The clothes part I’ve always handled by knitting and sewing a lot of my own clothes. I actually don’t like sewing that much and hardly do it anymore, but as a teenager I got really good at taking patterns and making them fit me. And of course knitting my own sweaters and accessories is something I’ve obviously kept up with.

So how about the whole skin care and makeup thing? Well, several years ago I got the urge to give that one a try and started making some of my own basic cosmetics — things like lip balm or bath oils, nothing too outrageously difficult. I was still spending a ton of money on expensive moisturizers, makeup, and hair products, though, and a few years ago I picked up a book called Natural Beauty at Home and my whole outlook on what I was capable of making myself completely changed. I started making my own cold cream to remove makeup. I not only succeeded in making a great product that was just as good, if not better, than what I was paying for at home, it turned out to be way cheaper and only took a few minutes to make. So I ventured even further — I looked up recipes and tried moisturizers, face cleansers, and mineral foundation. When those seemed to get really close to what I wanted I started researching and adapting my recipes, doing multiple trials, and eventually refining them to produce exactly what I wanted — all on the cheap, both in money and time.

This weekend I decided to branch out and try to make my own eyeshadows for the first time. I thought I’d document the process a little bit and show you what I did. In Part 2 I’ll talk about the other products I’ve been making for a few years now — moisturizer, cold cream, and mineral foundation.

I started out with some supplies from MakingCosmetics.com. I’m not affiliated with them, I’ve just found that they seem to have everything I need to make everything that I make (and bonus, they’re local, too!). They have tons of recipes on the site as well, from the basic to recipes that are so complex you’d think you should be in a lab to make them. I’d been wanting to try eyeshadows for a while but hadn’t needed to buy any supplies until lately, when I could justify throwing in some of their mica powders. But I ran out of mineral base to make my mineral foundation with (the bag I bought for about ten dollars lasted me over a year!) so I ordered the smallest and cheapest containers of four mica powders: pearl white, bordeaux red, blackstar red, and bronze. I thought that any combination of these would probably result in a color that I’d wear. I also included some magnesium stearate as a binding agent — I looked up several recipes and saw that this was a key ingredient to helping it bind together and stay on.

I have a mortal and pestle that I use to combine my mineral makeup ingredients, so I set everything up and got started.

Whenever I tend to make something I’m really bad at keeping a log of what I did so that I can reproduce it later. So this time I made sure to be diligent about that and took copious notes. I decided to make three colors for a typical three-color set of eyeshadow: a lid color, a crease color, and a highlight color. I started with the highlight first as I knew it would be the easiest.

I put a half a teaspoon of mineral base into my mortar and decided to start with quarter teaspoon quantities of mica until I got the desired result. It really didn’t take much — a quarter teaspoon for the highlight color, which is pretty much an off-white already, was all it took. The next step was to add the magnesium stearate. Here I was going to have to wing it a little — the recipe from the web site had far more ingredients than I was including, so instead of using the actual amount I went by its recommendation of the magnesium stearate being 5% of the total weight. That amounted to just a tiny amount, less than an eighth of a teaspoon, so I added what seemed like just a tiny bit and ground it into the mortar. Once they were combined I tried some of the eyeshadow on the back of my hand as a test. Score! It seemed like just the right color. I also actually put some on my eyes and it seemed perfect.

(Now, having said that I have to sort of go back and partially take back what I said: now that I’ve actually used it in conjunction with the other colors I’ve made it’s definitely a little too white, so next time I’ll be adding a tiny bit of bronze mica to it to tone that down. In the meantime, I just pick up a little bit of the brown color I also made that’s next to it when I apply it.)

I’d gotten two types of containers for my eyeshadow; one was the standard square palette and one was made up of individual containers with a sifter for more of a loose powder. I decided to try putting this into the palette container and press it as much as possible. It seemed to work, although it’s definitely far looser than most pressed powders, so I need to do some more investigation into a good binding agent as I think I’d prefer to have pressed eyeshadows rather than loose, but we’ll see.

I moved on to the next color, which was the lid color. I wanted a nice, neutral brown, nothing too dark. I did the same steps: I started with a half a teaspoon of the mineral base and added some of the bronze mica. I kept having to add it, quarter teaspoon by quarter teaspoon, to get it darker and it just didn’t seem to be getting dark enough — tests against the back of my hand showed that would just blend right into my skin. So I added a touch of the blackstar red, a very deep, purple red. That was just what it needed to darken it up. Now that it was a bit red, though, I needed to brown it a bit, so I added a bit of my beige blend mineral powder that I use for my foundation. Perfect! I added what seemed like the right amount of magnesium stearate and put this one in the palette next to the highlight color. Since I had so much of it from adding and adding bronze I also put some into one of the loose containers so that I could try both and see what I liked.

I repeated this process with the last color I had planned, a crease color. I wanted this one to be a darker color that had elements of reddish-purple in it but was still predominantly brown. After much blending and testing on the hand I came up with a color that was made up of roughly one part bronze, two parts blackstar red, and two and a half parts bordeaux red. So it’s actually more purple in the pot but surprisingly has a less-than-purple shade when applied.

