Wool For Brains

The dye bath was a deep violet, the colour that you’d expect from a lot of blue and a tiny bit of red. It was a lovely rich colour but you’ll just have to take my word on that. There is no supporting evidence because what came out of the dye bath looked nothing like the colour of the dye. When the wool was cooked the red had all been taken up and there was still a little blue in the water. After rinsing (when much more blue appeared) the resulting colour was pink. I try hard to see it as purple or violet but I can’t get away from it being pink, a colour that does not feature in my yarn stash. I’m not too upset because if it doesn’t grow on me I can dye it again once it is yarn. I can add the blue that vanished in the rinse and then the violet should pop back out. The reason for dyeing this at all was that I couldn’t face the prospect of spinning a huge yardage of fine white single. I find that the spinning goes faster when there’s a colour change to look forward to. Pink is a colour after all and there is plenty of variation to make it change on the bobbin. I wanted some shading in the dye and to start with I wasn’t getting it. There are six batches here and the first two were nearly identical. After that I tried to be more flexible in the amount of wool I put in and then got the shading I was after (if not the colour).

This is part of the two fleeces that arrived just before Christmas in a very large somewhat aromatic box. This wasn’t as poopy as the first one and it was worth the effort of washing it. Actually washing it wasn’t much of an effort at all – I stuck it in a sink of hot soapy water and rinsed it out four hours later. It is a shetland fleece, they are smaller animals with a shorter staple (length of fibre) and there’s still a lot of it left. The other reason that I wanted to dye this was that the tips of the locks were coloured. This might well be muck because I’m still learning this fleece washing thing but it might also be that this is the first shearing and the tips of the locks are the lamb fleece. It looked like muck but it wouldn’t wash clean and it annoyed me greatly, even though it vanished when carded I knew it was still there. You can see the dark tips to the white locks at the top right, it now looks like an interesting dye effect as the tips took the dye differently and they really liked the blue. I am happy, even if it is pink at least it looks clean now.

I have now to decide how to spin this. I’m aiming for laceweight (I can dream and I need the practise). I can try to even the colours out in the carding or I can keep the same colours together and go for stripes. The stripes would look better for a triangular shawl with centred increases where they would make a V shape down the back whereas if I’m making a rectangular stole then I’d be better with something that stayed roughly the same colour from one end to the other. The challenge is that I don’t know what I’ll make with it until I know how much yardage I have and how good a job I made of spinning it. I have 8oz here and that should be enough and some for a decent sized shawl. There is of course a heap more fleece in the garage, I could reproduce the colours well enough because I know exactly what I did and there’s a fair range of colour to aim at but I’m not sure that I’d want to make more of it. By the time I have finished spinning this I will have had enough of it.

The contest is still open now closed by the way, everyone that left a comment yesterday will just have to comment again today (no, I’m not sad enough to keep this up for weeks, there should be a winner today, maybe Thursday). The number you see next to a comment is the total number of comments ever and includes all the informative “hggazxvggfty” ones that I delete as soon as I see them. It may also include the ones with pages of suspect links that get caught in moderation for me to delete in bulk at leisure. The Wordpress dashboard tells me (and anyone else with admin rights) how many comments I have now, that’s why the husband is excluded from entering. I excluded my mum because it just wouldn’t look good if she won.

It seems to be the done thing to mark the various stages in the development of a blog with some giveaways. Don’t ask me why, I’m new at this, but it seems to be the thing to do. As the 100th comment is within sight it seems that now would be a good time. Post a comment, the 100th comment will get a small woolly thank you, in the event of the 100th comment being from a disqualified entrant it will go to the next poster thereafter. I’m sure that I could find something acceptable to knit a pair of socks, a hat or a scarf. I have a ball or two of Opal, some sock yarn that could be dyed to suit and fibre to make some original handspun yarn (but not laceweight because that’s still not good enough to leave the house). The winner can pick what s/he wants and I’ll dye or spin to suit. I care not where you live as yarn doesn’t cost the earth to post. If you don’t knit – well what are you doing around here anyway? Maybe you could take your yarn and find someone to teach you to knit.

The small print – anyone with admin privileges on the blog is disqualified from winning as is my mother. Sorry mum. If your comment is one containing three score and ten hyperlinks to gambling sites and ways to make me rich overnight then I’m going to delete it in the same way as I’m doing with all the others and it won’t count. If you sit there and think about it it won’t count either. Leave a comment and you’re in.  

