Tag Archives: yarn

October 24, 2013 · 5:42 pm

Eucalyptus dyes over grey corriedale: The spinning finale

I have a bit of a tendency to go a long way toward the completion of a big project and then pause near the end.  Sometimes for a little while, sometimes for a long while.  So here, finally, is the very last of the grey corriedale I dyed months ago and planned to spin during the Tour de Fleece. I loved the two ply yarn I created during the Tour a good bit less than my initial chain plied skein, even though it is what I need if I ever knit that cardigan I dream of.

I found the label for this fleece on the weekend and I started out with 3.5 kg of fleece.  I made a true three ply yarn (three singles plied together) from most of the last part…

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And chain plied the rest (one single plied on itself in a chain).  I think the long pause on this was caused by the way my heart sank when I stopped chain plying it in the first place.  I love the distinct colours in the last little leftover skein!   IMAG2562

I also spun up a little batt of alpaca dyed in eucalyptus.

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Three ply wins again!

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October 14, 2013 · 11:14 am

Just in time for summer!

Sometimes people ask me how I manage to fit so many things in… but I am not sure they are really keeping track of how long a project might take me from start to finish!  Many craft projects at my place involve large numbers of tiny steps.  Sometimes it is the nature of the crafts involved and sometimes it’s the only way I can figure out to make things happen.  So projects progress slowly at times, as whim, interest, the right weather, or the availability of time permit.  Today I can report that a couple of items reached the out spout.

The eucalyptus dyed grey corriedale which started here and continued here has finally come to an end, with every last bit now converted to yarn.  The middle skein is chain-plied (and to be honest, I really do prefer this yarn over the one I have created for my cardigan) and the one at the bottom is a true 3 ply.  Some of this yarn is destined to become a cardigan, but it will not be for winter 2013, which is over now for us here in Australia.

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I have also finally finished making a jumper for my fairy godson. He is a tall and slender individual (just in case you’re wondering if the proportions are right), and if he’s lucky there will be one or two days cold enough to wear this jumper before winter 2014.  I hope it will still fit him then!  It was slowed down by misjudgment of the amount of yarn needed, and thus several stages of dyeing and spinning as knitting progressed, breaking all the rules of good handspun-handknit practise.  It is 3 ply eucalyptus dyed alpaca in 4ply/fingering weight.

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Here it is, tied up with handmade string crafted from the leaves of our daylily.  When it was raining this morning I decided to steam press it and just take it over on my way to work in hopes it might be cold enough to wear it, and was lucky enough to catch my friends at home.  It never fails to gladden my heart to give a gift that is really warmly welcomed… but it is an additional exquisite pleasure to find the handmade string to be just about as exciting as the jumper to its recipient.  It fills life with pleasure to find folk who feel just as intrigued by string from the backyard as  you do, and just as curious about how it could be made.

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Someone who works in the same hallway as me exclaimed over my looking happy at work on a Monday, just as I walked in this morning… and may not have understood if I’d said it was all about late but welcome presents and homemade string and love.  Sometimes you have to be there.

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October 3, 2013 · 4:37 pm

How diverting!

Experiments in diverting textile waste from the rubbish bin or compost continue… The lavender wool and the entirely waste batt are all spun up.  In the end, I plied the trash batt with a single of the lavender wool.  I can’t say I expected loveliness, and to my mind this is not lovely. As for the spinning experience: it was fine to spin though my lack of foresight about a plying strategy wasn’t ideal and I didn’t think a chain 3 ply would work.  I also have to say that even with a  generous apron under my drafting zone, this yarn shed loads of pieces of chopped thread at every stage, which didn’t make me popular with my beloved.

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These yarns are destoned for yarnbomb glory.  I knit then into K2P2 ribbing and will apply them when I’ve chosen a suitable spot and the rain and wind abate!

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On the other hand, here is a corespun yarn made from the batt composed of white polwarth locks, eucalyptus dyed corriedale carding waste and overlocker waste (much of it from leaf printed fabrics).  I like this very much. I think the ratio of polwarth to other inclusions is part of what works, but so is the texture of the polwarth–it helps hold everything together.  The happy combination of colours doesn’t go astray either…

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September 28, 2013 · 5:06 pm

WordPress Family Blog Award

Some time ago I was kindly nominated for the WordPress family Blog Award by tinkerbellknits, who has a lovely blog you might like to visit.  Thanks so much, tinkerbellknits!

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Award Description:
“This is an award for everyone who is part of the “Word Press Family” I start this award on the basis that the WordPress family has taken me in, and showed me love and a caring side only WordPress can. The way people take a second to be nice, to answer a question and not make things a competition amazes me here. I know I have been given many awards, but I wanted to leave my own legacy on here by creating my own award, as many have done before. This represents “Family” we never meet, but are there for us as family. It is my honour to start this award.”