I didn’t feel like stopping there since I still had a couple of additional containers for color. So I decided to just see what I could come up with through some experiments. I decided to make a more pinkish-bronze color, something that could be used for either a blush or an eyeshadow, and then I decided to try and make a very light brownish/peach color. Both seemed to be pretty successful colors. I put the pinkish blush-like color in its own sifter pot, and put the peach color into the last slot of the palette box.

So of course I put the colors on my eyes as the very final test. And I love them! The shades are perfect. Yesterday I tried the first three colors I made, and today I tried the peachy color as a lid color and the more brown color as a crease color. Both combinations of colors are great and I’m very happy with them. I can definitely learn something, however, about improving their consistency and glide. Because they’re almost a loose powder it can be easy to put too much on so I have to go very, very lightly with these. They also don’t glide quite as much as a store-bought eyeshadow would. I suspect that I can add some things to improve these, though. I wore my eyeshadow for at least eight hours yesterday and it actually creased less than any of my store-bought ones, so there’s already some satisfaction there.

I’m excited about these because it opens the door to really being creative with color and trying my hand at some stage makeup for bellydance. And it’s really inexpensive! I used hardly any of the mica powders and they only cost $2.50 for a teaspoon container. I also only used about a half a teaspoon of mineral base for each eyeshadow out of a 1.8 ounce bag that costs ten dollars. So in essence these eyeshadows only cost pennies to make.

Next time in Part 2 I’ll cover my process for refining and creating the best moisturizer I’ve ever used.

The Marmalade shawl in Bamboo Benz (alpaca/merino/silk/bamboo).

I’ve been knitting it late at night when I’ve come home from work or when I have a few minutes in bed before sleep — both done in admittedly poor light (I’ll usually knit while Matt plays a game in the living room). Today I did a little knitting at lunch to get a break from the PC and so I got a chance to notice it in natural light. The color is gorgeous, the hand of the yarn is beautiful, and I’m going to love this shawl. But there were a couple of areas I noticed where the yarn had slubbed just a little bit as I spun it and at the time I didn’t really care. After all, I didn’t have a particular project in mind, just a fingering weight yarn. But even without a particular project in mind I did have a particular yarn in mind, and that yarn didn’t include slubs. There are two that stand out on the shawl and when I looked at them at lunch I tried to decide how I felt about them, and about imperfections versus character in spinning as master craft.

When spinners first learn to spin they’re frequently told not to worry about the slubs, the thick and thinness of the yarn they’ll inevitably get, the weird texture that will come from their first novice efforts at making yarn. There’s a very common way this is expressed: “Oh, don’t worry. You’re just making art yarn!”

Those that actually make art yarns regularly and intentionally — and I am not among them save for one or two skeins that I did intentionally spin as art yarn — would say that the novice spinner does not make art yarn. They make novice yarn because they are novice spinners spinning to learn. Art yarn has intent behind it. Art yarn is, as the adjective “art” would imply, a piece of work with specific design behind its construction, just like a painting, a sculpture, or any other piece of art. It is not what you get when you don’t get what you intended to spin.

Abby Franquemont once wrote a nice article on embracing your beginner yarn as beginner yarn in and of itself and about how we devalue our own skills as spinners when we rank our standard of quality so low in attributing novice efforts with the qualities of a master product. As we learn to spin we move out of this beginner phase where we’re simply trying to get a grip on the fast-moving fibers in our hands and make a contiguous piece of yarn to the phase where we’re comfortable making yarn at all, and finally to the phase where we make the yarn we intended to make when we sat down at the wheel or the spindle. That yarn may or may not resemble an “art yarn.” A slubby, thick and thin yarn that was intentionally made so is different from a slubby, thick and thin yarn that came out that way because the beginner spinner was just trying to make yarn at all. It is different sometimes because the former yarn is likely a better quality yarn, having been made a specific way with specific materials. And it is different because the intention behind it and the decision to make that a design element in the yarn is the mark of a spinner who knows his or her craft. The slubs and variation in a handspun yarn are only an imperfection if the designer did not intend them to be there.

But at the same time what we’re making is handspun yarn. The mill process that changed textiles forever when it was invented specifically allows for conformity and sameness of end product. Mill-spun yarns are specifically sought after for their conformity — if you examine a few yards of any mill-spun yarn, no matter how art-y it looks, comformity along the entire skein to what you see will likely be the case.

So when spinners create handspun yarn the process is likely to produce the occasional imperfection no matter how hard we try to keep it out. And in the end we have to decide if these imperfections are real imperfections or if they add “character” to our yarn and the end product made with it. The common response to imperfections or elements in yarn that the spinner didn’t intend to be there is that they simply add character. And it’s usually implied that it’s okay, you’re just making yarn, and and any elements in it that give it that homespun quality should be there or it wouldn’t be handspun yarn, or at least recognized as such.

