* to see 2 photos of my fleece but admit it...it's lovely, eh? Multiply that lovlieness by 5 pounds baby and we have some serious excitement for fleece worshippers!

I'm such a fleece harlot now. I love them...I love the way they feel with the lanolin, I even love the smell of fleece. I'm hooked, I'm shameless. I have an embarrassment of fleeces now ~ and I just acquired a five pound washed white romney, some light grey romney washed and a dark soft washed romney that has some neps but is amazingly soft so I don't care. I'll comb it. I still have the 4.5 pound dark fleece from the other festival, a washed Jacob fleece, 1.5 pounds of unwashed merino, a little bit of unwashed mohair locks left, a small shetland fleece from the other festival, some Lincoln locks given me by a dear friend and I do believe that's it for the moment. Then there's the 2 fleeces from my pal Nancy Barnett on the way...a shetland and a border leicester lamb in curls... Oh...then there's the 1.5 pound alpaca cria fleece nightmare that I'm working on at the moment.

Here's the story...someone brought in some alpaca fleeces to the shop but while they were amazingly soft and lovely, they were hacked to bits! It was a crime I tell you! Second, third cuts...just butchered. Waaaaah! But, I bought the cria fleece for half of what they were asking thinking I could maybe needle felt with it.

Here it is briefly washed up and after I'd pulled out anything that was even close to 2" or more. The prime stuff that I pulled out I combed and ended up with about 4 oz of some really nice fiber. The fleece was really sooo soft, with some lovely luster. After that...well...let's take a photo journey, shall we?

Using a pair of Louet double Mini Combs, I began combing the washed fleece, which is still dirty but not *as* dirty. These are the loaded combs above. Slow going, lemme tell ya! But the other combs I'd borrowed were too coarse for this fine a fiber soooo...onward with the addictive combing! I have to be careful of when I pull it out to work on because once I start, I can NOT stop! Its bizarre! The photo below shows what it looks like after being transferred between combs a couple times. Clean and lovely!

Then I start pulling it out from the comb, twist a tiny bit and then roll up into a small bird's nest. The first combing of this stuff I'll spin on the wheel. Here's what it looks like ready to go but bear in mind that not all the pieces of roving are that long. Not many of them are, really, and I believe that might be 2 pieces laying there together to fool you into thinking I'm not nearly as crazy as I must seem :)

But do I stop here? NO, I CERTAINLY DO NOT! Being the glutton for punishment that I am, being helplessly frugal and foolish and believing that there is still more spinnable cria fiber to be had for my ten bucks, I decide to comb THIS:

"this" being what's left on the combs after the first combing. See that little lock there looking at us? That's what I'm after! That would be spinnable! So, I do the whole combing thing again, getting even LESS fiber and teeny little bird's nests which I then proceed to spin on my Bosworth Featherweight into laceweight : ) Here you can see the teeny-ness of it all but just perfect, really, for that teeny spindle and teeny yarn.

And finally my friends, the JUNK:

Gee, it doesn't look that bad in the photo...but trust me, it is. I've harrassed it for every single bit of spinnable fiber I can get. I imagine that I could spin this somehow, with all the neps and horribly short fibers but I decide against it. I'll dye it and use it for needle felting :)

How far am I into the fleece you ask? NOT VERY! I've got about half of it combed, first and second combings. I've got a lovely big basket waiting for the wheel but I've spun up all the teeny stuff I had on the featherweight which I'll be plying tonight or tomorrow hopefully to see if it makes as nice a yarn as I think it will when it's washed up. I've filled up the spindle twice now. More incentive for another day or two or three of addictive fiber combing!

Aside from all this, I've been knitting like crazy (finished 2 projects for ME for my SSK! You can read all about it here!), I'm currently blocking the poncho I knit for my friend in exchange for hair maintenance for myself and my hubby, I have several Halloween projects to finish up this week for the shop, I'm working on my Fiber Trends Sheep Shawl and LOVING it (tinking aside!) I posted pics of it on the SSK blog too and you can still get in on it...we've just started. Check the Sheep Shawl KAL link in the sidebar.

But, no spinning lately...waaaaaahhh! I do have some soy silk I'm spinning for my friend Carol on the Mazurka which I hope to finish tomorrow, and the Tour de Fleece Shetland is STILL on my Traditional. UGH...I have to finish it and move on! That's meant to be another lace project.

Plucking, Dyeing, Knitting...

2006-09-19T10:38:00.001-04:00

Well, I *try* to do it all! Haven't posted in a bit and am taking some me time this morning before I start dyeing like a mad woman. Speaking of dyeing...here's the latest color way I'm oddly fascinated with...

The fiber is a lucious merino top and the yarn is our "zoo" yarn in the shop...it's a combination of merino, angora, alpaca, llama, polwarth...yummy! I bought some new dye colors and this is a combo of toffee and key lime. I have no idea why I'm so attracted to it but I am! I worry that it's a bit like camo...not this one so much as THIS one...

This is my September SOTM project. I overdyed some absolutely ugly "light quartz" wool/silk yarn in those same colors and came up with this in the toffee/key lime and I do love it BUT it so reads camo to me...so I decided to girl it up with these:

Whatcha think? Is it hopelessly Rambo Camo? Of course, one could leave off the beads and since the stitch pattern is not girly, it would make a nice man's scarf as well. I over-dyed a couple different colorways for the scarf though...

I struggled trying to find a stitch pattern that would work with hand painted yarn and I think the wavy welt does the trick :) Super easy and fun to work up! Just about done too! The pattern will be available on the website soon. I'm so behind in writing up patterns to post there for sale but I'm working on it. This is a great pattern to use with any lively handspun or hand-dyed yarn! I love designing but I hate writing patterns.

Speaking of girly girls...