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I am in turn nominating the following bloggers as people who have had a positive impact on my experience as a blogger… through their writing and what its shows about their craft and their values, their modelling of what a blog could be and what a blogger could be.

I hope you might check out their blogs.

Cossack design http://cossackdesigns.wordpress.com/

Wendi of the Treasure http://wendiofthetreasure.com/

Grackle and Sun http://grackleandsun.wordpress.com/

Sea Green and Sapphire http://seagreenandsapphire.wordpress.com/

Pia at Colour Cottage http://colourcottage.wordpress.com/

R1K1Spin http://run1knit1spin.wordpress.com/

Deb McClintock http://debmcclintock.wordpress.com/

Trembling Inside the Cocoon http://tremblinginsidethecocoon.wordpress.com/

HXGreen Soul http://hxgreensoul.wordpress.com/

SeattleSpinner http://seattlespinner.com/

My thanks to all those who have supported this blog–I started out quite unsure whether I would enjoy or persist with it, and I find that I do and I will.

…and since we have been talking yarn bombs a little lately, here are some I added to the local bike path quite a while back.  They are some of my early experiments in art yarn–some even made at a workshop with the inimitable Jacey Boggs (others made after poring over her book or DVDs).  Cocoons, corespun, beehives and supercoils.

Collage of Yarn bombs

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September 23, 2013 · 3:14 pm

Guerilla Gardeners and Yarn Bombers Strike the Neighbourhood!

Yarn bombers have been out and about in our neighbourhood!  They have improved a neglected spot a short distance from our place, cheering up people who’ve had a year of more construction noise, dust and reverse beeping than most of us can readily stand.  Bless them!

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Not content with tree decorating, they bombed the odd pole as well…

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Plus a raised herb garden for the locals to enjoy…

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They even left a potted lime tree and a bougainvillea.  I took a down-at-mouth neighbour along to see and she was quite cheered up by the constructive neighbourhood reclamation and whimsy of it all.  So was I.

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They go by the name of ‘Viva La Broad Bean’ and I can only congratulate and cheer them on.  I met one of them when I went to take these pictures and congratulated her in person.  I was able to share our neighbourhood revegetation projects with her, too.

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Meanwhile, the streets nearby are full of bottlebrush (callistemon) trees in flower.  Thousands of blooms, each the size of an old fashioned bottlebrush–but splendidly red.  It occurred to me that this is a form of wonder and beauty that non-Australians mostly don’t experience.

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The abundance of flowers has brought lorikeets into the neighbourhood to feed on the nectar and hold high pitched, apparently gleeful conversation.  They don’t hang about to be photographed, but I managed to take a picture of this rainbow lorikeet before it flew off like a green comet.

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September 12, 2013 · 12:38 pm

Fibre processing continues…

For those who are wondering… the nettle stems are back in the retting wheelbarrow for now. So I return to our regularly scheduled fibre–wool.

All I want to say about this last Polwarth fleece, with the prickly seedheads and the tips that were spiny and pulled off… is that I have reached the end of it.  Here it is–the last of it–!  It will be keeping toes warm for years to come once these slippers are felted. I do not need to spin more of it, ever.  The fleece from this sheep’s sibling, and fleece from this sheep in other years, are lovely, and I will return to those in time.

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Next stop on the fibre processing journey is a Corriedale fleece one of my co-workers gave me (in 2011!! I wrote the date down).  I dyed some greasy a year or so ago and it came out badly.  I can be put off by experiences like that, which so often indicate the current limitations of my skills or patience, or both.  I put the Corriedale down and haven’t come back to it for at least a year.  It does have vegetable matter in it, but it is otherwise a lovely fleece.  I weighed the remainder and there was 2.3 kg still to wash.  It’s in a yellow plastic bag designed for a double bed feather quilt.

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I sat a kilogramme of it to soak cold for a few days, because I’ve seen this suggested on Ravelry and it makes good sense as a first stage in getting mud, as well as grease, out of the fleece.  having tried it now, I would definitely use this process again.

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This kilogramme is now clean and drying, and that leaves only 1.3kg of this fleece yet to be washed.  After that, only one more Polwarth fleece left to wash. I admit, a Polwarth is a mighty big sheep.  However, this is the closest I have been in years to having the fleece stash clean and ready to spin!

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August 20, 2013 · 6:21 pm

Revelations at the drum carder

Recently I made good on my intention to properly clean and oil the drum carder.  It meant I had to find the instruction sheets.  And that was when I had the revelation that my drum carder has two speeds.

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Conceivably, this was a selling point when I decided to buy it–that does sound curiously familiar–and I had managed to completely forget.  I have had it on the setting which would be ideal for blending roving for some years.  That’s been good sometimes, because it really does make a great batt for artyarn spinning, and there has been quite a bit of that at my place.  However, I have struggled to make great batts from fleece, sometimes with a lack of patience, I admit.  But there has been plenty of trying and some of it has been patient.  So, I have been applying my newly oiled and cleaned carder to some Polwarth fleece on the correct setting, and wonder of wonders, it actually is better!