As a spinner and a knitter I am not a perfectionist. This label is proudly held up like a banner by many a spinner and knitter I’ve known but it definitely isn’t by me. I’ve been known to leave a glaring and egregious error in my knitting when spotted a few rows down simply because I’m too lazy to fix it. (Though usually only if the item is for me or if I can fudge a fix for it without it being horribly obvious. I do have some standards.) But even though I’m not a perfectionist I’m someone who takes my craft seriously. I make yarn with all the care, seriousness, and carefulness that a master woodworker would when making furniture, or a renowned chef would when making a dish.

So when I end up with a great, consistent yarn that has a few slubs in it that really stick out in the knitting, slubs I didn’t intend to be there, I don’t attribute it to the inevitable homespun-ness of handspun yarn. It may indeed add character, but it adds character that I didn’t intend for this yarn. At the end of the day this is acceptable, but it’s something I like to make a sharp distinction about. I do this because, like Franquemont believes, I want to be able to grow in my capacity and abilities as a master spinner (whether I am that now or in the future I don’t know), and to do so you have to understand the differences between imperfections versus design elements for character. When we don’t, we run the risk of never allowing ourselves to recognize when we’ve advanced our abilities and talent in a craft.

So I guess after all of that, the question is this: do I love this shawl I’m making? Do I love the yarn I made to knit it in? Absolutely. There are imperfections, elements in it that I didn’t intend to be there, but I’m okay with that. I’m not a perfectionist. But I can recognize them and learn from them and still love the product they came from.

Need more fiber in your diet? You’re in luck — this is Fiber Friday, and there’s more stuff about fiber and fiber arts at WonderWhyGal’s blog.

I’ve said before that Matt’s dad loves making things. He’s seventy-five and retired, and he’s been machining and making things pretty much his whole life, and the stuff he makes is very good. He loves new projects and if he’s not already working on something for himself he’s looking around Matt’s house for things to make or improve. And a few months ago when he came to visit I was in the middle of drum carding some of my alpaca’s fleece into batts on my Louet Junior drum carder.

I bought the carder used at a pretty good price. I had saved up my pennies to get a drum carder but after researching I knew there was just no way I was going to get one of the really nice full-sized popular models for any price I could afford right now, and hand-carding all of my alpaca just simply wasn’t going to cut it. Even used, nice carders like Strauch or Pat Green go for several hundred dollars, and motorized carders can sell for, at minimum, $1000. After researching and then looking in my wallet and then researching and looking one more time in my wallet hoping that the bills had just magically multiplied like bunnies while I wasn’t looking — only to realize in dismay that they hadn’t — I settled on the Louet Junior, a half-sized model that seemed to get a fairly equal smattering of great reviews and “meh” reviews. Given that, like most spinning equipment, drum carders always seem to have good resale value and tend to go fast as soon as they’re put up for sale, I figured that at worst I could resell it if I wasn’t happy with it and save up for a different model.

When I showed Matt what I wanted to get he said, “you know, my dad could probably make one of those.” I admit that I wasn’t really sure — it seemed like drum carders had specific, precise measurements. And then I realized that we were talking about a man who can machine things within 1/1000 of an inch.

Regardless, he wouldn’t be able to make one without having one to examine, and so I figured that since we didn’t even know if he would want to make one or could, I would go ahead and get it and I’d have a drum carder and he’d have one to look at.

When Matt’s dad came over he had no idea what I was doing, so I explained what the drum carder was and he was utterly fascinated. I mentioned that it was a half-sized model and that, while it did the job, there were a few things I probably would want to be different if I ever got a different carder. He said he’d love to make one and that it really wouldn’t be that difficult as long I could get the carding cloth, which I knew I could get. In fact, I decided it would be useful to get a carding cloth with a TPI (tines per inch) that was higher than the one on the Louet so I’d have some versatility in carders. I went with a 90 TPI, slightly more than the Louet’s 72 but not as high as my Schacht hand carders, which are 112. (The higher the TPI, the finer the fiber the cloth is meant to card.)

In case you’re interested, I got the carding cloth from the fine people at Howard Brush. They were very informative, quick to respond, and give great customer service, which was a contrast with the place I’d originally tried to order the cloth from, Woodland Woolworks. I’m not even going to provide a link to them — I ordered the cloth back in November and was told it was backordered for at least three weeks, which was fine, but after five weeks when I contacted them I was told, “a week to ten days,” and when we finally started getting into mid-February I had heard that at least two or three times. Not only that, they accidentally sent me a “your order has shipped” email…for someone else’s order! I thought it was my carding cloth and got all excited, but when it failed to arrive and I contacted them to find out where it was, they said they must have accidentally sent me the wrong order email. And how long would my carding cloth take to come in? You guessed it: a week to ten days.

Matt’s dad was getting really impatient — he had most of the drum carder put together and only needed the carding cloth to begin the final phase. So I contacted Howard Brush and they told me that not only did they have what I wanted in stock but that they could ship it out the next day, and that’s what they did. The only difference was that I had to order it in foot-long increments as opposed to the inch-increments from Woodland Woolworks, so I had to get four feet of it even though I only needed thirty-eight inches. It turned out to still be cheaper to order more of it from Howard Brush than it was to get it — if I was ever going to — from Woodland Woolworks. So please, buy from Howard Brush and support them if you plan to order anything like what they sell.