That's Miss Phoebe the Phiber Phactory! Post plucking/grooming. She's molting now and I was having such a hard time getting much plucked fiber. Turns out, I was being a bit *too* gentle in my plucking. I found out that grasping the tips a bit more firmly yeilded a satisfying amount of plucked fiber instead of like 6 little hairs! It's still a very tedious process and I'm not done yet by any means. Here's some fiber from her that's "prime plucked"

And here's some that I just comb out and will either spin up as it is, dye and hand card, or have blended with some merino/tussah laps

And here she is pre-groomed ~ it's not easy photographing a rabbit, lemme tell ya!

Looking a bit ratty! She's a lovely girl though, who almost never gets any mats at all except at her chin (which she hates having groomed!) and on her feet, which is pretty typical I think. Of course, behind her ears she gets teeny mats that are easy to get out. That fiber there is super silky. In case you're wondering, she's a tort English Angora and was bred at Desired Haven Farms. I'm hoping to get another English Angora ~ dark this time~ there at the Northern Michigan Lamb and Wool festival coming up at the end of the month from the same breeder, Misty Chandler. Phoebe is truly a lovely angora who gives me a LOT more fiber than I ever expected, and I've spun some up already. I've only had her since May of last year and already have a paper grocery bag of combed out fiber (and I've spun up at least 4 ounces of that already!) and a tidy pile of prime plucked stuff as well and I only started plucking a couple weeks ago. Here's some of the stuff I spun up:

A couple of my very first hand carded rolags:) This is some dyed, not-that-great Phoebe Phiber blended with merino/tussah silk laps and spun into this:

Actually, this is not as well blended as those rolags above so it's not the same stuff but close!

Then, I used some black and pink dyed angora Mom gave me which was not prime plucked by any means and blended it with Phoebe's Phiber on hand cards and got this "Good and Plenty" 100% Angora novelty yarn, which is Very Very Cool :)

I also spun up a really wild hot pink and key lime green Phoebe Phiber and merino/tussah silk laps yarn last week but I guess I didn't get a pic of it yet. It's a lot of yardage...224 and 5 oz! Its for sale in the shop too. It was hand combed angora, hand dyed both fibers, and then hand carded and hand spun. whew! Great skein though, I'll get pics soon!

On the knitting front...still working on the Yukon Leaves SOCK (ha! I feel SSS coming on for this pair) and am soooo excited that I'm almost done blocking the pieces for my merino cabled sweater! I've *only* been working on the thing for 2 years but it'll be done by next Sunday for my Selfish Sunday Knitting project :) Check out the team blog for that and join us if you like!

I'm only 2.5" from the toe decreases ~ YAY ME! It's a lovely pattern to work, but it's slow going on size 1 dpn's with double stranded alpaca/wool/nylon that my husband had left over from his machine sock knitting operation.

The pattern is from the Vogue Knitting Fall 2003 issue...TERRIFIC issue...I've made a super bulky hooded vest from it already and there's another sweater in there I want to knit.

Boring Blocked Bits

I didn't have enough room on my dining table to block the back so today I'll wet block that and wait very anxiously to sew it up and then pick up and finish the neck on Sunday. The weather here in Michigan now is turning out to be PRIME SWEATER WEATHER! The yarn is a heathered merino, mill spun at Zeilinger Woolen Mill. Lovely lovely stuff! I'm not totally into purple, although it seems that way from my two projects. But really, I've never bought even one purple thing to wear EVER.

I still need to finish my Soft Twist Cotton Tee (my excuse being I lost one of the dpn's and couldn't finish...ack!) and hope to get that done this week. I MUST finish the one sock since I need my size 1 dpns to cast on a pair of Christmas socks for my sister. No way would I ever immediately cast on that second Yukon sock...I need a breather! But after finishing the sock, the tee and the merino sweater, I can cast on with some of my very own handspun! I'm thinking of making a little shrug or capelet or small poncho type thingee with this crazy, very first handspun.

It's about 450 yards, in bulky weight (not all pictured here) so I think there will be enough for something kind of cool. I spindle spun it and then asked my Mom to ply it for me cuz I was SCARED OF PLYING...hahahah...ah, the newbie spinner's lack of confidence! But I discovered I love plying, actually, and now somehow get roped into plying all Mom's singles...talk about turn around being fair play???

Off to dye up tons of stuff, and I'll be packing up merino/silk laps to ship and Jaggerspun Zephyr for the SHEEP SHAWL KAL :) I'd like to get some spinning in today but if I had a magic eight ball, it would say "not likely."

Selfish Sunday Knitting

2006-09-03T11:34:00.000-04:00

I was sitting on the couch, working on a pair of socks for me this morning and got to thinking that I really need some ME KNITTING time. If you're like me, you're a pretty SELFLESS knitter most of the time...knitting for others and rarely for yourself.

I'm in this trap a LOT...owning a shop, I knit for the store, I design patterns for the store, I knit stuff for everyone else but me and that really gets to be a bummer. I don't have even one pair of hand knit socks for myself!

So, I'm inviting all of you selfless knitters out there to designate a time for YOU...and I'm choosing Sunday mornings. I vow to sit on the couch and catch up on the news with my cups of coffee and knit for ME AND ONLY ME for at least a couple of hours. I would really enjoy seeing everyone's blogs with their Selfish Sunday Knitting progress :)

Any takers??????????

Please feel free to copy the button and use it on your own blogs and sites. I would love to have a blog ring for it as well but have never done that before so if anyone wants to step up and create it for us, I'll send them a prize......A KNITTING PRIZE. Of course, you really should use this prize for yourself. I'm thinking something yummy and hand painted :)

So, while I'm on that subject, here are the sox I've been working on for a LONG time for me! It's the Yukon Leaves pattern I found online at the fab Boogie Knits site. I'm working them in an alpaca/wool/nylon blend that I'm using doubled on size 1 needles. I got this yarn on a cone for my husband to knit socks on the commercial sock machines he works with and he didn't like it so I took some off and am using it doubled. It's not washed so it feels kinda icky but I've seen it washed up and it's very nice stuff! I really like this pattern...it's a 12 row repeat and not horrible lace knitting at all. The 12th row has a k3tog that can be a bit nasty using the doubled yarn, which doesn't have a lot of stretch, but not so bad. The rest of the rows are a cake walk, really. I usually will work one 12 row repeat but this morning I did TWO! Yay ME! Trying to decide how long to make them, because my calves are kinda big and always have been...I think it was all that horseback riding (bareback) in my formative years.

