SpinnySpinny

I have banished the evil baby yarn from my life. I shall only think uplifting thoughts of fine silk and handspun wool.

All of that to re-sley and it still looked horrible. The closer sett seemed to make no difference on how the weft packed in and I’m not going to sit there and slowly ease each and every pick of a six meter warp into place. I’ve cut handspun warps off the loom when they weren’t behaving, I’m not going to let this one intimidate me into weaving it off.

Now I just have to decide what to do next. I think it will be more of the 8/2 cotton, but I can’t warp it right now because I need to leave the loom folded until Holiday Party Season is over. I know better to leave something around where 35 guests can all go “oooh” and “ahhh” and stick fingers or drop cookies in it. Our friends are nice people, but that’s just tempting fate. I could start measuring, however.

Last week I bought a bunch of silk fabric, so now I get to play with it. I wet out a piece of organza and sorta madly crinkle-pleated it into a bundle and dumped blue and purple dye all over it. I know I used far, far too much dye because organza weighs nothing, but it was what it took to get the fabric good and squishy damp. We’ll see how it comes out after it sits for three hours in the steamer. The one downside of all this clearance silk dye I bought. If I get really ambitious, I’ll stitch some gathering threads into it (by machine, thank you) and try some shibori the next time we do an indigo party somewhere.

Back from Petaluma with a pile of laundry and a bunch of newly-blue yarn. I’ll put the rest of the pictures on their own page soon, but here is one of the coolest:

This is the huge skein I made from the cone of so-so white single. I did put it first in the walnut pot, but wasn’t thrilled with the color I got. It was a yellow-brown that many people admired, but I was not one of them. The natural dye expert in attendance hinted that indigo was a great way to recover from a walnut experience with which one is not entirely pleased (having done so herself on several occasions.) So into the indigo vat it went, which soaked up half the pot and required maintenance every time. But after some hours of dips, it came out a greenish gray. I’ve decided I need to use it for pattern weft on something in a traditional coverlet design.

I’m heading off today for another trip to the farm in Petaluma. It’s a bunch of people from my spinning guild, we go to sit, swim, eat, yak and generally hang out and be fibery. There will be dyepots. With luck, somebody will be able to explain what I am still doing wrong with this sock knitting thing. We will eat way too much food and hang out with the sheep.

There will be an indigo vat, as usual, and I made huge skeins out of a cone of baby pink cotton yarn. With luck, it will turn out blue with purple bits and make for interesting weaving. The chemistry of the indigo process actually strips the fiber reactive dye out of cellulose material, which is very interesting. It doesn’t happen all at once, so you get a range of colors between whatever the original was and blue and can tie areas of the material to act as a resist. I have a t-shirt that started off bright yellow and is now blue and this odd greenish-yellow alien glowing stuff where the original color comes through. This amuses me because it’s almost exactly what you see when something first comes out of the indigo vat, before it hits the air and turns blue. (Indigo is not soluble in water, you have to reduce it in an alkaline solution before the fiber will absorb the dye.) But the synthetic thread used to stitch it together is still yellow.

My other dye experiment is going to be walnut hulls, kindly given by an online spinning friend. Without adding any other chemicals, simmered hulls give a dark brown. I’ve never actually used walnut hulls myself, so I’m completely guessing on how much to use. I stuck 100g of it in a nylon stocking to soak for a few days and the water is good and black. I’ve got about 750g of wool yarn and no expectations.

I finished two of the millspun copies and added the new pictures. I spun the fat single for the Brown Sheep sample and then had to go back and remove twist because it had too much. Ick. Now I guess I’ll start on the next one, I’ll do both from commercial Merino top. The others would have come out smoother if I had done that, but I had to use fleece to match colors.

I’m waiting for the water to boil to steam more blue yarn for a second attempt at the Andean swatch. I hosed the warp tension so badly I gave up and pulled it apart. I can still use most of the yarn but I need more blue and white for the pattern. If I’m going to re-do the white yarn anyway, I am going to go get some different fleece out of storage. The Blue-faced Leicester is nice, but the staple length is shorter than I’d like. I think the Shetland will do. I hope to get it warped by this weekend so I can work on it at a local spinning event Saturday.

This winding skeins business is getting really old. I’m doing fast skeins right now, so it seems like I get two new ones finished for every one wound.

Another weekend of spinning. This is about how it’s going to be until everything is done. I finished more yarns over the weekend and now that The Boyfriend is done borrowing my camera I’ll get pictures taken. A local knitting group did a dye workshop a few blocks away, I stopped by for a visit Saturday afternoon and ended up with a bottle of extra dye. I need to dye some of the Andean two-ply for the traditional three color patterns, so now I have medium gray, white and blue. The white is from a Blue-faced Leicester top I picked up for fun, it’s similar fiber although not so long a staple length.

I also did the drop spindle skein, again because I didn’t like how it came out the first time. The fiber for that was a grab-bag of fleece that appears to be Border Leicester. It was cotted (tangled) and had some color variation, so I flicked, drum carded and then combed just a little. Saturday I reeled some silk and Sunday was the guild meeting where I did fiber prep. I tried an experiment with the mystery farm fleece, a 4/3 12-ply cable. It was lofty and bouncy and huge, and with that many plies it doesn’t matter what the single looks like. But the fiber is filthy, so there I was with the dog brush yet again to get the junk out. It’s short and fine and crimpy but obviously has some down breed in it. The woman from the farm thinks it might be part Rambouillet, closely related to Merino, but there’s no way to really know.

Today I’m working on the remaining woolen with the Suffolk fleece. I used a friend’s drum carder to make batts and now I’m tearing them into chunks to make rolags. I couldn’t do it with hand cards because I couldn’t get batts large enough for the yarn I need. I’m also doing it with the quill, because it has to be large and low twist. Long draw works really well that way and the Lendrum quill head is huge. It’s weird to work with this big spike pointing directly at me, I can’t draft as far as with a normal position but this yarn doesn’t take long. Even if it’s still slower to spin than it should be because I have to get it as perfectly even as possible. Woolen just doesn’t like to do that.