Anyway, Once the cloth came in he brought the finished drums over in a makeshift holder that allowed us to measure how far apart they needed to be — that was really the only thing he wasn’t sure about. The Louet’s teeth mesh, something I really didn’t like (though some do), so I asked people on Spin-List if they could tell me how far apart the teeth were on their drum carders. Someone replied that the test is being able to just slide an index card between them — perfect! We could replicate that, and so we did. He took it home and a few days later…voila! He brought over the finished product, and I was absolutely floored with how beautiful it is. It’s not just a drum carder, it’s a thing of beauty. Even just in aesthetics it beats anything out there, in my opinion.

The drum carder, taken while still clean of fleece.

He machined every part, including the handle, which turns butter-smooth.

He even machined these clamps for it. The CLAMPS, people!

What a nice handle he made for it for carrying, too!

And yes, he machined the gears, too. They're sandblasted aluminum.

I’m just stunned at how beautiful this thing is. And it’s surprisingly lightweight — he took some weight out by making the drums hollow (without making them too delicate to card with) and added a great handle in the perfect place. For some reason the Louet has a weird leather loop only big enough to hook a finger or two in, and it’s heavy enough that it’s awkward and painful to carry that way so I’m not sure why they even bothered with that.

Of course, the real test is this: how does it card? Naturally I ran to my fiber room and grabbed some of Silverton’s fleece for the final test. Let me tell you, this thing makes a beautiful batt. It turned like butter, didn’t tear at my fleece like the Louet can do if a heavy lock manages to sneak in there or the carder gets a little too full. (Louet’s literature on the Junior model insists that it can make the same three ounce batts that full-sized models make, but I cannot put more than one ounce of fiber on there or the fiber tears and I get neps.)

I haven’t had a chance this week to sit down and do any carding beyond the initial test, but I can’t wait to get to it on Sunday when I plan to card some Silverton locks for my Silverton Sweater project and the dry fleece I finished washing this week from Benz for the last of the commissioned yarn project. I couldn’t wait to share my enthusiasm, though, and sent a picture of the carder along to Spin-List, which prompted several spinners to ask how much Matt’s dad would charge to make some more. Sadly this is a one-time thing; at 75 he isn’t interested in going into business and prefers to work on his own projects. Occasionally he just likes trying something new and my spinning equipment caught his eye, and I think he just wanted to see if he could do it for the exercise.

The carder stole the show this week as Most Awesome Thing Made In The World Ever, but Matt also whipped something up for me: a fiber rack for my fiber room. I had noticed we had a couple of old and slightly beat-up wooden coat racks in the toolshed; Matt said he wanted to put one up in the utility room to hang his fishing gear from, and the other one he hung this week in the barn stall we don’t use so we can keep the pasture-cleaning shovel, dustpan, and other tools we use within the pasture nearby. Although I want to put some nice wooden shelving up at some point in the fiber room I had liked the idea of hanging one of these coat racks, or something like them, in the room to hang skeins that need washing, roving I’ve dyed that I want to keep within eyesight for project ideas, and more. I like having my fiber out and accessible so I can see what I have rather than keeping it tucked away in plastic bins in the closet, which is where it is now. If it’s out and I can see it, I have far more ideas for fiber combinations, colorways I’d like to create, and basically I just get inspired by the fibers I see when I go in and spin. It helps me to remember what exactly I have.

So Matt reproduced the coat rack for me from some dowels he got and some wood we had in the barn. It’s perfect, and I love seeing some of my finished yarns and rovings hanging from it.

My new fiber rack!

And yes, there’s been some actual fiber work this week. I tackled another dye project this week — nothing so scientific as single dye color tests (I’ll get back to those soon enough) but just something fun. I took eight ounces of some superwash Blue-Faced Leicester and dyed them in burgundy, gold, and chestnut.

Superwash BFL in burgundy, gold, and chestnut.

Judging from the color chart I had assumed the chestnut, which you can barely see in this pic, would come out far more brown than it did. Instead it looks more like a burgundy that’s been drabbed with a lot of gray. It’s not bad, it’s just that there’s not enough contrast, at least visibly in the roving, to really see it between the gold and burgundy.

Spinning Term: “Superwash”
Most sheep wool will felt (become a tangled mat of fabric) when exposed to heat and agitation — for instance, when you throw that nice hand-wash-only cashmere sweater into the hot washing machine and it comes out as a tiny, matted replica of its former self. Superwash wool is wool that’s been treated by a process that renders it incapable of felting, thus allowing products made with it to be machine washed safely.

Regardless of the less than inspiring chestnut colors, I actually think the chestnut is going to be a bit more noticeable once it’s spun and I’m happy with it. I’m spinning this into superfine singles that I’ll then ply into a 3-ply sock yarn — not chain-plied as is typical, but a standard 3-ply. I kind of want to see the colors interplay that way. And I’m deliberately trying to spin it finer than the Falkland/alpaca/nylon blend I recently created and have been knitting with. While I love that yarn so far the resulting gauge is just a touch thicker than I had intended or liked.