Here's the other thing I'm doing for me...it's a store sample BUT I've decided to make all store samples in my size so they're mine! I'm actually farther along that this...I've started to add the color bands to the sleeves and I was up until 12:30 last night trying to find the 4th *&+#@! DP needle because I wanted to work on it. It's not in the couch, nor anywhere else I looked so it must be at the shop. If not, I'll have to buy more #6 DP to finish. UGH! It's the Mesilla Pattern from Knitty. I'll be leaving off the embroidery. I'm knitting it in a soft twist cotton I have for sale in the shop. It's like 80 cents an ounce so this cute little number can be knit for under $15.00. How cool is THAT? It's a single ply and quite soft. Let me know if you're interested in the yarn ... we can fix you up! It's available in mahogany, apple green, camel and ceil blue. There are a couple balls of dusty rose for the accents left too. I used all the colors except the dusty rose on mine

Here's a detail of the really cute picot edge that you work for the bottom, sleeves and neckline. There's some tacking down required when you work it but it's too adorable not to include:)

On my days off this week, I vow to block the pieces to the cabled merino sweater I've been working on for 2 years! I used a Vogue knitting pattern and I love it! All I need to do is block the pieces, sew them together and then pick up and knit the neckline. NEW SWEATER FOR ME! YAY ME!

THE HORRORS (and non horrors) OF MY TO DO LIST:

1. Housework ~ HORROR

2. Pluck Phoebe the Phiber Phactory english angora ~ Non Horror

3. Work on shop website and blog ~ usually not a horror

4. Cook a nice meal for my husband ~ depends on the day

5. Dye yarn for my next Scarf of the Month ~ Non Horror

6. End the day by spinning on my failed Tour de Fleece Shetland ~ Non Horror

I almost forgot! SHEEP SHAWL KAL!

We have a great bunch so far for this KAL, and we'll be casting on Mid September. At this time, everyone has been ordering kits and I have to get the orders in then mail out the kits. Join us...more brains to pick, more shoulders to cry on, more cheerleaders :) We've got a Yahoo Group going :)

OK......off to that TO DO list! GET SOME SELFISH KNITTING TIME IN ~ That's an order!

Michigan Fiber Festival ~ WOW

2006-08-28T15:50:00.000-04:00

Wow...what a great time the Michigan Fiber Festival was in Allegan this year! Soooo much to do, see, buy, learn...it really was amazing!

I spent MUCH time in the barns with the animals and this handsome fellow was my new best friend all weekend. He was so sweet I couldn't leave him alone! His name is Finn and he's a Blue Faced Leicester yearling ram. He was huge, sweet as could be and amazingly handsome :) He's owned by Beechtree Blues, a very nice couple whom I talked to about reserving his fleece. I fell so hard in love with this fellow that I want to make something out of his amazing fleece :) I'm thinking a throw would be lovely. His pen mate was also a real lover of a young ram and the ewes were gorgeous as well. This was my first experience with BFL in the flesh and I found them to be large, VERY handsome and quite docile, unlike the crazy Shetlands that were everywhere. I *like* Shetlands, but they are so much flightier than the BFL...they do have the cuteness thing going on for them though :) I also checked out some lovely Wensleydales, Icelandics, and a host of other breeds.

There were a LOT of sheep, mohair and pygora goats and a few llamas and alpalcas to see there. The sheep folk were, for the most part, very friendly and informative. Here are a few of the other critters who struck my fancy in the barn:

The curious dark-faced fellow was the other BFL ram in with Finn and the 3 lovelies laying down are the very placid BFL ewes.

This is an extremely handsome Jacob ram (another fiber I adore!) who was obviously just shorn and below is a Shetland ram who was REALLY a funny little character

OK...enough of the critters already! I went to the festival with my best friend, Anne...here we are and, as usual, she looks much better than I in a photo. Anne's on the left and I'm looking horrible on the right

We camped in a tent under a pine tree and next to a gorgeous butterfly garden there at the Fairgrounds in Allegan where the festival is held. It's very cool...everyone just camps all around and you're basically in the midst of all the vendors, kinda-sorta. Folks are everywhere spinning and knitting and weaving and making baskets. We got a little damp one night when it rained really hard but other than that, the tent suited us fine :) Here's the garden, complete with butterflies!

And here's "my" Kromski Mazurka posing with the skein of fancy mohair yarn I made in my workshop:

I say "my" Mazurka because this gorgeous little wheel really belongs to Mom, who lets it live at our shop and I took it with me because it's so light (only 9 pounds). I wouldn't use it to spin novelty yarns on again because the hooks are too small. I took the Three Fancy Mohair Yarns workshop with Pat Maley and enjoyed it very much! She taught us to spin three different novelty yarns. The first one was a Pluck and Fluff yarn, where you spin and then randomly pull up fiber and kind of toss it onto the already spun single so that it wraps around and sticks out. The second one was a core-spun yarn (my favorite!). You take an "ugly" yarn, in my case a bright green 4-ply acrylic, and then tease out a handful of dyed mohair locks and feed them onto the core while you're spinning, then bind it all with thread. The top one is the core-spun.

