SpinnySpinny

I haven’t had much to say because most of it has been pretty dull. I’ll spare you the details of the not-family-friendly conversations I’ve had with the inkjet printer over alignment. I did some research at the library and worked on more writing. Oh, and I changed my jury service so I don’t have to go the week before I need to mail all this stuff off. Isn’t that thrilling?

I am doing some spinning at least, I got the fine textured cotton done, reeled a bobbin of silk (and glued another together into a sticky mess) and today I’m doing singles for a lofty cable yarn. That one is fairly mindless, a nice break. I’ve been warned that The Boyfriend might be coming home early from his business trip, I hope it’s not before I can vacuum up the fiber that’s all over the floor.

More paper. I have my box of file folders set up, with labels and index cards and plastic baggies. Nearly every file folder has an index card stapled into it, to which I’m going to stick a printed label with the required information. That’s what the directions say, staple an index card to the file folder. That might have made sense decades ago when nobody had heard of self-adhesive labels. You can’t put a file folder in the typewriter, after all. Now, nobody I know uses a typewriter and I can’t offhand think of where I might find one other than the display of Herb Caen’s venerable Royal in the window of the San Francisco Chronicle. I was by to visit a friend there yesterday and I didn’t see any typewriters inside, either. Even my mother has a computer and she used to have practically a typewriter collection.

I’m not going to hand write anything if I can help it, so I’m using computer printed labels. I counted yesterday and figured I’d have sixteen sheets of labels. Then I realized I forgot one. Twenty sheets of printed labels, most of them all unique. Each type of label has to have something different and every yarn has six different labels. The swatches have another two, and then there are file folders for written materials, the binder and some for the box and lid too. I even managed to print a label to avoid drawing the two inch lines. (If you ever have cause to do such exacting typography, I have one word for you: letterspacing. See, I got something out of all those years of hanging out with The Ex-Boyfriend, Font Geek.)

Today I do have to get some spinning done, between laundry and dealing with paper. With things getting down to the end, domestic tasks are suffering. My exercise schedule is long gone, meal planning involves increasing numbers of Things That Come In Boxes and now even basic housework is falling down. That is a serious problem in a place this small.

A little bit of spinning, a lot of paper today.

I did the Romney/mohair blend single, but I’m not happy about what the bamboo/tencel blend is doing so I scrapped that idea. I’m trying to come up with two more fibers to blend. I did my really sloppy punis from the Pima cotton, after taking out all the seeds and a pile of trash. I can see it isn’t going to all fit on the high speed bobbins, so I will have to do two. That’s ok, at least. I may just splice the ends anyway. I could use that for the cotton swatch, as weft. It’s textured, all right, but that also means it’s not very strong. I’d have to find something to use for warp and pull out the table loom, but it wouldn’t take much yarn.

I set up the printer, assembled a box and started dealing with packaging. I have to go get more file folders, but at least I can get going with the labels. It took hours to set up the templates because the ones I downloaded from Avery didn’t align correctly. And then I had to create all sorts of nested tables to get the layout right. But now I have them all ready. Even the two inch lines, one half inch from one short edge and one quarter inch from one long edge. What a pain. Still haven’t cut the cardboard tags that go with those, however. While I’m out getting file folders, I need to look at staplers and three hole punches. If they are cheap enough, I might get my own instead of trying to borrow them. I’ve been meaning to get new business cards just for the website, too. Three blocks away and I can’t manage to get the the office supply store.

After test printing a few things from the website, I was reminded how much I adore stylesheets. Since I have put things in a binder, I need a left margin on all the pages. So I changed one line in my stylesheet and there it was. I didn’t even have to mess with the website, I just created a custom version that I can tell my browser to use. The only other thing to do before I start printing for real is create a new blank page footer. I have to take out the SpinnySpinny part so nobody knows who I am. (As if.)

I plied the tiny cotton, I didn’t like how it looked as a two-ply so I’ve decided to take it and four ply that. So I gave it a lot of twist and wound it off to measure. I’m really close, so I have to wind bobbins by length to make sure I ply every last bit of it. And, yes, there is about 550m of two-ply there, about what I guessed. There is only a little bit of the original single left so I was even very close on that. This brown cotton is combed, but there is still a lot of short fiber and a little trash in there and that makes it impossible to get a really even yarn. And in a two-ply, every little bit of variation shows. I still had the other multiple ply medium cotton to do, so I decided to use it for that. With an eight-ply, it all evens out.

I did the spinning wheel yarn in a day, I just have to measure and wind the skein. It’s fine enough that I’d rather not put it on the swift, so I took it from setting the twist on the skein winder to a ball. It’s something like 60 wraps per inch, that makes it extra fine. It’s basically the same single as the Andean weaving yarn but with a little less twist. I didn’t sort the Romney for color this time and the lighter color fibers tend to be slightly longer than the dark, so the color gently shades from dark to light with each comb batch. It’s an interesting effect that makes a semi-random narrow stripe warp, but it’s not so good for weft. The shorter length of each back and forth pass of the weft means large blocks of color.

Next is going to be the blend two-ply, I think. I did the mohair and wool on the drum carder a few days ago, the bamboo and tencel has been sitting around for a while. I have a lot of things to finish, I’m going to do as much spinning as possible next week when The Boyfriend is out of town on business.

The past few days have been spent dealing with a mountain of fleece. No, I didn’t buy it at Spinners day at the Winery. (I’m negotiating that for later.) Long, long ago, like in February, I asked The Boyfriend’s uncle if he could get a little bit of wool from his neighbors. He lives in 4H land, and I was looking for meat sheep fleeces for the woolen stuff. I didn’t hear anything, so I went and found my own. Well, this week I get a cryptic email about Dorset fleeces. I go to the mailbox and there is a huge box containing two Dorset fleeces. Yikes. They are stinky and dirty and smell more like barnyard than sheep. They are also full of hay, burrs, dirt and all kinds of things. I went through both to see what I could use and out of two large garbage bags I got one small one of stuff I might be willing to do something with later. The fiber itself isn’t bad, it would be good for sock yarn or cold weather sweaters or things. But I have plenty of other fiber that doesn’t need nearly as much work. It’s very kind of him to go through the trouble to locate and mail me the fleeces. And at the time I did need such things. But Oh Boy.

In the middle of all that, I’m still trying to get yarn done. It’s getting to the point where I’m sick of pretty much everything and I want it to all be over with. I needed to ply the cotton for the fine two-ply, so I took a look at how much a nightmare that might be. Earlier attempts were a mess, so I decided to let it sit on the bobbins a while. It’s only a little better now. I finally wound the two singles together on a bobbin so I can ply without also fighting snarled, tangled yarn. It only broke about a dozen times in the process because I went r e a l l y s l o w l y. It took hours just to wind the bobbin and I still have to actually twist it.

I’ve decided to do the spinning wheel skein as the single from the Andean weaving yarn. It’s tiny, but it’s fast and it’s something I can do without much thought. I started flicking more Suffolk to do the spindle wheel yarn, I will drum card it if I can but there are several other things ahead of it in the queue. I am still avoiding the small supported spindle. I should just get the large supported spindle thing over with, but I don’t know what I want to do with that yet. Maybe more Suffolk. Whatever it is, it will be large. And I’m not doing it with the long “Navajo” spindle, either. I don’t like them for soft yarns because the part that spirals up the shaft gets mashed while you are spinning. I have other large spindles, or I can take that same huge whorl and put it on a shorter shaft. Any bottom whorl spindle becomes a supported spindle by setting it down. Nothing fancy about it at all.