Spinning Project Catch-Up

Posted: January 2nd, 2010 | Author: Hellchick | Filed under: Knitting, Spinning | 1 Comment »

Having mentioned the various spinning projects I’ve worked on over the past year I thought it would be good to show a few of them off in more detail, including some I didn’t mention recently. And as I said before this has been a banner year for me in terms of spinning — I’ve got my own fiber supply now, I’m spinning more intentionally, and I’ve jumped into dyeing, combing, and drumcarding.

One of my Christmas gifts this year was a beautiful Golding drop spindle, given to me by Matt’s mom. I always like to have a spindle project going even though I do the bulk of my spinning at the wheel because spindle projects are so portable. I still had some of Cinnamon’s undyed combed top that I’d carded with soy silk in a roughly 50/50 blend; I figured this was the perfect spindle project. I didn’t have a ton of it and figured if I could spin it laceweight then maybe I could make a small project with it.

I’ve got quite a few spindles and I won’t hesitate to say that this is by far the best one I have and have used so far. It spins for what seems like forever and it’s incredibly light. It doesn’t store much because it’s so small, but on a spindle this light I’d primarily be doing laceweight projects anyway.

Now, one misconception that a lot of beginner spinners have is that the measure of a spinner’s talents lies in how fine he or she can spin yarn. That’s certainly one type of measure but it’s not the sum total — the real measure is in whether or not the spinner can produce a usable yarn that’s designed well for the project it intends to become. I could spin a fine 2-ply alpaca yarn in laceweight, but if that yarn was supposed to be for socks that my yarn is going to work pretty poorly for the project.

That said, I’m a little too proud of just how fine I was able to spin this yarn. It’s probably the smallest gauge yarn I’ve spun to date, and I’m going to take a little undeserved pride in that.

Another project I worked on over the last couple of months was some commissioned yarn from Jody at Jo’s Fleece Fields. Jody had asked me to spin some fiber from her pygora goats — it was the first time in six years she’d been able to get fiber from them and she was anxious to see what kind of yarn it made. I was curious myself so I said sure. The pygora top arrived in two small and extremely soft rovings, one white and one gray, both about one ounce. Per Jody’s request I spun it into a 2-ply sportweight yarn, and the result was unbelievably soft, and the denim look is great in this yarn.

There was one problem with this fleece: guard hairs. Goat fiber typically has guard hairs in it that, if not picked out before spinning, can make a yarn go from cashmere-soft to feeling like steel wool. Most processors experienced with goat fiber can de-hair fleece, and this fleece had in fact been de-haired but it still had a significant amount of guard hair in it, so much so that I didn’t feel right spinning it until I did a pass on it myself. So I got out a towel, sat down in front of the TV, and picked.

That took for. ev. ER. Have you ever wondered why cashmere — the same family of fiber that top-quality pygora falls into — has been the fabric of kings and queens and why it’s so expensive, at least in the pre-Chinese-cashmere-market days? It’s because someone had to sit down and pick each of those guard hairs out, one by one, until the fiber was fit enough to spin into the softest of soft yarn. I now have great respect for that person. The resulting yarn in this case was well worth the effort — it’s softer than you can imagine and the gray has a lovely, silky, silvery shimmer to it. While I didn’t enjoy the de-hairing, I did fully enjoy the hand of the fiber, and I can just imagine blending some of this with alpaca.

Another avenue of spinning I’ve moved into is dyeing my own fiber. This was something I was always afraid of since I assumed this would result in me turning our kitchen into an accidental mess of unintentionally-splashed color. But it’s actually been really easy and not as messy as I thought. I used a lot of Cinnamon’s white fleece from this year’s shearing as a base with which to experiment, and one of the results of those experiments was an interesting skein of autumn-like colors.

I combined a few dyes in a pot that I thought would actually blend a lot differently — I used salmon, burgundy, and yellow, and I expected far more reds and pinks. What I failed to take into account was something that Matt reminded me of, and given our lines of work it’s pretty funny that I didn’t think of it (I’m a UI designer, and he’s an FX artist and previously a graphic designer): colors add to black. I’m so used to working in a Photoshop/web environment in which colors add up to white that I forgot that this doesn’t happen in the real world. Duh. Regardless, the color variation turned out to look vaguely like leaves in autumn in New England, where I’m originally from, and I like it. The yarn is 100% alpaca from Cinnamon, spun into a 3-ply yarn using the Navajo (or chain ply) method.

Another dyeing experiment that came out more like I envisioned it has been my “Red Berries” project. I loved the results of this one so much that I took copious notes so that I could reproduce it later. I started with something a little easier: commercially-prepared 50/50 Merino/Tencel top. Since this was in roving form I coiled it loosely into my disposable foil turkey roasting pan, soaked it in water and vinegar and, using the Jacquard Acid Dye colors of Burgundy, Salmon, Fire Red, and Scarlet Red, randomly splotched dye in roughly equal amounts over the whole roving. The result was the roving you see below.

It already looked pretty tasty just sitting there, but once I began spinning it the results were even more fantastic. Just take a look at those rich purples and striking reds! And what you don’t see are the occasional long shots of really bright, awesome, hot salmon color that just goes perfectly with it.

I chose to spin this into a 3-ply sock yarn. I didn’t get the gauge of the singles quite as thin as I’d like so the resulting yarn is a bit thicker than your usual sock yarn gauge — it’s more like sportweight. But the socks I’m knitting from it are beautiful and I love them, and they’ll likely be my kick-around-the-house socks rather than in-shoe socks.

And finally, the last of the Show and Tell projects: the Silverton Sweater. I’m in the batt-making stage, carding Silverton’s locks on the drumcarder and adding in a little bit of Merino that I’ve dyed in various shades of blue and a little bit of silky white Tencel. The result is very pretty and I can’t wait to do some test spinning.

I’m planning to spin this one long draw so that I can get a purely woolen yarn out of it — I’d like it to be lofty and airy. Then I plan to ply it 3-ply and am going to try for a sportweight gauge. My planned pattern is a top-down raglan style with some kind of subtle cabling in it. I’ve never made a full sweater from my own handspun and I’m really anxious to have one from the fiber of my own alpacas. Really looking forward to this project.

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