I need more practice with the pluck and fluff stuff though. It was supposed to be the easiest but I found it kind of hard. The Core Spun was easiest for me, and while I did learn to make the Ratine, Snarl and Boucle stuff too, I didn't really finish the yarn in class. However, I AM spinning up a llama ratine right now (I can hardly stay away from it to write this blog!). It takes a long time to do either of those three so when I'm done, I'll post some info on it and pics. It's a blast to do though! The jumbo flyer assembly on my Ashford Traveller is working very well for the ratine and I'm kind of surprised. I thought I might have to get a Woolee Winder to do any of them but it's not so :)

I've been spinning a lot lately, and not knitting enough. Doing a little dyeing too so there will be more of all that to come soon but I really wanted to blog the fiber fest stuff. I didn't spend a ton there by any means but I got an absolutely GORGEOUS SUPER CLEAN dark dark Border Leicester, Lincoln, Corriedale fleece from Moonsshadow Farms in Minnesota (4.5 pounds!), a small 1 pound part of a Shetland fleece for $4.00 :) some 85% cashmere top from Little Barn, more fiber from Liz Cowdery of Linden Lane Farms (love that gal!), an ounce of hand-dyed bombyx silk from my good friend Suzanne Higgs of Hooked on Felt, some gorgeous handmade soaps, a Montadale bag of roving for the shop, and THIS lovely little thing...

A mahogany Bosworth Featherweight spindle! I can totally spin frog hair on this .35 ounce baby...my very first attempt with some of my own hand-dyed Merino/Tussah Silk yielded 26 WPI plied so while not as small as I thought it would be, still pretty small and definitely qualifying as lace weight:) It's just unbelievable how light this thing is! You can get a practically invisible single on it Thanks for making such a great tool Sheila and Jonathan! Go check out their spindles if you never have at their Journey Wheel site!

Whoa...where has the day GONE??? Ack! Well, I'd better start some dinner from my super hard working hubby so I can finish up that ratine :) More fibery fun soon!

Blame the DYEPOT (and the SPINNING WHEEL)

2006-07-31T09:02:00.000-04:00

Wow...I can't believe it's been two weeks since I last posted! But...I sustained this hideous spinning injury and lost way too many days, which REALLY was a PITA. You can see the cause of the injury in my shop blog here. In a nutshell, I spun for way too long without proper breaks and stretching, which caused muscle spasms that were unbelievably painful. No sleep-crying-totally-pissed-off kinda pain. Of course, it really set in bad on the weekend but on Monday of last week, I went to the doc and with anti-imflammatory and muscle relaxing meds, I'm back to normal (yeah, yeah...I know...normal for me!) So please learn from me ~ I wouldn't wish that on anyone! Take my advice and if you have access to a copy of In Sheep's Clothing, read the section in the back about proper stretches :) I haven't spun on the wheel since then and totally crashed in the last stage of my Tour de Fleece challenge. Talk about a lesson!

I'm blaming the siren call of the dyepot for neglecting my housework for yet another day. I get to blame the dentist for it today...UGH. I'd rather do housework!

I finally experimented with the Low Immersion Dyeing process with wool. Very different than what I did with the Low Immersion Cotton Dyeing I posted awhile back. I think my first attempts were pretty successful (see pic above!) and I'll do it again and hopefully, with some tweaking, I'll get even better results.

I started out a very teeny ball of super soft wool/mohair that was just sitting in a bowl on the kitchen counter. In a weird kind of frenzy, I just grabbed it, grabbed some jars and some left over dyes that were hanging out in the fridge, a gallon of vinegar (which I used UP yesterday!), and went for it. I didn't wet the fiber at all, I used it dry in all the examples I worked up. Then I grabbed another counter-sitting ball of 100% mohair and did another little sample...then grabbed the FIVE POUND bag of mohair and went nuts:)

These jars were the first sample (wool/mohair). First, I mixed dye stock with vinegar and hot hot tap water, poured into the bottom of the jar, STUFFED in the dry fiber, then poured another hot dye mix on top, just covering the fiber. There really was very little liquid floating in the jar and the dry fiber sucked up a lot. I put the jar on a plate and heated it in the microwave (uncovered). The first stage of heat was 2 minutes, then I would let it rest a bit and keep heating in increments of about 1 min 30 seconds, but found that you really have to watch the jar because it WILL boil! The fiber will expand in the jar too (no matter what) and you'll get some dye overflow onto the plate, which is kind of OK because you can easily see if it's exhausting or not. Here's what it'll look like after heating:

The purple dye I was using was RIT and what made me pretty happy was that it REALLY exhausted using this method, and when I rinsed this fiber, there was zero bleeding in the rinse water. I'm sure the fact that it was mohair contributed.

The one thing I didn't do that I did in my next example was to fold the roving over several times before stuffing it in the jar. For the one above, I started stuffing one end in first and what happened was that the roving didn't have any repeats of color. One end was teal, the other end aubergine. There was some variation but not enough.
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Next, I basically did the same thing, but folded the roving several times before stuffing and then did a side pour. This one turned out the best, resulting in more color repeats. (The finished roving is the one in the pic at the top of this post). The second jar above was an experiment which KIND of worked out. I poured dye in the bottom, stuffed roving, then poured more on top and left white space in the middle. This gave a nicely variegated roving. There wasn't as much white space after heating as I expected, but lots of variation in depth of color.

This roving was the first one, no folding of the roving...stuffing "end to end" and pouring dye first into the bottom, then pouring another color on top. Pretty, but not much color repeat.

This one was done the same way as far as pouring the dye but I folded the roving several times putting both ends together then folding repeatedly. Much better variation. I used a little less dye and ended up with some white space, which I like.

This is the one where I did the folding AND poured dye down the sides of the jar and is my favorite result. Some lighter spaces, which I like, and a more color repeats than the others.

This is the roving where I left the white space in the middle. I poured dye into the bottom, stuffed, then poured more on top. It didn't leave as much white space as I expected but still is quite nice.

This was the only "failed" experiment of the day. I tried to just pour dye stock with no vinegar in the bottom, stuffed, poured a different color on top, then filled the jar with hot water/vinegar. Almost zero color variation and while it turned out pretty nice, the teal totally took over the aubergine. Some nice depth to the color but no distinct color separation.