And finally, remember the “Blood Orange” batts I showed off last week? I took all six ounces of them to this past weekend’s Eastside Spin-In (I would have worked on the commissioned yarn but I still had more fleece to wash and dry) and managed to get them all spun into a nice, roughly-worsted-weight single. I plied it with gold embroidery thread and I really, really love the result. I ended up with two skeins of roughly 155 yards each, which is just perfect. This will go up in my Etsy shop once they’re washed and dried. I’m not sure what to call it yet.

The Blood Orange batts turned into yarn.

I have even more to show off, but I’m going to save it for next week — I dyed some BFL and some mohair locks for an art yarn I got a flash of inspiration for earlier this week. I’ll be calling it, “Green Apple Martini and Keep ‘Em Comin’.” I’d show you how I dyed the fibers in preparation for it but I don’t want to spoil the surprise as I plan to spin that one this week and show it off next time. I also got the beginnings of another art yarn idea that I jotted down and plan to call, “You and Your Filthy Sea Shanties.” I’m not even going to describe that one, I just want you to think about what that yarn could look like until it’s made.

Until next week, check out all the other Fiber Arts Friday posts over at WonderWhyGal’s blog!

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.

This yarn is probably my most engineered yarn to date, and I’m pretty proud of that fact since — at least so far, since I haven’t knit with it yet — I feel like I’ve gotten exactly the yarn I set out to make. I think it’s going to make fantastic socks with all the properties I sought in engineering it. Here’s a breakdown of all the steps I’ve taken to get the right yarn for the project:

The fiber

I knew that I wanted a yarn that was going to make a good pair of socks for me and my perpetually cold feet. That meant that I was going to need warmth — hence alpaca, which is three times warmer than wool. I was going to need durability since they’d be socks — that meant a wool like Falkland with its long staple length and durable crimp would be called for, and blending it with some nylon would add some extra durability and elasticity. I bought the Falkland and nylon already commercially processed into top at The Weaving Works in Seattle, and the alpaca would come from my own boy Benz, whose black fiber I washed and hand-combed into top.

Once I knew what fibers I needed, I had to figure out…

The blend

A good sock yarn needs to have the right blend of fibers. Too much alpaca and they’d be incredibly warm but lack any elasticity or durability. Too much nylon and they’d feel odd and lack the durability and memory of the wool.

I wasn’t planning on meticulously weighing out the fibers before blending them, but I knew that I wanted a rough 60/20/20 blend of Falkland, alpaca, and nylon. I took out the blending hackle and lashed on the fiber in layers. I started with a thick layer of Falkland, then laid on a thin layer of nylon, then a thin layer of alpaca. I repeated that set and then finished with a final thick layer of Falkland. I pulled this sandwich of fibers off with the diz, removed the waste from the hackle and then re-blended it one more time by lashing it onto the hackle and pulling off again with the diz. This gave me about one ounce of well-blended fiber per “sandwich.” Now I had six ounces of fiber ready for the next step.

The dye job

The dyeing wasn’t exactly a critical piece of engineering in the construction of this yarn, but it’s still part of the fun of the whole process. Since these socks were going to be for me I was willing to just throw a couple of dye colors on there that I hadn’t yet used together just to see what I’d get, and I’m pretty happy with the results. I coiled each one-ounce ball of fiber into my roasting pan, stacking all six ounces in there at once. I soaked the fiber in vinegar and water and then used the sprinkle method to dye it with my Jacquard acid dyes. I used turquoise and purple, each in two alternating groups, sprinkling the dye onto the wet fiber and massaging it in. I knew this method would result in some uneven coloring, which is exactly what I wanted since I wanted a little variation to come out in the spinning.

Either I used way too much of the turquoise dye or blue-based dye simply doesn’t strike well, because I had a lot of turquoise dye color left in the bath and it took me forever to rinse it all out. I did read somewhere that blue dyes don’t strike well, but I also suspect that I used too much so I’ll try a sample next time with less of the dye powder. Regardless, I was really pleased with the resulting colors.

The spin

Part of making durable sock yarn is in the twist: the more twist a yarn has, generally the more durable it’s going to be (I say “generally” because it’s possible to break and weaken your fibers by overtwisting, but that’s a separate discussion). The reason for this is that twist allows less of the surface of the yarn to be exposed to wear, which will reduce abrasion and give the socks a longer lifetime. More twist adds energy to a yarn and an energetic yarn is typically a more durable one.

So given that, I switched out my regular flier for the fast flier so that I could really get a lot of twist in the yarn. I spun it on its highest ratio and spun it quite thin knowing that I was going to 3-ply it and wanted it to be a fairly low gauge. This fiber blend was so easy to spin. It just drafted like butter. I suspect that was because of the Falkland and its long staple length, a fiber I’d never spun before but will definitely be using again based on my experiences with this project. I spun about half of the singles earlier this week and the other half at today’s Spin-In, really pushing my six ounces onto my Lendrum bobbin. It just fit.

