Making Stuff, Week 4: Keeping Records

This week I continued with my socks-from-the-ground-up project, taking the fiber that I blended on my hackles last week and spinning it up this weekend after it was dry from dyeing. Now that I’m finished with that I can go back to my commissioned project since the dyed wool for that is now dry and ready to card, but let’s show off some sock yarn, shall we?

Turquoise and Purple sock yarn, with a little bit of my boy Benz in there.

If you recall from last week I had a total of six ounces that I’d blended on the hackle and I’ve been wondering if that was going to create enough yarn for a pair of socks. The final yarn’s resulting yardage is 320 yards, so I think I’ve got just enough for a good pair.

I really, truly love the way dyed wool looks on the bobbin, so I snapped this photo before I plyed it.

A bobbin full of beautiful wool. I love the way dyed wool looks on a bobbin.

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Fiber Arts Friday: Milk Fiber

I wanted to do a new post for Fiber Arts Friday, hosted by Wonder Why Gal and her alpaca farm, instead of recycling one of my other weekly blog posts about making stuff. So today’s short entry is about something I forgot to add to my blog post last week: milk fiber.

A cellphone picture of some milk fiber that I'm working on.

I got this as a sample from an Etsy buyer who had forgotten to ship my order and threw this in as thanks. The colorway is really quite beautiful with its mix of chocolate, rose, and tans. I’ve never spun milk fiber before and was intrigued; I’d seen it in fiber shops before and it seemed very soft and pretty, but how would it spin?

It spins about as easily as any other fiber; it drafts very nicely and seems to want to be spun quite fine, so I’m spinning it on my very small Golding spindle. Occasionally I lose control of the draft but for the most part it’s a very enjoyable small spinning project. I plan to ply it 2-ply to maximize the yardage I’ll get and I’m hoping I get enough to at least make something small with it.

Here’s the thing, though: I’m not sure I’d ever go out and actually buy milk fiber. From what I can find out in my research online — which is very little — milk fiber is processed similarly to soy silk in that it comes from extruding the proteins (only in this case milk instead of the discarded waste of soy processing) into a spinnable fiber. I can’t seem to verify this, but some spinners say that this requires some harsh chemicals to achieve, and I like to avoid buying and spinning fibers that require lots of chemical processing — I mean, with wool and alpaca fiber, for instance, you feed the animals, they give you natural fertilizer for the garden and wool for your clothes that simply requires some soap and hot water. What could be easier? (Yes, I know soap is a chemical, but you have to draw your line somewhere.)

And that’s the other thing: what does milk fiber offer that other fibers don’t? I can’t seem to sort that out. It feels about as soft as soy silk, but I can get that softness from, well, soy silk or even good old-fashioned silk. It doesn’t seem to offer me a property that no other fiber can give me, and seems to require harsher processing to achieve — wool gives you warmth and memory, alpaca gives you even more warmth but with softness, silk gives you strength with softness…the list goes on. I can’t seem to figure out what it’s supposed to do better than fibers with a similar hand, like soy silk. This fiber kind of reminds me of Ingeo, a corn-based fiber that appeared on the spinning market a few years ago but I’ve not seen since.

So while this fiber is certainly pretty and I appreciate the seller throwing it in as a sample, I don’t know that I’ll be buying it anywhere and will be sticking to fibers that I know offer some property that I need or desire in my spinning. How about you, spinners? What are your thoughts on milk fibers, or any of the other new fibers that seem to be exploding onto the market?

Check out other Fiber Arts Friday posts!

Making Stuff, Week 3: Spikes.

I got back into a groove this week now that things have quieted down in other areas of my schedule and I’ve started a couple of new projects and made progress on others. To start with, I dyed more of Benz’s white fleece red for the commissioned yarn I’m working on that will be plied with his black fleece. That has to dry fully before it’s carded and spun, which gave me a great chance to get some other things started.

Now that I’d finished the sage-green alpaca/Tencel yarn I needed a new project for my Lendrum. I’m not ready to spin the yarn for the Silverton Sweater yet — I want to card all of the batts I’m going to need first. This way I can see if there are any variations in the batts that would require me to do some mixing or breaking up in order to spin a consistent yarn. And since I’ve only washed, carded, and blended half the fiber I need for the project that meant I could start another one.

I poked through my fiber boxes and found two batches of fiber I’ve had for about four years: roughly a pound of super soft chocolate brown alpaca and one pound of natural, undyed Corriedale. I remembered that I wanted to spin the two together for a sweater but had never decided on just how. I thought that a 2-ply sportweight yarn that was made up of one alpaca single and one Corriedale single would be really nice, so I took that with me to Saturday’s spin-in and got one bobbin of each spun so far.