Here are some dyed fiber samples I spun & plied up last night on my lovely little Valkyrie Turkish Spindle. I love that thing! These are not the Low Immersion Dye samples. I did continue dyeing, using mostly RIT dyes because I have a bunch and well, I wanted to try something I read on a dye list. The Aubergine Mohair on the far left actually is a jar dye job...I poured RIT and vinegar dye solution onto dry roving in a jar and it came out great, with almost no excess dye in the rinse. Which, for RIT, is a bit of a miracle if you ask me! The second one from the left is a hot pour of green and aubergine (see photo below), the third from the left is actually the teal part of the wool/mohair first low immersion experiment, the Robins Egg Blue is mohair vat dyed with Procion MX and vinegar, and the last sample on the far right is hot poured RIT (wine, mauve and denim blue) I had a LOT of fiber in the pot (I put them all in dry, btw) and the dye didn't reach the bottom well before exhausting which left lots of white space. I really like this one...it's very fresh spun up:) In the hot pours, I used a LOT of vinegar in the dye bath and poured sort of cautiously because in my past experience, RIT doesn't like to exhaust. The Robin's Egg Blue exhausted very quickly (again, lots of vinegar) and I sprinkled some Raspberry Blue Lemonade Kool Aid on the top to get a bit more color variation.

Here's the RIT hot pour in green and aubergine. It blended LOTS when spun up and is very dark and mysterious:) It's the second sample from the left.

And here's the hot pour with lots of white space which I love! I actually used denim blue dye but it turned a bit lavender with the wine and mauve in the dye bath and it really blended spun up. (sample on far right in photo above).

I don't have a scale at home so can't give exact estimates of the amount of fiber in the low immersion jars. I used quart jars on the smaller bits, which were probably about 2 oz of dry fiber. The larger jars are the kind of tall, bigger jars that pasta sauce will come in and in those I could stuff approximately 4 oz or so of dry fiber. Again, these are just estimations but you'll be pretty surprized at how much fiber can go into a jar!

I also dyed some yarn with the low immersion technique but was NOT so happy with it. I'll post about that another day. So...Pros and Cons of Low Water Immersion and Wool Fiber:

Pros: Cleaner & faster than handpainting on plastic wrap. Excellent method for small amounts of fiber. No presoaking of fibers necessary. Very VERY easy to completely exhaust dyes (even RIT!) One big plus: No felting/compressing of fiber because it's handled very little (you aren't meant to poke and prod very much at all in the jar!) and the resulting dyed fiber requires VERY LITTLE rinsing. I also found that it was easier to control, in a way. I didn't get the "muddiness" that I sometimes do with handpainting. Now, I don't use thickeners when handpainting at this point in time and I believe that I sometimes use too much dye but with this method, the color separation seemed clearer and with cotton yarn, it was MUCH "cleaner" as well.

Cons: I can't imagine doing large batches of fiber this way, unless you can get your hands on HUGE jars. Hard to get lots of colors. I think in regular sized household jars (larger jars) you'd be limited to about 3 colors at best. Kind of unpredictable.

What would I do next time? Try heating the dye/water/vinegar solution to a simmer before pouring. Maybe pre-wet the fiber to see if the color travels a little better. Perhaps experiment with pouring dye into the middle somehow...trying to coil around the sides of the jar, pour, and stuff more and then pour more.

So, those are my adventures of yesterday! All of the fibers you see are available for sale on my Yarn or a Tale Shop website (I'll be putting them up there this evening after the dentist and the housework and the critter care).

And I knit, honest I do! One day soon, I'll put some knitting content up here and some more critter content (Miss Phoebe the English Angora Fiber Factory ~ with temps predicted up to 97 today and tomorrow, she'll be coming into the house for a couple of days to live)

DYE HAPPY!

It isn't ALWAYS about the fiber.......

2006-07-16T00:22:00.001-04:00

Sometimes ...well...there's THIS! And lots of other things, but tonight, I wanted to introduce you to Bubby and Mistress Bess. (That's the venerable old gal in the bottom picture)

What are they? Pot Bellied Kids, of course! And lest you've been under the impression that Pot Bellied Kids are CUTE, think again! *I* happen to find them adorable and charming but when experiencing them live and in full color, most folks' don't blurt out how cute they are! Now, my pots aren't paper-carrying, well groomed, show type pigs. (oh man...I must've influenced them somehow!) They're your average, everyday pot bellies with their own personalities and looks. Neither one of them have luxurious bristles, Bess is as old as the hills (EIGHTEEN!!!) and Bubby is, well....a huge fat thing in his prime. They can be snotty, demanding, and a royal PITA sometimes. But mostly they eat and sleep and wander around. Bess causes the most trouble, even in her golden years. Bubby mostly just looks like that all the time. I used to have a really cute SMALL pink and black pot named Rose but she's no longer with us. I'll have to dig up a pic and scan it. (She was pre-digital camera). SHE was really lovely, with lots of bristles and an adorable face. She was also a mean little shit! Pretty faces can hide myriad faults, my friends! I still miss her.

I've had pot bellied pigs off and on for many years, and at one time rescued them in Oklahoma. At that time, I had 30 of them at once! I could spout off for hours about how they are NOT the greatest pet on the planet, at least not for most people. (Hence the reason I had 30 living with me). And apparently, they live forever! I dearly love my two, though...I just wish they did interesting things to blog about. Once, Bubby got stuck in a dog house and we had to cut him out. That was pretty interesting.

I could take lots of photos of them laying in their houses or in the shade or in the sun. I could get MANY shots of them with gobs of wet food hanging from their adorable rooters, or pre-dinner shots when they're foaming at the mouth in anticipation. But then I'd be out of material. Ah well...I'll try to catch them doing something of interest in the future! For now, rest assured that this is what they do.......

More fibery fun tomorrow but I couldn't resist sharing one of the more bizarre aspects of my life tonight! Bon Apetit!

Shetland Spinning Secret Hand Shake...