Edit – the numbers of comments you see include all those spammers that I’ve deleted. I know which one is the 100th because the dashboard on Wordpress tells me (which is why anyone else with admin rights is disqualified. I disqualified my mother because it just wouldn’ t look good if she won)

 

 

The short version for those who don’t really “do” yarn – look, here’s a photo of some wool I made (you can leave now if you want but what were you doing here in the first place?)
 

If you knit then you are familiar with the idea of making a tension square before starting a big project. You get to see whether the yarn you’ve chosen has the right characteristics for the project you have in mind. Mostly it’s made to answer the big question of whether it will knit to the right tension for the pattern but you also see the drape of the piece – it’s no good it having the right number of stitches per inch if it has all the drape of a cardboard box. The equivalent process in spinning is known as sampling where you get to see whether the fibre and techniques you’ve chosen actually end up making the yarn you had in mind. Like its knitting equivalent it exists to let you check you’re on the right track before you make a massive investment in time on your project.

These are the samples I’ve made this week. The two on the right were nearly all I brought back from a two day spinning course. It doesn’t look a lot does it? They are cabled yarns made by plying up whatever was left on the bobbins at the end of the day. The cream was the other skein that I brought back with me, it looks nothing special but it’s the one that I’m most proud of. We had to produce a softly spun yarn of a certain thickness without having anything to copy from. If I want to make a double knitting yarn I usually scratch around to find a commercial one, unpick a bit of it and start from there. We had to start from a table in a book that said how thick to spin the single, how much twist to put in it and how much plying twist to use. The small cream skein came out right and I was so pleased about that. The fuzzy gold is silk and mohair and although it’s pretty it isn’t what I was aiming for (what a good idea to find that out before spinning 100g of silk). The three ply on the far left is variable in terms of thickness and twist but it’s my first long draw skein and as such it’s not that bad. It’s capable of being knitted with and that will do for now.

The star of the show, in my eyes at least, is the red and brown. The red is the alpaca fleece that I’ve been playing about with on and off since May. I decided that one way or another now was the time for it to go on that bobbin, fine or thick, lumpy or smooth it was going to be yarn. Some of it was spun short draw, some long draw in an attempt to find whether combing or carding is the poorer of my fibre preparation skills. The brown blue faced leicester wasn’t as chocolate brown as I remembered it but as it was all I had that would go with the red I used it anyway. I thought that by making a two ply and then plying it against itself the lumpy alpaca would get the chance to even out in the final cabled yarn. It worked better than I could have thought although it turns out that I like the alpaca lumps and next time I’ll not try so hard to smooth them out. There will be a next time because although it started off just as a vehicle for using up the red alpaca that I’ve been struggling with I was surprised to find that what I’ve made is a sample for a larger project. The next step would be to see what it looks like when it’s knitted, if I still love it then it’s on its way to being a sweater.

This swatch knitted itself, it really did. It showed me that I’m unsure as to whether I love this enough. The yarn is lovely to knit with, silky and altogether gorgeous, the feel is what really sells it. You’ll have to trust me on that one. This swatch is on three needle sizes, the left end is too floppy, the right end is a little stiff and the bit in the middle is just right. The thing that’s holding me back from running into major yarn production is that even after knitting it up it’s still not brown. This should not be so surprising as yarn doesn’t usually magically change colour when knitted. I’d seen this in my mind as being red and chocolate brown (that would be the 70% cocoa solids colour) and it just isn’t. I’m waiting to see whether the colour grows on me and whether I adapt to a not-brown reality. That gives me a couple of weeks to throw it in with the socks and see how it stands up to washing. It also gives me a couple of weeks for something new to grab me – if it’s not been cast aside in favour of something else by then I know that it will stay the course.

 

You missed out on something with my not posting this week because I was all set to give this away. It’s been in the naughty bag for a short spell while I made my mind up on whether to rip it or not. It would have been returned to wool without a thought if it hadn’t been that I really dislike unknitting mohair. I thought up a cunning option where I got to see the back of it without having to unpull it and that was by entreating someone to take it off my hands. The only drawback was that as I was barred from blogging due to the tax return not being returned I had to draft the post in my head. My immediate thoughts were that the things that I disliked about this was that the beading wasn’t shown on the chart, only in the written instructions, there are decreases on some of the wrong side rows, but not so many that I ever worked out where they were and working the beads was a total pain. That was actually a load of nonsense in so far as it was true when I started but I’d worked through most of my problems. I’d marked the beading on the chart with a highlighter once I’d got started and I’d flagged up the offending wrong side pattern rows so I didn’t miss them. My whole issue with the project was the beads, those hateful beads. They would be the ones that you can’t actually see in the photo….