The ply

Like the twist, the ply is important for a good, durable sock yarn. Plying affects yarn similarly to twist in terms of surface exposure and abrasion: the more twist in the ply (or the more singles that are plied together), the less surface area will be exposed to abrasion and the more durable the yarn will be. This is a trade-off for softness; a twistier yarn will be much less soft than one with a much looser twist, but for socks it’s all about finding that sweet spot between a yarn that feels good against the skin and one that will be durable enough to be worth knitting and wearing in your shoes.

Since I had two colors in this yarn that were deliberately not blended before spinning I planned to chain-ply (otherwise known as Navajo-ply) this yarn against itself. This allows you to control how the colors blend together since you pull the single through a crochet-like loop of itself to make three layers of the single that will be plied together. What’s funny is that looking at this yarn I completely forget that there’s solid black alpaca blended in there. I honestly thought it would have been more noticeable but it blended so nicely that it didn’t seem to change the colors much at all, and if anything it kind of helps them pop a little bit.

Tomorrow I plan to wash and dry the yarn, and I really can’t wait to knit some socks from it and actually see just how well they wear. If the final analysis looks good I’ll definitely be making more of this blend of yarn because there’s just nothing nicer than wearing hand-knit socks, nevermind hand-knit and hand-spun.

The other project that I started this week had more to do with organization than with actual spinning itself: record keeping. I’ve been spinning for years but never kept any records because I frequently spun with no intention behind my yarn — I would spin for the enjoyment of spinning itself and then figure out what I’d do with the final product based on whatever I got. But now that I’m dyeing my fibers and creating yarns for specific projects I feel I need to keep records so I can accurately reproduce things I’ve made.

My new Fiber Record.

I’ve got a three-ring binder with a bunch of sheet protectors in it. I tape swatches and samples of yarn and fiber to a piece of paper on which I’ve written whatever details I need in order to reproduce it and slide them into the sheet protectors. I’ve also got a few trading card protector sheets in there to store small fiber samples from dyeing projects.

I’m already finding this a valuable resource as I spin fibers and have to remember things when I sit down to spin, like what ratio I was spinning them on before I switched out the flier for another project.

Next week will be dedicated to finishing the commissioned red/black alpaca yarn project, and I’ll also be able to show off some of the plied alpaca/Corriedale sweater yarn.

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).

I also wanted to start the sock yarn I’ve been meaning to get working on, although at this point those socks will probably end up getting finished in the middle of summer when I won’t be able to wear them but will be anxious to. Regardless, it’ll be a good summer knitting project so I wanted to get started on it.

I pulled out the rest of the fiber that I used for my “Beaded Tomato” yarn, and I realized I had to make a correction: it wasn’t Blue-Faced Leicester I was spinning but Falkland. I’d forgotten that they didn’t have any white BFL so I went with Falkland which seemed pretty comparable, and I’d simply forgotten what it was until I saw the label I stuck in there. Ha. Anyway, I knew I wanted to blend this with some of the white blending nylon I’d gotten as well as some of Benz’s black fleece — the Falkland would serve as a good, long-stapled wool base for the sock yarn, the alpaca would add warmth (and softness, although that’s not as important in socks), and the nylon would add some durability.

So earlier in the week I combed some of Benz’s fleece into combed top and set it aside until today. Then I set up the blending hackle that Matt’s dad made for me this summer.

Fiber on the blending hackle. SPIKES!

Those are spikes. Very, very, very sharp spikes. For those that don’t know, a blending hackle is like a long over-sized comb: you “lash” fiber onto it in layers that’s usually been combed into top already (by sort of swinging it in arcs onto the tines of the hackle) and then you pull it off with a diz (another term I’ll get to in a moment). You can make a pretty ghetto blending hackle pretty easily by just taking a long piece of wood and attaching plastic hair picks or combs or similar things to it, and that’s initially what I was going to do. But then I talked to Matt’s dad over dinner.

Matt’s dad is retired and his main hobby, a very serious hobby, is gunsmithing. He can make and machine, it seems, anything, and to very, very exacting specifications. He’s constantly in need of projects, and if you’re a child of a parent who likes to make things you know that your house will become Their Project if you’re not careful. He helps us out a lot and I don’t like to abuse his willingness to make things, but when you need something and the person who can do it for you not only wants the work but can do it really well…

So when I said I needed a blending hackle I actually had merely planned to ask his advice on making one for myself. He wouldn’t hear of it, and when I told him what “real” blending hackles looked like and showed him my St. Blaise wool combs — which a blending hackle is related to — he said it wasn’t a problem at all and he could easily make it. He insisted on knowing exactly how big, how long, and how far apart the tines needed to be, which was funny because it doesn’t have to be exact at all but he’s a very exacting person so…yes, it needed to be exact. We figured out what measurements they should be and a week later he showed up with this beautiful and deadly-looking hackle.