One alpaca bobbin and one Corriedale bobbin.

I’d never actually spun Corriedale before and it definitely felt very nice. It was easy to spin, and though it’s not as soft as Merino its hand will be tempered a bit by the softness of the alpaca it’ll be plied with. I’m letting these sit and set twist while I spin another two bobbins, one of each. Then I’ll ply those since that will use up the four bobbins I currently have for the Lendrum (not counting the plying bobbin).

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The Trance of the Wheel

There are people who thrive on showing their unique-snowflake-ness to the world through the flashy display of their fringe hobbies. There is a kind of hobby-exhibitionism that these kinds of people revel in, a “look how strange I am, doing these strange things! Isn’t that strange? I’m so gosh-darned unique!” attitude that tends to get under my skin. It’s something I’m hypersensitive about because one of my hobbies — belly dance — requires a certain amount of willing exhibitionism, of diva and performer, to even fully engage with it on even the most basic level. And I am not one of those people.

Though not as much as belly dance, spinning falls into that category of odd hobby that people tend to find a little hippie, a little fringy, and a little weird. Because of that I’ve always been a little shy about spinning in public until I fell in with the Eastside Spinners Guild, a group of spinners that meets every Saturday, alternating between Starbucks here in Issaquah and Fortunato’s Wine Bar in Woodinville. Most people bring their spinning wheels and a few people bring regular drop spindles. I really wanted to join in even though I’ve always been a little self-conscious of spinning yarn in a public place (although I carry a spindle with wool in purse, I usually won’t do it in public — it’s generally reserved for lunch-time spinning in a secluded corner at work). I finally did join in a few weeks ago and have enjoyed the get-togethers I’ve been able to attend, and having so many other people to spin with I feel less like a weirdo doing some crazy hippie thing.

But what’s really strange is that I tend to attract all the people who want ask us what we’re doing. I have no idea why. There are usually at least ten people there and on days like today, twenty. All of them are equally capable of answering questions and all of them are just as friendly. But for some reason, they tend to pick me. And contrary to what I would have thought I thoroughly enjoy this.

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Making Stuff: Week 2

I’ve decided that since I do a lot more than spinning it would be a much better use of a weekly blog post on making stuff to, you know, make it about all the stuff. I knit, I spin, and I’ve even developed a little dabbling interest in making jewelry over the last year, so why limit it to spinning? So this week we’re just going to consider last week’s post a test run and continue the weekly theme under the title of “Making Stuff.”

I haven’t had as much time this week as I normally do because we’ve been really pushing hard on a deadline at work. (A little side note: did you know that the game I’m working on has been announced? If you haven’t already, check out Monday Night Combat at Uber Entertainment. We’re all pretty excited.) But I did manage to squeeze in a half hour or two here and there this week, and most of that was spent getting to know my new Lendrum.

Oh, my Lendrum! I’m so excited! Last week I bought my first-ever new-for-me spinning wheel, a Lendrum double treadle with all the accessories — plying head, fast flier, lazy kate, the works. For almost ten years I used a borrowed Louet S10 that dated from the 1970s. It was a great wheel, but really only great in the sense that I was ignorant of how other wheels felt and having learned to spin on this one (after graduating from a drop spindle) it was what I was used to. That doesn’t mean I look back on it as a bad wheel, quite the opposite. But it had its quirks — including a vicious knock that happened every rotation, something I tried for years to get rid of but could never find and fix the actual source — and began to feel limiting once I’d been spinning for several years, and I frequently looked in envy at the newer, more modern wheels that other spinners I knew were using.

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This Week in Spinning: Week 1

Taking a cue from my friend Jamie’s most excellent blog (highly recommended reading) I decided to start a weekly blogging project based on my yarn spinning. I don’t need to do it for motivational purposes — I’m pretty productive when it comes to spinning — but I thought it would be a great way to mark my own progress both creatively and in skill level. And it’s just kind of fun.

This weekend was actually pretty awful. For the first time in a while I had a weekend without any prior commitments, and I was going to spend early Saturday with the Eastside Spinner’s Guild and then head to work the rest of the day, and most of Sunday, so that I could bust through some work I need to get done for an upcoming deadline. But I woke up Saturday with an odd sense of motion sickness; I had some vague nausea and every time I moved my head it seemed to make it worse. As the morning went on it only got worse, and all I could do was lay down — any time I sat up I felt nauseous, and if I stood up my heart rate immediately skyrocketed and I felt like I was either going to faint or worse (you know, that nausea thing). I couldn’t read, I couldn’t spin, I couldn’t knit. I was trapped on the couch doing absolutely nothing, which is about the worst state to be in for me. I was horribly sick all night and didn’t begin to feel better until about three o’clock this morning. I decided to pass on going anywhere today since I was still pretty oogey-feeling when I got up and didn’t feel remotely normal until about five o’clock.

