SpinnySpinny

This weekend I borrowed the drum carder, so I could do a few things. One of those things was the Coopworth, which even scoured twice was still greasy. I tried to pick out the second cuts and VM and all those other annoying bits. What I wasn’t counting on was the tips to disintegrate in carding. So now I have carded batts with even more noils in them than before. And seemingly no less VM, despite cleaning up piles of it from the floor. Most of a day of carding produced six large batts.

I spun a section of one tonight. About ten minutes into it, with a lap full of junk I’d pulled out and a grungy-looking yarn on the bobbin, I skeined it off to wash. It didn’t look any better.

My original idea was to spin half S and half Z and do a striped warp. Not only do I not like this yarn, I don’t want to use it for warp either. It’s full of slubs from all the broken tips and then there’s still the VM. I’ll wait until morning and see how the skein looks dry, but this is seriously turning into a “Life’s too short” project. It’s one thing to go through hours and hours of work wondering if the end result will turn out like you imagined. It’s another entirely to do it for something you are certain is going to suck no matter what.

But I did finally get back to the Merino, I filled the last of the first bobbin. 132 grams. I could get a little more on there if I tried, but I’d have to stop and adjust it too much to be worth the bother. Now I just have to finish the other two.

Almost a month ago I bought some fleece on eBay. I wasn’t going to, but it seemed like a good thing to do at the time. It was advertised as Rambouillet, a Merino-type fleece. It looked pretty dirty in the picture but the scoured example was good and white. For $4 a pound plus shipping, it was priced about what I would expect for backyard sheep fleece. I send the check, the seller says he will ship when he gets it. Ok, fine.

Problem Number One: two weeks and no package, so I send an email. It is a holiday weekend, so I’m not concerned that I don’t get an immediate reply. Until five days later when there is still no package and no response. Second email.

The next day I get a reply. Problem Number Two: the seller forgot to send the package. Oopsie! He remembered to cash the check, however — four days after it was sent.

Finally I get the package. Problem Number Three: this is supposed to be Rambouillet, a fine wool closely related to Merino. I expect it to have tons of grease and a tiny crimp. It’s supposed to be a ram fleece, so I’m fully prepared for it to be stinky. What I get has far less grease than I expect. The crimp is vaguely like a fine wool, but not particularly so. And it’s hardly “very white,” as advertised, because most of the tips are stained yellow from dirt. At least it’s not stinky. I hunt around for the very cleanest part to wash, and that does come out white, but most of the rest is caked in dirt and washes to yellow stained tips.

Problem Number Four: this is the springiest, most Down breed feeling Rambouillet I’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s not all that fine, being somewhere near a mediocre Corriedale. (The seller did say 60s count, which is about right even if it’s the very bottom of the range for the breed.) Even in the grease, which there isn’t very much of, it doesn’t have the blocky square-end staples I expect. I could see some of this in the seller’s photo, but it’s more than I expected and the whole fleece is the same way. It’s actually quite tippy. I’m hardly expecting the best quality fiber from a cheap backyard fleece, but I at least expect it to match the description.

I notice that my washed samples have not even made the attempt to felt despite less-than-careful handling. I comb a bit of fiber and lay it out in a small batt for a felting sample. Following my normal felting procedure, it’s quite stubborn in not felting and only eventually starts to hold together. It’s still very springy. I wash another sample in my felting solution, making a point of swishing and squeezing the cut end, where wool fleece starts to felt first. After several rounds of rough handling, there is only the faintest suggestion of felting at the cut end. I pull out a lock of raw Merino from the closet and try the same thing: it starts to felt immediately.

If you handed me a sample of this without comment, my first suggestion would be that it was a Dorset crossed with a fine wool like a Merino or Rambouillet. Not a pure fine wool by any means. I could tell from the photo that it wasn’t the nicest stuff, but it wasn’t expensive either. It’s fine for what I intend to use it for, although I’m not so thrilled about the dirty tips not washing out as promised. If the seller said it was a Rambouillet cross, I would have probably still bought it. But now I’m cranky about it because it clearly isn’t.

I haven’t left feedback for the seller yet but sent another email. I already don’t expect to leave a glowing comment because of the shipping problem, but the question of breed on top of it makes me even less happy. I haven’t bought fiber from eBay in a long time because I’d rather see it in person, but I thought this would be a good inexpensive fiber to experiment with. This is what you get when you deal with people you don’t know.

Today we went off to the fair, to have a look around and get a picture of my yarn in the display case. Fortunately there is more than one digital camera in the household.