It’s extremely sharp, which it needs to be to properly comb and separate the top as you blend it. I treat it with even more respect than I treat my very sharp wool combs because I can only imagine how embarrassing it would be to die by tripping onto a blending hackle.

So today I combined the Falkland with the blending nylon and the alpaca and prepared to take it off with a diz. A diz is a disc-like object with a hole in it used to pull fiber off of combs or hackles into top. The idea is that it helps weed out the short and weaker fibers, letting only the longer and stronger fibers come through the hole, perfectly aligned for worsted spinning. Because these long and strong fibers are aligned by pulling through the diz you get a fiber preparation that’s perfect for things like socks, gloves, or any other garment that needs to be somewhat hard-wearing. Dizs are a very ancient device — they’ve been found in archeological digs dating thousands of years back and frequently were made from shells, rocks, or bone.

You can easily make a diz out of most anything since it’s just a disc with a hole in it, and most spinners make them out of discarded milk jugs, which is exactly what I did last year when I got my wool combs. I had widened the hole in my homemade diz and found it to be too big so when I wanted to pull my roving off today I knew I needed to make another diz. As I was cutting one out of a plastic cup I suddenly remembered something: a few weeks ago when Matt and I were at his mom’s cabin we went for a walk along the river and he’d picked up a flat rock that had a perfectly-worn hole in it. We thought it was unique and took it home with us, setting it on the counter, not entirely sure what to do with it. That hole was the perfect size, and the rock was almost perfectly flat. I wondered if it would make a good diz.

It had a little iron oxide on the inside of the hole but I figured I’d test some fiber to see if any of it came off onto the fiber, and even if it did I was going to be dyeing the fiber anyway. So I decided to give it a try.

My new diz, handmade by Mother Nature.

Pulling roving through the diz.

It’s perfect! None of the rust-like color came off at all onto the fiber, and the hole was absolutely the perfect size for my roving. And it’s even off-centered so perfectly so that I can hold the rock while I get the fiber through the hole. Thanks, nature! There’s something extra cool about finding exactly the same kind of tool for this job that a more primitive human thousands of years ago would have used, and having it be just right for the job.

While I didn’t measure exact amounts, the final fiber is roughly 60% Falkland, 20% alpaca, and 20% blending nylon.

Falkland/alpaca/nylon ready to be dyed. It's a cellphone shot, hence the poor quality.

The fiber is now in the oven dyeing as we speak. Since these are going to be socks for me I wanted to just experiment with color, so I kettle-dyed the resulting roving with turquoise and purple. Should be quite interesting. Next week: I should have some dry, dyed fiber to show off as well as some alpaca/Corriedale sweater yarn.

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.

I had to give back the Louetlast last year and suddenly panicked about having to replace it with…well, something. I didn’t know what I wanted but I knew I needed a wheel. But like many things in life it can take a long time to find the wheel that’s right for you. I didn’t have that kind of time. I had a pretty low budget for a wheel and knew I was going to have to go used and cheap, and I found an Ashford Traditional double-drive for an affordable price on Craigslist. I was nervous because it was such a radically different wheel mechanically than my Louet, but it looked like a fine wheel and I knew I’d spun enough to be able to figure it out.

I took it home, worked with it, and actually really enjoyed spinning on it. It had more ratio ranges than the Louet and it felt like it took less brute force to make yarn and more fine movements and tension tuning. I was making laceweight yarn by the first night I had it and even began trying a long draw on it for the first time shortly after.

But no matter how much of a step up it’s been from the Louet it still has some bizarre quirks I find frustrating. Taking the bobbin off is a real pain — you’ve got to unscrew the end, usually getting grease on your fingers from the flier rod which you have to be careful not to get on your fleece. And don’t even talk to me about changing to the jumbo flier, which you have to do if you have any hope of plying on this wheel without having to break your skein in two because the bobbins are so small; the jumbo flier requires a complete change out of the maiden and there’s a shim you have to keep track of in order to easily change between the jumbo flier and the regular one. God help me if I lose that shim.

So although I enjoy the wheel I knew it wasn’t going to be my final one, my real wheel. So I tried the wheels of people at the Eastside Spinners’ Guild. One nice lady let me use her Louet S45, a tiny compact wheel that looked like it was made in the future. I was in love from the first rotation — it treadled so easily, had no orifice (it uses a metal wire), had no flier hooks to fuss with (it has a simple movable metal flier piece), and was so tiny and light you could easily travel around with it. Then she told me the price: they run close to a thousand dollars. Geez. And that’s only because Louet stopped making them — when they were in production they were closer to $600 but went into such high demand after production was stopped that you can’t find them for that price any more.

Although I loved the S45 and was determined to get one I realized that it didn’t quite have everything I wanted in a wheel no matter how much I loved it — I wanted something somewhat portable, something that had the equipment or attachments to give me good range of ratios and bobbin sizes, something that was double treadle, and something that was quiet. And of course, something in a reasonable price range. I went into the Weaving Works in Seattle to try an Ashford Joy, a portable wheel that I knew had some of these qualities, and I was absolutely sure I was going to love it and even assumed I’d be walking out of the store with one. But I sat down with it and, to my surprise, utterly hated it. Disappointed, I turned to the Lendrum they had sitting next to it.