It was all down to poor planning. The beads are left overs from a previous sock so I know that they worked well with 4 ply. This yarn is thinner than 4 ply so everything was going to be fine and away I went. Imagine my dismay when the finest crochet hook I have won’t go near the hole in the bead. Of course I didn’t find this out until I needed to place that first bead because it never occurred to me to check. I was fiddling about with a sewing needle and cotton thread and a fine piece of wire that I’d made into a hook. I could never find either when I needed them and with the need to place one bead every six rows that’s a lot of fiddling to interrupt the knitting. It was not fun to knit and so it went to the naughty bag.

Once I’d worked out that my problem wasn’t the yarn, the pattern or the short rows but was just the stop-go bead fiddling the solution was clear. The sensible option would have been to break the yarn and thread the beads on. As that meant doubling the number of ends to be sewn in that was a non-starter. I went for option B, pulling the middle out of the ball to find the other end and threading the beads on, rewinding the ball as I went with the beads disappearing into the ball as I fancied . The yarn is now rather more fuzzy than it was before but I can live with that. Knitting this is now fun – will the bead I need appear on the yarn before I reach the point where I need it? Will these two beads that I keep moving along eventually disappear or will they be joined by others?

I know there’s at least one mistake in this – my sticky note keeps falling off and I just can’t read the pattern so I knit a row twice. I care not.

I have my tax return to do (it shouldn’t take long as I have no income) and the freezer needs emptying. There will be no blogging until I’ve done my chores. I need something to push me into doing it other than the threat of a £100 fine and lumps of frozen chilli falling on my feet whenever I open the freezer door. By the time I come back (the end of next week at the latest) there should be some knitting to show. I shall fight the temptation to go over to the dark side of the fibre and resist generating yards of arty yarn. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I may now be a convert to counting treadles, working out twist angles and the rest because it really does make a difference to the yarn. I now have a better short draw and a long draw, can spin from the fold, make a respectable rolag, spin silk, make a cabled yarn and make what my husband describes as “arty twonk”. That would be balanced arty twonk thank you very much. Some of my greatest achievements ended up as a cabled yarn (think crepe) so you’ll just have to take my word for it that I can now spin silk very much finer than I’d ever want to knit it. Regular readers may recall my attempt at replicating a three ply aran by taking it apart and calculating the amount of twist in each inch. You can imagine then how my jaw drapped open when I found the table in “The essentials of Yarn Design for handspinners” that tells you exactly what you need to do to make various types of yarn – the wraps per inch of the singles, how many treadles per inch of single, how many treadles per inch when plying. Someone else has already done all that work and worked it all out. Whether I can stick to a more technical way of spinning remains to be seen but it certainly does get results. 

My class samples are hanging up to dry so there is only the one yarn that can come to the blog right now and that’s the one that is the front runner in the arty twonk stakes. I am going to knit it to see what it looks like because I can see that there is great potential for having fancy edges on those rather boring short row scarves. It’s not going to take a deal of yarn to add a few inches to each end of a scarf and jazz it up a little.

My only challenge now is to decide what to spin first, I want to try everything all at once. I had a fantastic two days, made possible by my husband who took two days off work to cover for the mummy at home job. He cleaned the garage out too (certainly not part of the job of mummying about). There’s probably a pair of socks in it for him, possibly even another sweater.

There’s no real post for today as I spent all the daylight hours of yesterday spinning away from home. That in itself is a first (I don’t get out much you know), then there was the scary act of spinning with non-relatives watching topped off with spinning with intent to learn something. I now get the idea of the long draw, why did no-one tell me that was so much fun? My carding has improved (not that it’s difficult to make an improvement in something that I make such a mess of), I seem to be able to spin from the fold, (did I mention my long draw by the way) but I think that I really have to start counting my treadling. Given my recent form on counting I’m not so sure that this will improve my spinning to the extent that it could. Achieving my potential may involve counting past five and I’m not sure that I’m ready for that.

I appear to have come home with three bobbins that don’t belong to me but that’s ok because I’m going back again today.