2006-07-12T07:32:00.000-04:00

Does anyone want to let me in on it? I've finished my second 4 oz bobbin for Le Tour de Fleece challenge and while my spinning isn't TOTALLY crappy, the Shetland is proving to be Not So Easy. At All. It's not going to be lace weight although there are annoying spots that are trying to be...meaning I'm ending up with thinner spots in places than I like. Not so many nubs...but this has been truly challenging to spin evenly. I'm using a "semi-woolen" method, trying to draft forward...but it's just not coming to me the way I thought it might. What the hell...it's a CHALLENGE, right?

And I *am* halfway through the pound and the fiber is simply GORGEOUS and I adore Shetland, I truly do. Maybe because I'm trying to spin much finer than I normally do, it's more challenging (ya think???) But I find myself longing for some nice springy, forgiving Jacob at the moment. I just can't seem to pick up a good rhythm with this stuff!

OK...in my own defense, the really fat parts in the photo are the ENDS of the singles. Really. But, as you can plainly see, not so even, eh? Not so lace-weight. I'll end up with fingering, I'm sure (I sure hope!) The good parts are that it's soft, and with the semi woolen a lot of glaring inconsistencies are going to blend away with plying (I'm an optimist!)

I've been thinking again about how to ply...there's a killer shawl in the new Vogue On the Go Knitting "Shawls" book and I want to make that! Not sure if that's feasible with the weight I'm going to end up with but there may still be hope! It's the same shawl that Vogue Knitting mag has as an exclusive/addition on their site....it's Shawl 18 by Meg Swanson, which is in the Fall 2005 issue. The other shawls there are quite lovely too!

(Do I REALLY love the shawl or do I love the shawl because I think I'll look like that in the shawl? Ya gotta wonder...)

I'll be swatching and trying to go for it, I think, but perhaps more research for a pattern is necessary. Will I end up with a blanket instead of this shawl with my Shetland? And...how do I ply for color? I'm thinking of plying the gray and white together for the border and the 2 browns together for the main part. Maybe a bit funky, but hey, I've always been a bit funky!

So, before work today I have to clean Frank's cage (dear old guinea pig!) and groom Phoebe (fiber factory English Angora who's a real hoot!), print some ball bands for the shop, call my doctor...when all I want to do is laze around on this gloomy, rainy morning. I love rainy days!

Results of Dyeing in a New Way

2006-07-10T11:47:00.000-04:00

I finally took some photos of the low water immersion dyeing on cotton yarn in my last post. However, one of the results was in my shop on the counter, waiting to be balled up and knit into a sweet little store sample summery baby top. It was cotton chenille and it was REALLY lovely! Someone bought it before I could even ball it up so I'm going to have to skein up more cotton chenille and do it all over again. This time, I'll do a production line and dye up more colors:) But, I do have 3 skeins of nubby cotton that came out terrific, and one is just like the chenille, only......uh........nubby!

The top skein was the three-color jar, and the other 2 were the blue/green jars.

The colors blended just a bit, but not as much as I expected. In my experience, this method, though more unpredictable than hand-painting, is much "cleaner" when it comes to color separation on cotton. You could get more blending by leaving the dye to move longer before fixing or adding more dye for a wetter pre-fixing solution. For some reason, even when using a light touch with dyes, I get more color fusing in hand-painting cotton. I don't use a thickener, which may be part of the problem, and perhaps the way I roll up the skeins they smoosh into one another more. And I don't use heat with these dyes...I leave them for 24 hours. It also takes MUCH longer to rinse out excess dye when I hand-paint and with this method, there was almost no bleeding in the rinsing process.

If it weren't for my continuing battle with the dreaded housework, I'd be doing this again all day. But, I really need to get a handle on my housework. Not having the house organized makes me crazy and I just can't seem to focus on the "fun" work when I'm like that. My to-do list between the house, my personal life, and my shop is pretty overwhelming these days and I'm trying really hard to figure out a way to get a handle on all of it without working myself to death. If anyone has any helpful suggestions for this, I would be really happy to hear them!

It was really fun to hear all the comments on the Spindlers list about the dyeing:) I truly love that list and all the wonderful people and experience that "live" there so it feels good to give something back. I was awake a good part of the night thinking about dyeing wool this way. I have a couple of ideas, but I'm mostly concerned about the dye striking enough before you add the fixative (which, with wool, would be acid/water). I wonder if the colors will all blend together at that point, especially since heat is going to be applied afterward. I have a couple ideas in mind:

1. Try a jar with vinegar in the dye solution and one without.

2. Use HOT dye/vinegar when applying dye

3. Uh...I thought I had more ideas but I'm suddenly fresh out ;>

Anyway, I hope to be able to play around with this in the next day or two. I'm going to try roving first, I think. But everything I've learned about dyeing wool tells me it's going to be a whole 'nother animal! Stay tuned...

Dye in a New Way...

2006-07-05T18:06:00.000-04:00

I'm a really intuitive dyer...I tend not to follow many rules, I play a lot, I experiment. So, when I came upon instructions for Low Water Immersion dyeing (intended for fabric) I thought..."Why not for YARN?" I played with it on some cotton with a couple of skeins and was pretty pleased. I haven't knitted any up yet...I saved out one ball to knit but sold all the others I did that day. I was concerned about pooling in the knitting, etc. Here's a look at my first attempt...

Doesn't look that awful balled up :) But I can't leave well enough alone. I wanted more colors and I wanted to do it again. Now, I'm not really that disillusioned with hand-painting but the process of this low water immersion technique is so unpredicable. It's a tad easier too.

I'm going to walk y'all through the steps of low immersion dyeing on cotton yarn...you can certainly do it with wool...and I'm dyeing to try it with wool roving myself:)

First (boring) things first: Wash your yarn in hot water with Syntrapol (I've heard Dawn is a good sub, but I'm not sure). This removes any sizing, etc and gives you a clean canvas. Rinse and spin (or wring it out--this is cotton, so wringing out is fine!) so that the yarn is damp, not wet.

