The Eventual Sweater; A Long Haul Process
Just before my birthday I got an itch to spin and knit myself a sweater. I looked at patterns, picked several I like and then started researching fiber sources. I wanted it to be fairly soft, but also to have some sheen and to wear well so I turned to one of my favorite fibers to spin, the fleece of the Blue-Faced Leicester. I contacted Klaus at Crown Mountain Farms who was able to bring 4 pounds of simply gorgeous, fluffy, pin-drafted roving with him to Black Sheep Gathering for me to pick up, saving me on shipping costs.
I split 4 ounces of roving into 1 ounce bundles and did some test dyeing in July after making a trip to the Eugene Textile Center to pick up some Jacquard Acid Dyes. With just a few tests I was able to settle on a color that I'm reasonably sure is one I love (if I change my mind once the yarn is spun, I can always over-dye it). Each 4 ounce roving was dyed once in silver grey and then over-dyed with a mixture of turquoise and kelly green. I've started the spinning, but it's slow going as I'm easily distracted by my knitting. I did first spin a sample skein though. This wee skein is 1/2 ounce of three ply yarn and a dream to spin which is good, since there's a lot of it to spin.
Spring is for Spinning Part 2
It's been awhile since part one but I wanted to share the trio of 3ply handspun yarns that I finished on my last spinning kick. I wanted to get these up because I'll be spinning a lot in July since Tour de Fleece starts in just a few days. I've been participating in Tour de Fleece at a varying level since 2006 when Star coordinated her first one on craftster.org and her blog. At any rate, I have big plans for the Tour so hopefully there will be more handspun to talk about soon.
The first and second of these yarns was spun by splitting the top into three equal pieces and plying them together. The third yarn was intended to be spun as one continuous single and navajo plied but I was too far in when I realized the first half of the skein would be quite different from the second so I wound the singles into three wee cakes and then plied the three together. This was kind of frustrating and not something I would recommend. I'd probably wind them onto bobbins/toilet paper tubes if I needed to do it again. All of the yarns are a sport/dk weight.
First up, 4 ounces of merino in "Hotness" from Funky Carolina. I love Funky Carolina. She's a total sweetheart of a person and takes a lot of pride in her business. Additionally, her colorways are phenomenal and her fibers are well prepped and spin like a dream. This top was no exception.
Secondly, 4 ounces of 21.5 micron merino in "Northern Pine" from Black Trillium, a Portland indie dyer. She mostly dyes yarns but her fiber is really awesome and less expensive than many other places I've come across. Again, beautiful colorways; she has a lot of gorgeous semi-solid colored yarns that make my heart go pitter-patter.
And the third. This is 4 ounces of Targhee, in club colorway Woodstock from Crown Mountain Farms. I've been a long time customer of CMF, and Klaus is having a lot of fun with the club. This is normally a much more variegated roving than I would pick up so I wasn't entirely sure how to go about spinning it without turning it to mud, so I spun straight from the top without splitting it in any way. I'm very pleased with the results, it's unexpected but gorgeous. I feared I would end up with something so clown barf-y that I'd never have any idea what to do with it.
I also spun a 4 ounce skein from a gradient batt but I fought it the entire way so I'm calling a mulligan on that one and not devoting any more of my energy to it.
Spring is for Spinning, Part 1
Spring has sprung, bringing with it the ever changing rain-sun-rain-sun-hail-rain again cycle that is one of the things I love most about living in the Willamette Valley. My crafty desires have been following the path of the weather, changing on a whim. I have nine knitting projects in progress right now and as they all move slowly along I crave the instant gratification that comes from small spinning projects.
To kick off my spinning binge I finished spinning up some 90% pygora 10% silk blend batts from Rainbow Yarns Northwest. Terry and Susan, the women behind the pygoras, are absolutely fabulous and I couldn't resist these amazing, cloudlike puffs at last fall's Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival.
I broke out my awesome fast flyer for my spinning wheel and spun the singles at a ratio of 16:1 (for non spinners, that means that for every one turn of the wheel the flyer turns 16 times) to put a good deal of twist into the singles to hold the very fine pygora together in thin singles.
From there, I plied them at the same ratio, and the result is 600 yards of squishy and shiny laceweight yarn, that is being knit (slowly) into Romi Hill's Bitterroot Shawl from Knitty Winter 2009.
It's not the most fluffy yarn I've ever spun, and I probably could have gotten away with less twist, to make a softer yarn, but I'm relatively pleased with it. More spinning projects to come!
Pueblo, in stages.
Lest folks think I'm not being crafty, here's some yarn that I spun, in all its stages. Left, the finished, washed two-ply yarn. Right-top, corridale pencil roving from Crown Mountain Farms in the now-discontinued Pueblo colorway. Right-middle, two bobbins worth of singles. Right-bottom, another shot of the finished two-ply. I skeined this up and haven't remember to measure the yardage, but it's a full 8 ounces of fingeringish weight yarn. I'm contemplating wacky knee-high socks from it.
Busy B*
Things have been quite busy here lately. I spend Thursday nights knitting with ViolinJodie and a handful of other folks. This week's topic of conversation turned to Black Sheep Gathering (BSG). This year's BSG is going to be happening at a crazy time in this city, just before the US Olympic Trials [expect a lot of grumbling out of me come late Junly (late June to mid July) as they're predicting 100,000 folks flooding in for that. The population of Eugene is currently 153 thousand and change, with a metro area of nearly 350,000.] Workshop registration begins on March 15th (ah, the ides) so I'm getting together my application and funds to register for some fabulous spinning workshops. There's some talk of a sheep to shawl group, but that is still very much in the planning stages. (For those who are not fiber-y in their hobbies, a sheep to shawl is a spinning/weaving competition where a team of six--5 spinners and a weaver--spins and weaves a shawl from clean, uncarded fiber in a five hour period. The warp is handspun and set up on the loom prior to the event but the weft yarn is carded, spun and woven into a shawl measuring at least 1440 square inches).
Besides planning for Black Sheep, I'm working on another project. It will be revealed as soon as I get the website set up (hopefully no more than one week from now). This project is a big one, one that could hopefully change my life much for the better. It is also the first step in a much larger scale idea, one that likely won't come to fruition until the end of the decade. My husband and I are also planning to spend some time together. Instead of celebrating Valentine's Day, we've decided that we will celebrate Pi Day (3.14). This will encompass several dates we like--when we originally first met face-to-face (March 12th), Pi Day itself, the ides and St. Patrick's Day.
We're also gearing up for physical therapy! TheBoy has a problem with his lower back, he's already had one surgery to attempt to correct a disc that ruptured a few years ago (it ruptured largely due to four years of misdiagnoses.) When he had the surgery he was warned a second surgery to remove more soft tissue might be necessary so we had been preparing for that as we waited for his insurance to cover the pre-existing condition. However, his doctor thinks that with a couple of months of physical therapy TheBoy may be able to avoid undergoing another surgery. This is good news for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is covered by the insurance.
And now for our Friday Fixation: two youtube videos: Dancing Cop and A Sheep in Sheep's Clothing. Enjoy!
*B instead of Bee because my mom has always used "B" as a term of endearment for me.