Projects: Layered Yarn

I got my hands on some mohair, so I had to try my hand at making a boucle yarn. I combed the mohair locks to use for the loops, combed lamb's wool for the core, and a merino/tencel stripe for the anchor. 

Crepe is a layered yarn where the base is a regular 2 or 3-ply yarn, wrapped with another single ply. I made a 3-ply yarn with a braid of green BFL and wrapped it with teal lamb's wool.

 

The challenge of engineering the twist in all the different layers makes multi-layered yarn fun to make, and I am proud to say that both yarns are balanced.

Projects! Lace and Hemp

Spinning lace weight yarn is so satisfying. Challenging at first, immensely satisfying when you count up the yardage and realize you have 400 yards of yarn out of one ounce of fiber. And then discouraging when you realize that all the lace projects you have in mind require 1500+ yards, and there is only an ounce of thread left to ply....

The bright white of the yarn comes from Cormo wool and the glitter from mulberry silk.

I have an experiment this week as well. I obtained some hemp fiber on a whim, and then got it in my hands and thought "Hmmm....How do I spin this without ending up with rope..." Some research led me to buying recycled sari silk to add to the hemp. And then I saw some yarn at my local yarn store that was a linen/silk/acrylic blend and had a very nice feel, which made me contemplate adding some sort of man made fiber into the mix. Enter another curiosity I had in my stash because I couldn't resist: corn silk, also known as ingeo. After I got the stuff (of course, after) I did some looking around and saw that many spinners hated the stuff. Which I can understand, I did some fondling of the fiber when I got it, and immediately put it away for "later." Just in the fiber, it seems to have the drawbacks of silk- flyaway, slippery- without any of the fantastic things that make silk worth the trouble. Despite this, I had hopes it would work well in a blend. So last night I carded equal parts of hemp, sari silk, and corn silk into a rolag and went for it. And I liked it. Setting the twist was a little nerve wracking, as hemp is supposed to be boiled to set the twist and corn silk supposedly melts at that temperature. A thirty second boil was all I dared to do.

The yarn and the fabric is fairly soft with a crispness. Only time, and my laundry machine, will tell if the fabric softens more with washing, as is supposed to be the case with hemp.

Project!

I spent so much time on this collage that I don't have time to explain myself! Short story- handpainted fiber, different spinning techniques, eventual sweater to sort out the results.

Also, it's Pi(e) Day! We will be celebrating with pasties (the edible kind, nothing to do with strippers, get your mind right) and apple pie, with a salad thrown in for a "balanced" diet.

Progress Report

Nothing like attempting something for yourself to gain a newfound appreciation of someone else's abilities.

In this case, I'm referring to both blogging and dyeing fiber.

I have got a fantastic concept, which is not quite turning out how I thought it would in practice. Which is pretty much how everything in my life goes.

Concept: use the same colorway (colors/sequence of colors) to test out how different spinning techniques affect color pooling in a knitted project.

In practice, this meant that I added one too many variables by not using the exact same fiber for the entire thing. I had 200 g of commercial top, and hand combed another 200 g of PolypayX lamb's wool to have enough fiber for my project. Commercial top is pretty dense. Hand combed top is pretty fluffy. As is the handspun yarn. This one variable means I don't have the exact same colorway all the way through my project, but it's not a loss because- I learned something!

Commercial Top:

Hand Combed:

Hand Painted Skein:

Dyed on the left, reskeined on the right

Long Repeat Dyed Skein:

Dyed on the left, reskeined on the right

That's 100 g spun, 300 to go!

A day late and a dollar short

Spinning video. 

Yup.

....

Working Wednesday

I need a less obnoxious post title for my Wednesday work in progress updates. Suggestions? What's Up Wednesday! was too chipper, and Working Wednesday is too dour. I need Goldilocks.

I broke out of the sunset palette for this week's dyeing extravaganza- and what an extravaganza! I felt so accomplished getting six skeins of commercial yarn (for a quick sweater for myself), two skeins of white handspun dyed in long color repeats, and a braid of fiber done in one evening. Results:

I also have been experimenting with making laceweight yarn. I'm pretty excited about this small sample, I have big plans for a shawl.

What's Up Wednesday!

I haven't been up to spinning much this week, but there was a blizzard of activity with the dye pot. It's the only kind of blizzard you are likely to see here in Las Vegas. I dyed up two weeks of sunsets (and now I need to knit them....) I also came up with some intense colors that will definitely be repeated.