You should have collected some glass jars...you want your yarn to fit in TIGHT and I do mean TIGHT. Ball the slightly damp skein up and stuff it VERY TIGHTLY into the jar. Smush it, poke it, stuff it down into the jar. Like this:

This yarn looks like brains because it's a nubby cotton...fun, eh? Wait'll you see the alien brain photo later. Anyway, you want it packed really tight. This is very important! And that the yarn is not soaking wet is important as well.

Mixing the dyes: I used Procion fiber reactive dyes from Dharma...no heat necessary. You want to mix up the dyes with PLAIN WATER ONLY. No urea, no soda ash, nada! Just dye and water at this stage. Mix them according to the directions for your particular fiber reactive dye. You can use one, two, three colors...I chose three for mine. Now for the fascinating part....

You're going to need some precision pouring the dyes into the jar onto the yarn. I found that using the hair dye squirt bottles I begged from my hair stylist worked very well. (For this purpose, I needed to cut the tips off a bit more than I would for hand-painting)

For simplicity's purpose, I'm going to describe what *I* did in pouring on the dyes. You can certainly go your own route here! I tilted the jar a bit, and started squirting the dye down one side of the jar, trying to make sure that I was saturating that side/section of yarn. You could also (and I did this on another jar) pull out your yarn and pour some dye into the bottom of the jar to color the bottom. You don't want to fill the jar at this point with dye! You want to start coloring a section. At this stage, you can "smoosh" a bit...you can press down on the yarn so that more of the dye gets to the bottom (if you chose to pour onto the yarn, instead of into the bottom of the jar). This is something I didn't understand the first time I tried this...YOU ARE NOT FILLING THE JAR! You're trying to put in enough dye to color a section of the yarn in the jar.

When you're happy with the saturation there and you don't have excess dye floating on the top, time for step 2! Grab another color and squirt/pour onto another section of the yarn. Again, go lightly and DO NOT SMOOSH at this point (or at all from now on) unless you want the colors to blend together. If the dye looks "stuck" on a section, add SMALL amounts of water until it spreads where you want it but keep in mind that you still want a basically "dry" yarn at this point. Pour...wait...pour more if you want. And then continue in this manner with all your colors. It should look something like this:

The first jar was done with 3 colors, the second two with 2 colors. Notice how there is NOT any excess liquid at the top of the yarn? Now onto the tricky part...

Waiting and watching (sigh). BUT...it's super important! This stage should take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. If you leave it too long, your dyes are going to blend, which is fabulous if you want a more "Monet" water-color result. If you want more distinction, keep a careful eye on the jars and when it looks right to you, it's time to fix the dye. Some dyes will "split" as they creep along the fiber, which can be a Very Cool Thing. I don't find that the Procion dyes I've been using split UNLESS I mix colors to get another. I.E: Mixing blue/red to get purple can end up in green at the edges:)

When your yarn looks about like you want it to look in the end, you need to FIX THE DYE. Fiber reactive dyes require Soda Ash as a fixative (this is NOT baking soda!) Mix the soda ash into a solution and then pour the solution into the jars to just cover the yarn. What will be happening here is that your yarn will have "accepted" the dyes and is just waiting for a reason to keep them! It'll be like this:

And don't freak out if it looks like this on top:

It can be cloudy, weird, bizarre looking! That's OK, (and part of the fun!) If you look into the jars, your colors should still be separated. DO NOT SMOOSH, STIR, AGITATE OR OTHERWISE *&)@* with your jar of yarn at this point!!! I know it'll be hard to keep your paws out of it but the fixative WILL creep down into the yarn, I promise! Do not underestimate the power of gravity! LEAVE IT ALONE! For (and this sucks, I know) at least an hour!

When at least an hour has gone by (and if you can resist, or have other pressing matters to attend to) or 6 or 12, you can rinse your yarn.

I used the most excellent instructions of Paula Burch when I started doing this and you can find so much more info on this process (and many more!) from her HERE.

Tomorrow I'll post the results of my own low immersion dyed cotton yarns so you can see what you're getting into before you take the plunge:)

Inspired by a perfect summer day

2006-07-05T10:26:00.000-04:00

Wow...woke up this morning to a gem of a forecast...Blue skies, light breeze, 75 degrees all day. It doesn't get better than this:) After I get done messing with this blog I'll mess around with the plants, kick around the idea of going to the sale at the nursery for more perennials cheap, vacuum and do laundry and clean the toilet (awwwwwwwww man!) but mostly, DYE! And when I was outside photographing some stuff for the blog, I took some pics of a couple of plants on the deck for inspiration...I get so stuck in color ruts sometimes and I'm in a green phase right now. Ha...and maybe will be still looking at these...

...but it's summer...things are green and gorgeous! And my green stuff always sells. That's a pot of coleus on the top and a pineapple mint on the bottomt. The pineapple mint is absolutely delicious in iced tea...just drop in a few branches and let it steep in the sun.

I guess I won't be working on the Tour de Fleece challenge today...too much to do and I'm feeling dangerously cocky about it since I spun up 4 oz of the pound yesterday morning.

I participated in a Spindlers list Dyeing4Spring exchange, and received this lovely yellow/green roving from Norma on the list, along with the spalted maple spindle. This fiber actually helped me figure out the long draw on a spindle...it's a dream to spin! I'm trying to find out what it is. The cool new spindle fits in quite well with my small spindle collection, which currently consists of the spalted maple, a zebrawood top whorl, a tahkli (that I'm afraid of!), an Ashford Turkish (my first!) and a Valkyrie Turkish, which I adore. Not pictured is a Very Cool Alden Amos stone whorl spindle that lives at the shop with fiber for sock yarn on it.