My friend predicted I’d get a blue ribbon and I did. I’m not personally all that motivated by winning, so I had to be convinced to enter. It is another way to explore further what judging yarn means, so I can learn something there. (I won’t get the comments, if any, until after the fair ends.) Perhaps somebody will be inspired to explore traditional yarns as a result, and that is a good thing.

There was a group of spinners demonstrating in front of the yarn and weaving display, one turned out to be a yarn judge. I asked her about how they evaluated the entries and the judges were looking specifically for technical skill. I’ve talked to many people about entering their yarns in competition and have heard several stories of seemingly random results, so this is encouraging. It isn’t that I don’t care at all about creative visual design (let’s just say it isn’t high on my list) but I do think that some people don’t look past it to consider structure. It is the structure that interests me, and that is best seen by starting with even and consistent yarn. Such that apparently there was some discussion about whether on not my skein was actually spun by hand.

I get this comment once in a while, it’s still always weird when I do. (People ask me all the time where I buy my clothes, you would think I’d get used to it.) Some spinners believe one shouldn’t worry too much about making fine and even yarn because irregularities give it “character.” If they wanted even spinning, they would buy it already made. I actually don’t consider if yarn is machine or hand spun when evaluating it’s qualities, only that it has certain characteristics. Handspun yarn tends to have particular ones and machine spun others. It’s all still yarn. It’s the whole subject of what is “good” yarn where I get bogged down in the sea of opinions and personal preferences.

While we are on the subject of pictures, there were some other things on the camera once I got everything off. Here is the yarn I sent off to the San Mateo County Fair:

I didn’t even measure it, it’s somewhere around 100 g I’d guess. I think it’s a nice medium-ish sock yarn size and it’s good and solid. One thing I don’t like about the yarn I bought is I keep splitting it with the needle. Here’s the swatch:

Yes, that’s a roll of coins there. I say it was a teeny tiny hat, remember? I did it on 2.25 mm (US 1) needles. I like how that worked, so I expect I’ll do the actual projects on that size also. I even got a second matching circular needle for the occasion.

With all the excitement going on with the loom, I haven’t done any spinning the past few days. I have to prep more fiber first, which I’m not so excited about at the moment. I’m also doing some computer stuff, which is why these past few entries didn’t get posted right away.

I keep trying to find entertaining tidbits to dazzle and enlighten, but the truth is I’m not doing anything the least bit exciting on the textile front at the moment. The skein for the county fair is off and the sock is in that row after row of stockinette stitch part. I’ve even spun all the Merino I combed for the bobbins of singles. So what am I doing now? Fiber prep. Sorting, scouring and flicking. I haven’t even gotten back to the pointy dangerous tool bit.

For those of you who were here for the whole COE thing, I realize this is a letdown. First the COE, and then the Learning Exchange and now… fiber prep? Yes, I hate to break it to you but I am one of those types who generally works on a project until it’s done. I may have two or three going, but rarely more. Right now, there is a knitting project, a spinning project and a loom-configuration project, in addition to the ongoing may-take-forever spindle project. I’ve got some ideas for other things, I’ve toyed with a few samples, but I haven’t actually started anything.

Since I finally finished scouring the first lamb fleece from last summer (there are two more to go, remember,) I’m continuing with the spinning of it. I’m basically going to spin three full bobbins of single and make sock yarn, which will be used for legwarmers and wrist warmers and possibly some socks. The Boyfriend has expressed an interest in gloves. Several of these things will come from this first batch. If I need more yarn, well, it was a four pound fleece.

I like to spin a bunch of yarn all at once because I get better yarn. If I do all the singles first, they are more likely to match. And if they don’t, I can still do something about it (like decide I want a six-ply yarn instead.) I also do better if I ply all at once. Now with full bobbins of fine single, that’s going to mean many bobbins of 3-ply yarn. But I can ply a full bobbin in a couple hours at most. I usually do it in one sitting. I count treadles when I ply, so I set aside an afternoon when I have nothing else I have to do and nobody is around. I don’t answer the phone. I even got some extra bobbins so I could do several at a time.

All this is about as far as you can get from the gee-wiz school of spinning, where one is in it for exploring the unending parade of possible fibers, colors and textures. I like to pick something and do it for a while until I feel I really understand it. Add to that my preference for large projects and it can easily take years to finish something. When I finished the COE, the one thing I most wanted to do was make something. After such a long time of doing nothing but samples, I need to produce a finished object just to see that I still can. It didn’t help at all that many of those yarns are things I would never choose to do for myself. “Ok, I did the novelty yarns. Can I go back to fun stuff now?” Bobbin after bobbin of technically precise yarn is the fun stuff.