SpinnySpinny

I spent most of the day with the drum carder. Last week I pulled out several small bags of fleece to blend together and this morning decided I didn’t have enough. So out comes the collection of workshop samples and other odds and ends and between all the different kinds of silk I have enough to do something. Gold tussah, bleached tussah, bombyx multiple sources and a few wool/silk blends. I left some of the larger amounts for another project and took all the bits and stuck them in some blue dye.

While the color was steam-setting (three hours!) I started preparing the base fiber. I set aside the lightest color wool to blend with the silk. The wool was all combed out in the staple with a dog brush and then carded, the wool blend took three passes and the silk five (because it was all clumped together after being dyed.) Now the gray-brown and blue batts are ready, tomorrow I just have to do the final layered blend of the two.

There is probably about 200g of fiber, enough for socks and a hat or a large scarf. I’m thinking I’ll do 3-ply sock yarn and then see what I feel like making. The yarn should come out a tweedy blue-gray. I’ll have pictures later.

I went to Stitches West at the Santa Clara Convention Center this morning to do a spinning demo, and of course since I was then in for free, some shopping.

It’s kinda like MacWorld for yarn. It would be dangerous if I bought knitting yarn, but typically I don’t. There were more vendors with spinning equipment and fiber, which was nice. I of course bought stuff I didn’t intend to. I wasn’t organizing this demo but only showing up to spin for a couple hours. I did teach so I wasn’t a complete slug. But I might have been more focused if I had actually had breakfast. Or lunch.

The demo was not the usual guild thing but for the Spinning and Weaving Association, a trade group of manufacturers and retailers. We were teaching, but not with the box of CD spindles the guild has. I got to play with a Ladybug wheel from Schacht, a beginner wheel less expensive than the Matchless.

It’s a nice little wheel, but I have to say I’m still a Lendrum partisan. The way it was set up was too slow for the kind of yarn I spin and too fast for real beginners. From looking on the website I think it had the medium whorl rather than the slow one but I’m not really sure. I found the scotch tension adjustment a little fussy, with the small plastic knob slipping when I tried to adjust it. Apparently it can also be set up for double drive, which I wouldn’t recommend for a first wheel. (Yes, when it works it’s wonderful. But getting it set Just Right is a bother.)

We had several small rigid heddle looms designed to use typical knitting yarns. They were already warped, I didn’t play with them but they seemed to be typical for the style. They had floor stands, which was nice. I really don’t know the manufacturer, I thought they might be the Knitter’s Loom, but it seems that Ashford is not a member of the association.

There was a small drum carder also, I carded some random layered batts and was spinning huge fluffy woolen yarn. Entirely unlike what I normally do, but suited to the fiber and equipment. Everybody seemed to like it and it got people’s attention.

I then spent about 90 minutes doing a fast tour of the show. I got a new spindle, some hand-dyed silk fiber and a length of Japanese silk fabric. Here’s a summary of the haul:

Hand-painted tussah silk from Fiber Fiend. It’s in blue, gray and purple in a colorway called Blackberry Swirl. Also a Maggie spindle from Carolina Homespun (27g I think the label said, before I lost it.)

The silk from Japan with a floral design was from John Marshall. No way I can afford any of his own work, but this was a nice piece he found in Japan. He told me how they are turning up now because people aren’t doing much traditional work anymore and you can find them discontinued. Good for shoppers, at least the Americans who are buying wholesale and bringing them back, but bad for the craft. I’m not sure of the exact technique but boy is it nice. It has a large group of flowers on branches on each end and some additional flowers between. I’m guessing it was originally intended for kimono, with the large design.

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.

I just spent the week at a conference where talk about threads and fiber had nothing to do with textiles. Aside from getting a bit of knitting done while waiting for things, nothing of note happened this week to talk about here. But there is some to catch up with, as I had to drop everything to get ready.

I pulled the sari silk fabric off the loom and it immediately twisted up. (Not shown in the non-image, above.) High-twist singles will do that, enough that sometimes a fabric just refuses to lie flat no matter what you do. (Narrow stuff is worse: less mass, less inertia, nothing to keep it in place. Wide fabrics may only curl at the corners.) I was able to mostly get this one under control by ironing, but it took a bit. I’m reconsidering my previous idea of cutting it apart for coasters, when it gets wet it will just curl up again. I suppose I could mount the pieces on sheets of cork, but covering up the back side makes it less of a weaving sample. So off it goes to the Textile Aging Vault while I contemplate.

While I was busy, my package of mystery weaving yarn arrived. I wasn’t able to pick it up from the mailbox until today. I bought 25 pounds of 8/2 mill end cotton, stuff that is generally used in industry for lightweight sweater knits. Some of the yarns are even waxed, a dead giveaway that it’s for machine knitting. I was able to include general color suggestions, so I’m fairly happy with the results but some is a bit odd. I asked for natural, white or pastels and specifically requested no orange. I hate orange, it makes me have nightmares about bad Halloween parties. I got a good amount of bleached white, several pastels and a dusty medium blue. There were other darker neutrals I’m not too thrilled about, like a really strange brown-green, but still colors that can be overdyed darker.

And then there was the large cone of that wonderfully subtle shade generally known as OSHA Orange. We’re talking serious highway safety here, my personal nightmare yarn color. The kind that makes people ask if they can use your deer cooler. I have absolutely no idea what I could do with this, the only things that immediately come to mind are hunting gag gifts and that’s a lot of work for a joke. The only dye that would cover up this monstrosity would be black. Maybe.

Everything is working fine with the loom, I’ve decided to weave one long strip of fabric and cut it apart for the coasters. The sari silk yarn is very textured, which tends to make the selvedges a little messy. In general, it’s weaving ok although once in a while I have to stop and untwist a snarl. It’s still a single. I’m using a stick shuttle (the only thing I have that will hold enough thick yarn) and doing a very narrow fabric, so I end up fiddling with the weft every pick anyway. I think for a wider fabric, I’d skein and set the twist again under high tension before weaving with it to reduce the tendency to snarl.

So with my first project on the loom, I can tell you one thing I’m not doing again is using all twelve harnesses for plain weave. I did it just to make sure everything was working correctly and get a feel for threading. But every shed is lifting six harnesses, along with all those extra heddles. That’s pretty heavy for no good reason.