I mentioned yesterday the odd ball mountain that has accumulated over the decades and that is now squatting in storage that could be better used for other things such as fibre. The majority is ages old acrylic but at the top of the pile there’s now a layer of handspun that failed the grade. Anything that doesn’t meet my standards for sock yarn or lace yarn doesn’t make it into the yarn drawer but is consigned to the odd ball heap. The sparkly red and orange sock is now a scarf, it was knitted along with a ball of red something and that made it long enough for a scarf that still twinkled and changed colour (mum knitted that one). That will be the first item in the 2007 box. My first contribution will be these scarves that were previously the green triangular shawl with the leaf pattern. I’m not sure why I though it was a good idea to make all three the same, I was bored well before the end and I should have though more about pandering to my short attention span when I started them. This was of course before I discovered scarves with long rows.

This is a new shell pattern and is simple enough to be picked up at the end of the evening. It’s a two row pattern, one of which is knit. The third scarf will be my February contribution to the give away box and although it isn’t finished in the photo it is in real life. Needless to say, there’s a small odd ball left over, another contribution to the pile.

I’d never knitted a scarf before January 2006, I know that they are regarded as the traditional starter project but my knitting had a different beginning. I learnt to knit at school some thirty five years ago and I remember well my first project which was a vivid green horse with a yellow mane. It was all garter stitch rectangles, folded, sewn and stuffed. Owing to a total lack of comprehension my first attempt was a giraffe as I folded the neck rectangle the wrong way. I had to unpick it and do over and I suspect that this accounts for the start of my dislike of sewing up. I think that my next project was a purple and lilac tabard thing for one of my dolls, this involved shaping, buttonholes and following a pattern. After that it was just scaling the tabard up and making a sweater.

In all the knitting that followed I had never made a scarf. Last year I made six which is something of a catch up. Now I’ve made a few I’m glad that I didn’t start with them when I was younger, If beginners are encouraged to start with scarves then it’s a wonder that anyone ever sticks with knitting as a hobby, it’s just endless miles of short row knitting. 

The scarves and hats are an attempt to use up this bag of yarn and the other bags like it. There may be more than six of them but I’m trying not to deal with the reality of it and I certainly wasn’t going to drag them all out of their hiding places for a role call and photo shoot. This is not proper stash (projects in waiting) but the leftovers from projects past. My mother and I have had two years working on the elimination of this, in 2006 I set myself a target of knitting up 300g a month and I’d achieved that by October through making hats and scarves for the giveaway boxes. This would have taken a good chunk out of the heap had I not been given two black sacks of yarn during the summer. We joke about Stash Aquisition Beyond Life Expectancy but it has to go somewhere and I was given another knitter’s odd ball mountain after she’d put down her needles for the last time. She had much more than me but fortunately I was just given the four ply and pure wool elements, otherwise I could now be looking at six sacks full rather than just six carrier bags.

I have had three scarves on the needles recently and was about to be naming 2007 as the year of the hat. Once I’d thought about why it is that I dislike scarves I was able to tackle it. It’s the short rows that bug me, I just get started and then it’s time to turn around. I got there in the end – if you knit it longways then there are no short rows. My target for 2007 is two scarves or four hats a month. There will be lots of stripes because there’s not a deal of any one colour but stripes are good for those of us with short attention spans. This is three strands of four ply held together knitted on a US 11 needle with my 40″ Denise cord. I do believe that this will be the year when we hit the bottom of the yarn pile, or at least get it all into a single bag.

Doesn’t it look lovely? (note to husband – there’s paper under under it, it’s not on the floor) That’s the presentation face, the less pleasant parts were rolled up inside. The fleece varied between lovely and fit for the compost heap. I shall just say that it was not skirted and leave it there, I didn’t take photos of the less pretty bits as I might have had to leave home with my wheel strapped to my back. I hearby resolve that I shall never again buy raw fibre that I have not inspected before purchase (except for alpaca which has never disappointed). Buying at a distance is a waste of my time and money. At least with this one the fibre is good, the last pound of fibre I bought was long, well skirted and veg free (as promised by the seller) but was coarse. If I’d been making a rug I’d have been happy, but I wasn’t.

I’ve washed a little so I know what I’m getting here but only time will tell whether the whole process is worth it. Washing fleece doesn’t have the same theraputic effect of knitting and spinning, it feels more like housework than a leisure activity. I think I’d thrill to it more if the transformation were instant but you’ve got to wait for it to dry. Maybe it’s one of those things that grows on you. I’m going to deal with this lot and then run it past the “just because I can, doesn’t mean I should” line and see whether I think it is a good use of my time.