SpinnySpinny

I’ve been trying to not obsessively check the package tracking, and I thought I was being fairly mellow about things. Then I realized I had a typo on one of my labels that made it incorrect. All my checking and checking again and reading over everything and making sure the right label with the right information got stuck on the right card and attached to the right object. I’m actually not all that surprised there was an error with all the different pieces involved. Each yarn had six printed stickers to go with it. And several times I stuck on the wrong one only to realize it seconds later. I tried to set up a system as much as possible so that I got everything together correctly, because this is a huge project to try to organize.

So, needless to say, I was in a panic. I calmed down enough to contemplate my possible options and then sent the mentor an email. It was still a little early here on the west coast to call her. But the registrar is in North Carolina, so I called her. She is the one who will be handling all the boxes anyway. She was exceedingly helpful and would be happy to attach a new label if I sent her the correct one. I was so nervous about it I even got which label it was confused. (I had the wrong number of plies, which is on the yarn index card, but the others are correct.) I immediately printed out a new label and stuck it in an envelope with a snippet of yarn for easier identification. I’ll run it over to the post office in a little bit and it will go out today. As much as the official instructions are intimidating, confusing and even occasionally conflicting, the people have been friendly and helpful and for this I am thankful.

Now, with that emergency resolved, I can continue on with my weekend. A bunch of local fiber folks are getting together for a retreat at someone’s home. I’m not bringing a spinning wheel and I even decided to not bring a spindle. I have some knitting to do, a gift project, that is about as close to mindless as you can get without it being a garter stitch rectangle. (It is basically a giant dishcloth, exactly the kind that aunts and grandmothers have been knitting of 4-ply cotton for decades.) Which is good, because I’m going to sit on my butt by the pool all weekend. I’m going to chat with friends and bake bread and knit and generally not do anything I don’t feel like. I might teach some weaving, I packed the frame loom and a bunch of assorted shuttles, shed sticks, weaving swords and rods.

I haven’t done much with updating the website, but I do have pictures of most things to put online. A few yarns went out without photos but I still have samples of most of those so I can at least have something up. I’m going to take it easy with that because I have a bunch of things to do, for this website and others. I have a ton of article ideas that have been on hold to get written, in addition to starting on my summary of the COE process. I’m not going to publish anything on that until I get the results back, but I’m starting to think about how this has gone and what I want to say about it. But right now there is a deck chair in Petaluma with my name on it.

It’s done!

The package is ready to go out in the morning. I didn’t get all the yarn pictures taken but I have little bits of most of them remaining. I’ll just do a new one in a few months when I get everything back. It will take a few weeks to get everything online anyway.

And I have several months of cleaning to catch up on. But The Boyfriend sure is happy to hear that food will again appear out of that room at the other end of the apartment. But first, I think I need a nap.

I have so much to do that I’m probably not going to be saying much in the blog until I get this done. I’m making changes to the website, but only where it’s helping me organize my material. I still have some writing and a lot of spinning over the next four weeks. There are still those everyday nuisances like sleeping, eating and doing laundry too. Fortunately, The Boyfriend is being incredibly understanding and helpful as the various domestic tasks grind to a halt and the place is taken over with spinning. I wish I could say as much about the landlord, who has chosen this week to start renovating the upstairs apartment.

The Pima cotton is giving me fits, but I got some writing and another swatch done anyway. I wove something roughly the size of a coaster with weft stripes of fuzzy llama yarn. I keep wishing I had a real loom but when I actually start thinking about it, what I need is a place to put a real loom. The loom itself is much less of an issue. I still have the table loom, but I’m not using it because there isn’t even a place for that. I have no table to put it on, and using it on the floor is horrible. Even if I had a better piece of floor than the high-traffic middle of the living room. So I did it on the frame loom, with string heddles and sticks and everything. I could have finished the fourth selvedge but I left it as fringe because it gets much more difficult as you get closer to the end. This is seriously primitive stuff, I had to pick up most of my pattern sheds by hand. I can keep one on a shed stick, but I’d have to tie up harnesses if I wanted the rest of them.

I went to Carolina Homespun yesterday, partly because I needed a tapestry beater and partly to just get out of the house. I picked up, err, “A Few Things” and looked at some other weaving stuff. One of the big problems with early weaving technology is that there is no simple warp spacing mechanism. With no reed to hold the warp in position, it’s very hard to maintain width for anything but narrow warp-faced fabric. It is possible to set up something with a rigid heddle, but the finest you can get with those are about 12 ends per inch. Seeing that most of my interest in weaving starts around 20, that isn’t much help.

With the writing, I’ve been trying to get all the Elements and Principles stuff done. I completely hate it because most of it is theoretical principles of design stuff. Supposedly these are the qualities of good visual composition, but it’s all very eurocentric and doesn’t consider the many non-Western artistic aesthetics that don’t fit into it’s nice neat boxes. And it’s all visual. Tactile perception, a large part of textile design, isn’t even remotely considered. I’m supposed to provide “illustrations, photographs and/or small samples” for each item. I’m not going though the work to spin and weave swatches just to talk about theories of visual design, so I’m doing it with photographs. I selected the images, but I haven’t finished all the writing. I took one new picture, but mostly I just pulled old stuff out of my library. (Yes, they are all my images, I changed the resolution so they look ok online but that’s it. If I find someone is using them, you will be hearing from me.)

I need to get back to that cotton. Ick.

The 16-ply cable is done, along with the extra fine cotton. I haven’t measured either, although the 50g of wool yarn won’t even begin to fit in the plastic sandwich bag. It’s huge. Much to my amazement, I had no trouble plying the singles even with the absurdly small amount of twist in them. The yarn comes out kinda square, it’s a 4-ply yarn that is then done 4-ply again with hardly any twist at all. The whole thing is felted, it shrunk quite a bit but now holds together nicely.

I skeined the extra fine cotton to wash, very carefully. Now I have to unwind it to measure. I think it will be ok, it only broke once in winding, but I’m still nervous. This yarn is much more even than the brown cotton single that gave me such trouble. Since I’m doing extra fine cotton, I’ve started on some combed Pima for the two-ply. It is breaking more than I’d like but otherwise is doing ok.

I’m trying to figure out how to describe my cotton spinning technique. I’m doing the exact same motions as for the other extra fine, but since this is combed and not carded the yarn comes out smoother. Supposedly combed cotton is to be spun “point of twist,” which is drafting while moving the fiber so it stays ahead of the twist. I do that, yes, but then I make the yarn thinner and more even by continuing to draft. Isn’t that what happens with a rolag spun woolen or carded cotton or a puni? Some people even call it “double drafting.” This is where the whole woolen/worsted thing falls apart. Cotton doesn’t handle like wool. I tried pure point of twist, with no extra drafting, and other than a thicker yarn it doesn’t look any different. But since I’m using combed fiber, supposedly the “correct” way to spin is with a short draw technique. Point of twist, with no further drafting, is short draw because it is pulling the fibers out in parallel and then immediately twisting them into finished yarn.