Making Stuff, Week 5: Alpaca/Silk, Dyeing, and Non-Optimal Results.

Posted: February 12th, 2010 | Author: Hellchick | Filed under: Making Stuff Series, Spinning | 3 Comments »

I thought this week I’d actually try and time my weekly Making Stuff post to coincide with Fiber Arts Friday at lovely WonderWhyGal’s blog, so be sure and check out lots of other great posts from people making awesome stuff.

I started off this week with an attempt to free up some bobbins — my Lendrum is new and I haven’t had a chance to go out and buy more bobbins for it yet — by plying the Corriedale/alpaca yarn (not from my own alpacas but a commercially processed one I bought a long time ago) I’d started while the wool from the commissioned project was still drying after the dye bath.

I love the feel of this yarn, but as I look at it I’m not sure I love the end result as a yarn that I’d use myself, and I had originally thought I’d knit a sweater from it. I don’t know what it is about yarns made with one strand in one color and another strand in another color: I fall in love with them in my head or on the shelf at the knit shop, but when I bring them home and knit that awesome sweater I plan to make with them, the result just isn’t me when I put it on. I can’t figure out why. Sweaters made out of anything but a yarn no bigger than sport-weight that is mostly solid color just don’t look right on me, and these two-toned yarns I insist on making tend to look very bulky on me.

I’m not heartbroken at the result; I’ve had this fiber in my stash for a long time and really this project was just to free up some room for a couple of fibers I hemmed and hawed about what to do with. I may keep it, I may try and sell it on Etsy. I’m sure this yarn is good for someone for some kind of project, I’m just not sure that someone is me. I do plan to knit a swatch with it, though, before I decide that. Who knows? Maybe the swatch will win me over. I’m so used to really loving every yarn I make that I feel kind of bummed that I have this skein I’m not wild about.

But to make up for it I embarked on a blending project this week with my own alpaca fiber from my boy Silverton, whose fleece is so silky and fine you want to just roll in a big pile of it. Every time I handle his fleece I want to run out into the pasture and give him a big, warm, silky, soft hug. Unfortunately he’d hate that, so I’m relegated to hugging his fiber instead.

A few weeks ago at the Eastside spin-in one of the ladies was spinning up an 80/20 blend of black alpaca and white silk. It looked lovely but she was having problems spinning it, she said. It just wasn’t drafting right and she really wasn’t loving it. While I thought the fiber looked pretty as she was spinning it it really didn’t jump out at me at the time as something hugely special, and I mostly forgot about it until this past week. This time, she brought in the finished yarn and the hat she’d finished knitting from it. The yarn was absolutely gorgeous — it was incredibly soft and the white silk gave it a black, charcoal sheen that almost reminded me of graphite. And did I mention soft? It was soft. I was in love with it.

So in love with it that I decided to make a blend of my own that would, I hope, be pretty close, but done with my own alpaca’s fiber. I could have used Benz’s black fleece but I thought a white silk combined with the super softness of Silverton’s fleece would be a terrific combination.

Fortunately for me I had bought a couple of ounces of silk the last time I was at The Weaving Works knowing that I wanted to do some blending with it soon. I had some top that I had hand-combed myself this summer from this year’s shearing but it hadn’t been washed yet — normally you really wouldn’t comb fleece until you’ve washed it but I had been impatient this summer after getting my boys and their 2009 fleeces and my new wool combs, and Silverton’s fleece is hardly dirty at all, it seems, when you open up the bag.

Spinning Term: “Top”
“Top” is a preparation of fiber in which the longest, strongest, and best-quality fibers have been processed and aligned into one long strip to spin from. It’s called “top” because it’s the top quality fibers from the fleece, and you get top from taking the locks from the fleece and combing them with special combs, either by hand or, as they do commercially, with machinery. When you’ve used the combs the locks have been opened up and the longest, strongest, and best fibers remain on the combs while the shorter bits and little “second cuts” from the fleece get left behind. You can now pull these good fibers off with a diz, just like I showed in Week 3. What you get from this is “combed top” or just “top.”

So I took the combed top and washed it Monday night, and by Wednesday night it was dry enough to blend. I used my blending hackle and, this time, actually measured out the fiber percentages rather than just eyeballing it. By the end of the night I had 2.5 ounces of beautiful alpaca/silk roving, and I’ve still got another 1.5 ounces or so of alpaca top to blend with. I’m not sure what I’m going to spin it into yet; part of me wants a nice 3-ply rounded yarn to make a hat with like my fellow spinner did, but part of me wants to spin it laceweight to make something finer with. I really don’t have any alpaca hats, so I’ll probably go with the former.

And finally, this week I started what will be a longer term project that will help me learn more about the part of this skillset that I’m least familiar with: fiber dyeing. I only started seriously dyeing my own fiber this summer; before that I’d done a little Kool-Aid dyeing of some cheap fibers just to experiment, but nothing that I had really planned out ahead of time. Since I want to be able to control what colors I get and begin experimenting with my own color blends, I thought it was time to put my new fiber records to use and start recording some proper experiments.

Over the last few months I’ve been reading Deb Menz’s Color in Spinning, something recommended to me to get me started in how to blend colors for spinning. And wow, what a book. This is such a great resource and I wish I’d picked this up years ago. Menz really breaks down color theory for spinners and what it means when it comes to blending fibers and how to control every aspect of the process.

What’s really funny about dipping my toes into dye (har har) is that it’s kind of silly how newbie I feel about it. For years now I’ve been a web/game UI designer, so it isn’t like I’m not familiar with color theory. Although I’m not a formally-trained designer and definitely not an artist, I certainly have had to learn a bit about color theory to do my job over the years. But there’s something I learned when I started dyeing actual fibers as opposed to combining colors on a monitor: did you know that colors in the real world don’t add up to white? That sound you heard was a facepalm.

I mean, it’s pretty obvious they don’t. But when you’ve worked only in web-based colors and never even have to think about printed or painted colors it can be easy to forget how color works in the real world. So when I first started combining colors I got a few mixes that felt totally out of the blue (ha!), just things I wasn’t expecting to see. Matt saw me scratching my head about this. Matt, I should say, got his degree in graphic design, is an artist, and is the grandson of a well-known Pacific Northwest painter. So he knows a little bit about color. “Well,” he said, “colors multiply. Remember?”

Ohhhhh yeah. Dur.

I decided that a fun beginning project to test out how different percentages of color contribute to a final blend would be to take two colors I thought might combine nicely and dye some fiber with them in two parts of one color mixed with one part of the other color, and then flip it. So last night I dyed up my remaining, undyed one ounce of Falkland from the sock fiber I recently made. I chose two colors: Burgundy and scarlet. Sure, they’re not that far apart on the color wheel but that’s kind of why I chose them — this way I could see if the color difference would be subtle or noticeable. I used two parts burgundy dye to one part scarlet.

I really love the resulting color. It has a touch more red in it than when I used straight burgundy to dye some alpaca fiber this summer. And tonight I dyed some Merino wool with two parts scarlet and one part burgundy — that’s drying as I type. And I do notice the color difference; the former is more wine-colored while the latter is more blood-red, and since I’ve used straight scarlet as a color I do see that adding burgundy can make a noticeable difference in the final shade. I added a tuft of the Falkland to my fiber record, slipping in a note card of the dye blend, and when the Merino is dry I’ll do the same and snap a picture. Next week I’ll put them side by side for comparison.

Upcoming projects this week will be to finish the commissioned yarn now that all the fibers are carded and ready to spin, and that will be my main priority. I’ll also continue with my dye experiments, possibly trying out some green/blue mixes.

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