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Building a Fiber Studio

For years I’ve always stuffed whatever fiber- and spinning-related things I’ve collected over the years into whatever nooks and crannies of my house or apartment were available. I never consciously dedicated a room as a fiber studio, even if I stuffed its closet to overflowing with all of my bins of fiber and yarn and various other supplies. I always just hauled my spinning wheel out from wherever it happened to be — which was always whatever corner was available in a spare bedroom — and brought it into the living room, and I’ve been doing that lately with my drum carder, my wool combs…so it’s time to devote some actual space to this pursuit.

There’s been a thread lately on the Spin-List group I’m on about fiber studios and whether people have actual dedicated space for one. Some do, some don’t. Some have rooms in their houses that they’ve crammed as tightly as possible to the rafters with shelves of fiber, tools, and equipment. Some have an actual structure somewhere on their property — usually a converted barn or, in one case I read about, a converted milking shed — where they can set up something as private, spacious, and dedicated as a painter’s studio. I envy those people because I think someday I’d like to have a small studio — an actual small building — where I can spend my time when I’m working with fiber. It could happen someday!

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Looking Back at Two Years of Health

Just about two and a half years ago I wrote a blog post about the ongoing health issues I’d been experiencing to that point and all of my run-ins — mostly bad, some good — with the medical establishment to try and solve them. That post is far and away the most linked, commented, and viewed post on my site, and I thought it was time for another update, two and a half years later. The story has developed more and I want to chronicle this for myself as well as other people.

I was frank in the previous blog post I mentioned above and I’ll be just as frank here, talking specifically about what’s going on with my body in all its gory detail, because the frankness of my last blog post seemed to really be helpful to readers, and there’s no sense in hiding this kind of information when you’re trying to write honestly about these things. So if you’re not interested in reading the intimate details — read: I’m going to mention periods! Specifically mine! — you probably should skip this blog update. (Also, it’s absurdly long.)

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Silverton Sweater: Test Spinning

I spun up two of the batts I’ve been making for the Silverton Sweater project. Just to document this process properly and recap a bit, here’s a quick shot of my boy, Silverton, a little wet and leaf-covered, just the way he likes it.

Look at that smile.

Here’s a one ounce batt that consists of roughly 60% Silverton’s fleece, 20% Merino wool that I dyed blue, and 20% white Tencel.

60% Silverton. Make that 60% of AWESOME.

I test-spun two of those batts. With the first batt, I pulled off pieces and spun it over-the-fold with a supported long draw. I knew this would ensure a truly woolen yarn, which would give it softness and loft. With the second batt, I pulled the batt into roving and then spun the roving with a modified worsted draw — instead of really short pulses, I let my front hand pull the fiber a bit longer than you normally would in a true worsted draw, while also pulling the fiber supply back a bit, and then I smooth the single with my front hand down to the drafting triangle and repeat. Here’s a shot of the finished yarn from the second batt, plied 3-ply. It’s not the best light, but it’ll do for now.

A short section of 3-ply test.

Tonight I knitted that yarn into a test swatch with some impromptu cabling, since I know I want cabling in the final sweater.

Beautiful!

I absolutely love the blue tweedy look combined with the beautiful natural color of Silverton’s fleece. And it’s very soft. This is the semi-worsted yarn, and tomorrow I plan to swatch the true woolen yarn to see which one I like better for the final project.

Toenails Without Tears

The adaptability of alpacas to new experiences just amazes me every time I see it. It seems like dogs and cats, whose surroundings and daily routine seem far more susceptible to change than that of alpacas, take several events of a specific type occurring over and over before they’ll get used to it happening. Alpacas, on the other hand, seem to only need to experience something once before they figure out if it’s harmless or not.

Take The Mysterious Broom, for instance. A few weeks ago we picked up a large push broom to keep in the barn because the boys throw their hay around when they eat with wild abandon, and so every morning when we feed them we sweep up the mess to discourage vermin and keep the boys from cushing down in it and getting it stuck in their fleece (because I’m the one who has to clean that out later). The first time we brought out The Mysterious Broom the boys were eating in the barn and they immediately panicked, flailing around and clumsily bumping into each other in their rush to get out of the barn. OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT THING?! It’s some…big…brown THING! And they’re pushing it toward us! Get out! Get out while you still can!

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