Cobalt:

 Pink:

 Steel:

 Teal:

The teal will just not photograph true. The camera wants it to be blue, and even with fiddling with the camera and then fiddling with the photo, I can't get an accurate representation of the color. Which is a shame, because it is my favorite of the lot.

I've also been working on a sock. I have a goal of being the crazy sock lady, but I had trouble liking socks. Part of the problem was the patterns I was choosing, and part of the problem was the yarn I had. So I picked a pattern that, while pretty tedious and complicated, was nowhere near as difficult to follow as my first attempt. I also found some yarn that makes me happy to work with. My husband said it looked like "a parrot on a Rastafarian island." Now that's some happy yarn.

What's Up....Thursday!

I have this problem. If I think intensely about something, I put it in the "Done" folder of my brain. Which means that I think I've done things like call my friends, replied to text messages, or post on my blog, simply because I thought really hard about doing it.

Which is all to say- this should have been here yesterday, but I like to excuse myself with the adage "Better late than never."

I spent some time last week finally setting up an Etsy shop. So if you like what you see here, go check it out.

I've also been making some fun things. The first is this yarn, which I made in response to a local guild's Winter Fiber Challenge. For last year. S'okay, I got a really fun experiment out of it. The challenge was to create a skein of yarn inspired by a picture of nature. 

from ecologiesofknowing.com

I've also started on this laceweight- I'm using up some grab-bag fiber I purchased on sale, and I'm stretching it by making lace. Only 1700 yds to go...

I was feeling overwhelmed this morning, so I needed a project that I could finish today. So I'm spinning up singles from the last batts I have in this color. I'm calling it "Under the Bridge." The colors came together as an experiment to combat a tragic dye accident that had left me with neon virulent green. As my brother remarked "troll hair green." It turned out well, so I may try to do this again on purpose.

What's Up Wednesday: Suri Alpaca

This is Ariadne. I'm not usually one for naming things- nonliving things, that is- but I've also never had a relationship with an object before. When you spend as much time with something as tactile, useful, and awesome as a spinning wheel, it begs for a name. It's like naming a car, but I've never felt the urge to name a car. 

I know that I had Arachne in mind when Ariadne popped in, but Ariadne sounds prettier. Arachne is the girl who challenged Athena to a weaving contest and got turned into a spider for her hubris, and the obvious fiber art connection is there. But Ariadne is the girl who gave Theseus a ball of yarn so he could find his way out of the Labyrinth, so there is still a connection to fiber. Besides, I don't weave. Yet.

I have been playing around with a sample of Suri alpaca fiber (wool?). These guys have an interesting appearance:

from alpacatrading.com

This stuff is really cool. I'm sure my enthusiasm is in part because it is the first fiber I have experienced other than sheep's wool.

What's up Wednesday!

I'll admit to some trepidation in writing this post. My first attempt at blogging failed. I wanted to say it failed spectacularly because I love a little melodrama, but really, the blog just crawled in the corner and curled up without a whimper, waiting for inspiration and motivation to return. Which is also pretty melodramatic. This time around, my goals are much less lofty than when I began. 

Part of the reason for my first failure was a lack of passion. I had my new passion foisted upon me mid-July of last year. It is a simple story that I love to tell the long way around because of my love of drama, but the basic facts are: my parents have sheep; my aunt gave me a spinning wheel. 

In the months since July, I have learned how to wash, card, comb, dye and spin wool. And knit. I already knew how to crochet, and felt like knitters were a strange club of obsessive snobby yarn weirdos, and wanted nothing to do with knitting. Unfortunately, the first yarn I was able to spin was not suitable for crocheting. So I learned to knit. I was right about knitters - they are weird obsessive crafty people, and I love them for it. 

My favorite current project will take me all year to finish. I read about a really great daily knitting project called the Sky Scarf. The idea is to collect some yarn in different blues, greys, whites, and beiges, and use these colors to knit one row of a scarf every day in the color of the sky that day. I took it one- well, several- obsessive steps further. My project is to knit every sunset of the year. To do this, I prepare a small amount of wool, dye it according to my daily photo, spin the yarn, and then knit it into the scarf. 

I'm a bit behind at the moment, but here is January 1-7: