Making Stuff, Week 6: Blood Oranges

It’s a short post this week, once again timed to coincide with Fiber Arts Friday. It’s short because I’ve forced myself to concentrate on mostly one project this week: the commissioned yarn I’m making for a coworker, a yarn I’ve already featured here (100% alpaca from Benz, 2-plied as one red and one black strand each). It’s taken longer than I thought because it turns out he needs more yarn than I anticipated, which required more washing fleece, drying fleece, carding fleece, dyeing fleece…

But in between all of that I did manage to do some more dyeing experiments, sticking mostly with the red family so I could see some consistent changes. I didn’t take individual pictures this week of all the individual batches after they were dyed, but I did take pieces of each fiber and mark them for my records. First I dyed the last of my Falkland wool, about an ounce, with a 2:1 ratio of Burgundy to Scarlet, and then I dyed one ounce of Merino wool with the opposite ratio, 1:2 of Burgundy to Scarlet. The shades turned out really pretty and distinct enough to notice. Finally, I dyed another couple of ounces of Merino with a roughly 2:1 ratio of Fire Red to Salmon, something I was just interested in seeing the results of since Salmon is so orangey-pink. That turned out to be a very pretty dark, dusty pinkish-red.

I stuck with the red this week because I figured this way, after seeing all of the dyeing results and keeping samples for my records, I could card them together into a blended batt along with the bright orangey salmon Falkland I had leftover from my beaded yarn experiment. Looking at all the colors together before carding, I had this image that they might look like the colors of a blood orange when put together.

A Merino/Falkland batt. I'm calling the colorway 'Blood Orange'.

Sure enough, that’s almost exactly how it came out. I didn’t carefully weight out the percentages but rather wanted to experiment as I carded it together, but I’m sure it’s roughly 50/50 Merino and Falkland. I blended it in roughly organized layers: The Scarlet/Salmon mix first, then some Salmon Falkland, then some Fire Red/Scarlet Merino, then some Scarlet/Burgundy Merino, then some Salmon Falkland, then some Burgundy/Scarlet Merino, followed by more Salmon Falkland. I left the batts at one blending pass to retain the color banding. I ended up with just over six ounces.

Spinning Term: “Batts”
Batts are flat rectangles of fiber that have usually been prepared with a drum carder — a machine with two barrels of teeth that “card”, or align, the fibers together. Batts are different from top in that the fibers do not have to be all the same length, and drum-carded batts will produce more blended batches of color when created with dyed fibers. Because they are fluffy rectangles of variously-aligned fibers instead of long strips of perfectly-aligned fibers (as in top), batts, when spun, typically produce a woolen yarn, one that is lofty, airy, and warm.

The yarn I plan to make from this will be a roughly worsted weight yarn, spun semi-thick-and-thin, and then plied with some kind of glittery, dark thread. I still have to determine how I want to spin the batts — I don’t want them to blend too well so I don’t want to pull them into roving (which would only serve to help the fibers blend even more), so I’m thinking of simply pulling off hunks and spinning from the long side to get a definite woolen result. We’ll see how that goes. I really can’t wait to spin these and I’m hoping I’ll be able to begin them this weekend at the Issaquah Spin-In.

Don’t forget, check out more Fiber Arts Friday posts!

Being the Barn Boss

We set aside time this morning to take care of farm chores and, since it had been about a month since we last did it, those farm chores included toenail checks, halter practice, and body scoring on the alpacas. This is only the third time we’ve done it in the six months we’ve had them and we seem to get better each time. Today we feel like we really made progress in being The Barn Boss with our most spirited alpaca, Cinnamon.

Are you talkin' to me? Are YOU talkin' to ME?

Because these are the first farm animals we’ve ever owned I’ll admit that we were really skittish and shy about how to handle them at first. Don and Jody of Jo’s Fleece Fields have helped us a lot with that, but really it just comes down to working with them more and more, which is why we’re trying to make sure we get some deliberate handling in about one a month even if they don’t need a toenail trim. Even though we’re not a farm in the big sense and our boys don’t have to be handled except when they get sheared and they get their toenails trimmed, what if — as unlikely as it is — we had to move them in an emergency and we were still uncomfortable with halters? And of course we want to be fully comfortable for all of this when shearing day comes up in early June. In order to do this, we are making a concerted effort to step up to the plate as Barn Bosses.

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

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.

Corriedale (natural white) and alpaca (natural brown) yarn, 2-ply. Made about 400 yards and I've still got plenty to spin.

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.

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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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