I’d seen other spinners with Lendrums and had never really given the wheel much thought. It looked utterly normal, like nothing special. It was even kind of oddly built in that it leaned forward unlike any other wheel. Spinners I knew who were looking for a Lendrum had mentioned having a hard time finding one, which I just wrote off without much thought. I’d heard spinners who use them rave about them and thought, well, I’m here, so why not? I assumed I’d dislike it.

I grabbed some test wool and oh my God, something about this wheel just felt perfect. It treadled like butter, the flier head was adjustable in height, it was quiet, and it broke down easily into a more portable form. Changing the bobbin was incredibly easy and changing to another flier head was a cinch. The tension system was easy and it had a great range of ratios. And no flier hooks! It has a simple metal O-type ring with a squeezy hook that you can easily slide up and down the flier arm. I was sold, literally. It was the wheel I had been looking for. I ordered one and last week it finally came in!

I finally feel like I have what could be called, for me anyway, a production wheel. So I’ve spent this week getting to know the ins and outs of this great wheel by spinning something super simple: some commercially-prepared alpaca/tencel blend that I’ve had for a while that I wanted to spin up into a lace-to-sport weight yarn.

An alpaca/tencel blend of fiber. I had two pounds of it to start.

It was a great yarn to start with because it wasn’t a special challenge, just an easy yarn that I could spin while concentrating on the various parts of the wheel and how they affected my spinning. What’s funny about this wool is that I think it might be the last batch of commercially-prepared and dyed fiber that I’ve bought, and that was at least two years ago. I’ve been so consumed with using my own alpaca fiber or dyeing and prepping my own blends that I’ve lost interest in buying commercially-prepared stuff (except if it’s going to serve as a base, such as undyed Merino roving). But you have to admit, this color is lovely. It’s a sage-y green with hints of gray-blue in it. I had two pounds of the stuff and had already spun up a good portion of it into 384 yards of roughly fingering-weight yarn on my Traditional. So I’ve been spinning the rest at the same gauge and I’m just about finished with it now, ending up with two full bobbins on the Lendrum. My plan is to make a really intricate lacy shawl or scarf with it, probably a replica of Peacock, which I spent a year knitting only to find that the color really wasn’t me (I hadn’t yet figured out that just because I love a color doesn’t mean that color is going to look good on me) and ended up selling it for a good price to someone looking for a gift for their mother. When I finish spinning it up I’ll probably switch to the plying head on the Lendrum and see how that feels.

I’m still working on some commissioned scarf yarn made from Benz’s fleece (a denim yarn made with one strand of black and one strand of his white dyed red) but in between carding it and washing it I managed to squeeze in that beaded yarn I linked last week. The other day I stopped to pick up more beads to finish the other half and found myself browsing some really great jewelry supplies, beads, and the like. Last year I developed a slight interest in making my own jewelry (note to self: finish fixing the bracelets I made for people last year!) and picked up a few items that I thought would make a very quick and lovely necklace.

A simple necklace.

I started with the stone disc and the two curved beads on either side. I figured I could use the silver wire I had at home to wrap the disc in a nice way to attach it to the necklace, and I saw some conic beads that would be perfect for hiding that join. I used a simple necklace I also bought with them, cutting off the end so I could slip the elbow-shaped beads on and then re-crimping it with a small loop on the end to serve as the closure. I’m pretty pleased with how it came out, although I’m still very much a novice when it comes to working with wire. Getting it to shape the right way without any little bumps or jogs is still something I’m learning how to do.

A closeup of the necklace.

While rooting through my supplies I came across a few beads I’d bought a few years ago and a pendant I’d also bought and tucked away knowing that at some point I wanted to turn it into something. I already had my tools out and I figured I had the supplies, so why not do that now?

Another pretty simple necklace.

This time I didn’t have a necklace ready to string the stuff onto, but I did have beading wire and various findings and clasps. So I took my beading wire and used it as a necklace base, doubling it through the loops since it’s pretty thin and on its own didn’t seem strong enough for a necklace. I’m also happy with how this one came out, although I probably should have used some crimping beads to keep the small metal beads from sliding beneath the large pendant attachment ring. Still, though, for spur-of-the-moment it’s not half bad and I like it.

I’d really like to get better at jewelry-making, although it’s something I do pretty off-and-on. But it’s amazing to me what you can create for yourself with some very simple supplies, and like spinning yarn it seems like there’s a very long road toward quality and mastery that would be enjoyable to follow. I see people on Etsy who create beautiful jewelry pieces themselves that are far and away better than what I see in jewelry stores, and that seems fun to know how to do. So I’m going to keep working at it.

Next week’s plan: more work on the commissioned scarf yarn and possibly some new beaded yarn. Stay tuned. And in the meantime, check out Fiber Arts Friday to see more people making more cool stuff.