Spindling was my first love and I still do it regularly, much to the dismay of my Mom and assorted spinning buddies. To me, it's great fun, and very calming. It's not always about the finish line for me, I really do enjoy the whole process and spindling slows that down. And the portability can't be beat! If I only have a few minutes to spin, I love how easy it is to grab a spindle and just DO IT rather than committing to sitting down at the wheel. So much easier to collect than wheels :) I'm currently lusting after a Greensleeves McKenna and something-anything-from Bill at Copper Moose. I want a Hatchtown too, and a fancy fancy Bosworth...

So, I'm off to accomplish some of the dreaded housework, maybe hit the nursery and DEFINITELY get some dyeing done :)

And the race is on ~ for me, anyway :)

2006-07-04T13:53:00.002-04:00

I started out this morning spinning the Shetland for my Tour de Fleece challenge...

And what a challenge it's turning out to be! I recently discovered how to do long draw spinning and have been having a bit of trouble with it. So the first 4 oz of this roving came hard but toward the end (like the last 1/2 oz!) I might have been getting somewhere. I was tweaking tension (scotch and drive band), playing with different whorl ratios, you name it! This roving is more like combed top and maybe Shetland isn't the easiest thing in the world to use in long draw spinning, I don't know. I'm going to google it here in a minute and see what I can come up with to share.

This blog ~ PINK TEA ~ had a pretty interesting entry about a Shetland Spinning Class. And take a gander at the Tussah Silk she spun and plied...WOW! Awesome! Anyway, she mentions spinning "semi-woolen", which is drafting forward I assume, rather than back. I ended up playing with that some myself about 2 oz into it and found it helped so maybe I'm onto something after all :) And I found that I, too, needed to really loosen up the scotch tension to get even close to enough twist.

I did spin up some other dark Shetland, (not as "combed top-ish) as this on the Mazurka at work and it wasn't easy either but I wasn't at all trying to draft foward. I finished it as 2-ply and it's very soft...I think it wants to be a scarf! There are about 200 yards of a fingering weight (mosttly!) Then I tried with some Coopworth which was really tacky as if it had a lot of lanolin or spinning oil in it from processing and THAT was NOT easy. I did have a very easy time with some wool roving at the shop on Mom's Ashford Elizabeth...that stuff just flew onto the bobbin like magic and the Elizabeth put lots of twist in. It was a bit of a challenge getting twist in with the Traditional today as fine as I was (trying!) to spin...I think I need the smaller bobbins...I'm using the standard right now.

So tomorrow I may try the Mazurka with another four oz...I think the ratio (which I really don't understand the way I should) might be better...loose tension, draft forward.

Now I'm eyeballing a ball of cormo roving to practice true woolen spinning...the question is...dye it before or dye it after? Hmmmm....(as the huge pile of stuff waiting to be dyed on the counter screams at me ) Add to "To-Do List" : BUY SOME ACID DYES!!! The Jacquard dyes I have are really boring colors but I think I may have to dig them out and use them up anyway. And there's always Kool Aid, and Wilton's (but I think NOT the Rit anymore...it bleeds something awful and takes a thousand and twelve rinses to get out...but sometimes it's good to add a bit of it to other dyes to tweak color)

This is the tacky Coopworth I tried to spin on the Traditional using the long draw but it was VERY tacky and just a PITA to spin. (and my dining room table isn't pink...its a very cool beat up barn red!) The singles weren't real even by any means, I fought it every step of the way. I ended up making a 3 ply from it, after reading in the current issue of Spin Off about plying and spinning for knitting. Sigh...I though 2 ply was grand until I read that! So I only ended up with about 240 yards or so of this. It was interesting trying to wash out the tackiness...took awhile and super hot water! I do like how the 3-ply looks though. The article said that 3 + plies fill in the knitting better than 2-ply, and that 2-ply is better suited to lacey knitting, which is a relief, because I want to make a lace shawl out of my pound of Shetland :)

I'll have to do a lot of searching for a pattern that can use all 4 colors and I've also played around with the idea of plying two different colors together...the two darker and the two lighter together and see what I get. It looks like I'll be able to spin this up in plenty of time for the challenge deadline (July 23).

I'm off to check out the other participant's blogs to see how they're coming along.

First Post and Tour de Fleece challenge

2006-07-03T15:52:00.001-04:00

There's not much here yet, I admit but I'm very very new to this blogging thing and I've spent most of the day trying to figure out heretofore unknown things like blog skins and html code I did manage to figure out how to insert the Tour de Fleece button in my links area AND even hyperlink it, so perhaps that's enough for one day of blogging.

I've decided to just start posting and use this to begin posting my progress in the Online Spinning Challenge called Le Tour de Fleece. I've challenged myself to spin up 1 pound of a very lovely Shetland in 4 separate colors, hoping to spin it fine enough for a lace shawl. I've spent both days of the challenge thus far finishing up various fibers on both my dear Mother's Kromski Mazurka (which I kidnapped from the shop and brought home) and my own Ashford Traditional. I recently taught myself long draw spinning and plyed some brown Shetland that I'd spun that way on the Mazurka. It came out OK, particularly for my very first attempt at long draw spinning on a wheel I'm still getting to know. I'm donating 4 oz of brown llama roving for the challenge prize pool.

But now, I have the Traditional bobbins free and all the Mazurka bobbins free and tonight or tomorrow morning I hope to start sampling a bit to see which wheel will work best.

I want this blog to be a place to share my spinning, dyeing and knitting adventures and I plan to work on a separate blog for the shop I share with my Mom, Yarn or a Tale in Millington Michigan, and another personal blog about me, my life and my critters (and I do have critters!)

I need to get busy dyeing up yarn and roving, I have LOTS of knitting to do for the shop, I have patterns to write, a newsletter to get out, a Scarf of the Month to design...and I only have 2 more days off :o

In the meantime, here's a quick example of some of the stuff I like to do for fun! These are some mohair locks I bought as raw, unwashed fleece (and THAT is a story in itself, coming soon!) and hand-dyed. They are soooo yummy (and for sale in my shop)