SpinnySpinny

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.

Ok, no more dye experiments. I was going to be cute and dye the tussah skein. Bad Idea. It blew itself to little bits when I tried to microwave set it. Another new item for Misfits. Now I have to go get the fiber back out of storage and start over.

The silk is coming along, it’s basically the same technique as the worsted wool but I don’t like it as much. The fiber is slippery. But at least I’m going through it at a pretty good clip. Without all that fiber prep to do, it feels like it takes no time at all. That is at least a nice change. I’ll probably have half of it done this evening.

I pulled out my dyes and I have to decide what to use: electric purple, scary bright pink, turquoise blue or antique gold. I could live with any but the gold, I got that to match the color of one of the commercial yarns. The pink and purple were supposed to be for dye experiments in painted roving and I got the two brightest colors I could stand to put together. This was back about the time I bought that Merino/Tencel stuff, so it was clearly also the product of temporary insanity. If I really want to do this as an embroidered swatch, I probably don’t want to do multiple colors. The blue was from an old project, one of the hats shown in the Gallery. I dyed some silk noil for one of the blending skeins, too.

Like I need an excuse to go over to Pearl… but I should probably use what I’ve got. I have a feeling that means the purple. It’s Country Classic Spring Violet, you can see it on this color card over at Mielke’s Fiber Arts. (While you are over there, you could check out some of Adam’s nifty wood stuff. I have one of the Lizzy spindles and it’s Very Nice.) On the bombyx, it should give some serious purple.

The silk experiment is a success, and it’s a lot easier to work with this way. The fiber is very pretty, all soft and fluffy like that, but a pain to work with because it tries to escape at every opportunity. Now it looks like something wet and dead, but it spins better. Maybe if I get my act together, I’ll actually dye the bombyx to make it less dreadfully dull. The tussah at least has an interesting soft gold color.

As for the other tussah project, I realized last night that I have to wind off and empty the spindle. And it doesn’t look anywhere near full. But I’m spinning it with a sorta-long draw technique and the silk just slides all over the place. That 15g spindle now weighs 36g and I can’t get the fine yarn I was. I want to wind it on a bobbin for better storage but I’m actually thinking I’ll skein it to have a look. If I ever actually intend to do anything with this, I should try to spin something vaguely like it with the rest of the fiber.