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I have also been carding some of the lower quality end of my enormous stash of Polwarth and spinning it fat, soft and three ply with YET MORE Fibertrends Clogs in mind.  The short cuts and brittle ends will never be seen again once they’ve been felted.  And I have to say the spinning is a lot of fun.

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Every time I use the drum carder and pick up the doffer–a long pointed metal tool for removing the batt from the carder–I find myself earwormed with a folk song called The Doffing Mistress.  The link is to the singing of Maddy Prior and June Tabor, two of the shining stars of English folk music over some decades.  The quality of sound is no doubt better on iTunes, but this version comes with a description of the job of a doffer in the period after the industrial revolution.  I am very glad not to be a small child pulling bobbins on and off an industrial spinning machine to earn sufficient to eat…  Instead, I have been hand winding big fat balls of this yarn, since it is a bit thick for my ball winder.  Let the knitting begin!

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August 17, 2013 · 1:10 pm

New socks!

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My beloved brought two skeins of sock yarn home from a trip to Ireland and Turkey some time back. What sumptuous colours!  This is Hedgehog Fibres Sock Yarn (85% superwash merino, 15% nylon) in ‘Pod’.  It feels glorious, but the dye work is especially lovely.  Happily, I still have the second skein to convert into socks… or perhaps gloves.  I’ve decided to reward such excellent choice in sock yarn by giving these back to my partner.

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Here they are in the dyers’ camomile patch, which has started to look leafier since the weather began to turn toward spring.  I love the way that a beautiful yarn can render even a plain ribbed sock lovely.  At present my sock knitting is being done in meetings, on public transport and in the car, so this is the height of sock knitting complexity I’m scaling at present.  These have been a delight for my fingers even when knitting without looking in lengthy meetings, just what I love about socks.

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August 2, 2013 · 10:19 am

Plum Pine 5: Lightfastness

Having discovered that plum pine had so much potential for colour, I felt obliged to test for lightfastness and washfastness. This is my lightfastness testing apparatus on the day I set it up: it is a none too sophisticated set of threads wrapped around card, inside a heavy card envelope with a window cut out of it, which has been sitting in the front window since 23 June 2013.

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At the top, 3 silk thread samples, handspun Wensleydale, handspun Polwarth, two shades dyed on BWM alpaca rich and finally, two shades dyed on Patonyle (superwash woool+nylon blend).

After over a month in the (winter) sun, fading is quite evident.  I realise now that I could have made a lightfastness test which made the results clearer, but you’re stuck with my limitations on this learning curve. If you squint, you can see the original colour at the sides.  The fibre that performed best was the handspun wensleydale with alum.  It was also the winner on the washfastness test.

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I have to say that I think I have chosen well in using the bulk of the yarn I dyed for some slippers (they are Fibertrends Clogs), which might spend their lives tucked under a bed and come out only at night!  Here they are awaiting felting…

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And here they are after a wash at 40C, with some commercially dyed companions.

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July 29, 2013 · 12:36 pm

Plum Pine 4: Washfastness

I decided the obvious way to test for washfastness was to wash.  So I embroidered with the plum pine fruit–no mordant–silk thread, and with the plum pine fruit-with alum and cream of tartar on a piece of cotton… and added a little eucalyptus dyed silk thread for good measure.  Not the best example of embroidery ever seen, but it will do the job.  The two upper examples were purple (like the thread on the cards) when they went into a normal wash–30C with eco-detergent.  One wash later, the no-alum sample is grey and the with-alum sample is green-grey.  Eucalyptus shows its true colours yet again.

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Yesterday I tried washing my sample cards at 40C with eco-balls (we have laundry variety here, as you will shortly understand) and they were still purple when they came out of the wash.  Interesting… this made me wonder if part of what is going on here about Ph.  Detergent would be more alkaline than eco-balls.

After 4 more washes:

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You might remember that I did some darning with my early silk samples.  They have not fared well either–but the mending is still doing the job!  The pink is still pink, but much faded after what I would guess as being about 8-10 washes.  The purple is blue, and paler.

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I knit some test samples from my yarns.  They fared better, washed with other woollens, cold with soapnuts rather than detergent (if anything, a slightly acidic wash).  The sample on the right has two shades of plum pine with alum and CoT on BWM alpaca rich, with a band of cotton used to tie the skeins in between because this yarn took so much colour during the dyeing I was curious.  The sample on the left has two shades of plum pine on patonyle (wool and nylon superwash sock yarn and a sample of handspun Wensleydale).  One has gone from purple to grey and the other from purple to blue.  Blue?  Before:

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After, with unwashed BWM Alpaca Rich in the background for comparison.

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Well then.  Not what you’d call really excellent washfastness. And some new mysteries to ponder, as usual.

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