Land O' Cotton

I mentioned the project my Mom and I have going.  I spun quite a bit of cotton from the seed so I thought my mother might want to try growing it.  I've never met a plant she can't grow and she does come from cotton country in West Texas.  What better way to feed your addiction than by helping someone else feed their addiction in a way that will feed your addiction?!

So under the warm Texas sun, the seeds got planted. 

First report - there were babies.

Second report - there were teenagers.

Third report - yellow flowers.

Fourth report - pink flowers

Evidently the flowers come up yellow to begin with and then change to pink as they mature.  Once they run their course and fall off, the boll will come up and then we'll really be on our way. 

I'll let you know how it goes.

Sampling

In keeping with my goal to sample with fibers and spinning and such, I had a good time this morning.  I plopped in my "Roman Holiday" dvd, got my variety of fibers I'd put by to sample with and my cards and had a good old time.  First of all, how could you not have a wonderful time with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn.  I LOVE that movie.  So sweet and bittersweet.  Always brings a little tear to my eye when they meet in the middle of all those reporters at the end.  Sigh...  Love that movie.

Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn and surrounded by scrumptious fibers.  Nothing better. 

For this morning, I just wanted to see how the fibers acted together.  I had corriedale, generic wool top, merino, silk noils, tussah silk, bamboo and tencel.  I loaded my cards with a little of this and a little of that, mixing them as seemed good, adding colors as it seemed good.  Once I had the fibers carded lightly and rolled them into a rolag, I spun them on my Ashford drop spindle and plied them Andean style to get a good 2-ply sample skein.

These were straight off the spindle and these are after they've been washed.  I don't know if you can see the difference in these pictures but they really "bloom" after they've been washed.  As always, you can click on the pictures to see a larger view.

I enjoyed myself immensely, not only because it was fun to figure out how much of each color and each fiber to load up and, of course, I always love the wow factor of how the yarn looks as it is spun into singles and then plied into a yarn.  It always seems a little magical to me and never quite predictable.  I like that!

My exploration of cotton continues, too, with this little wrap of tri-colored natural cotton that I've had for ages.  You can see the top and then how the color deepens once the yarn has been boiled good and proper.  Our spinning group took to the park the other night and I took my "coyote" cotton (that's the reddish/brown color) top and I spun and I spun.  I told some of the ladies that I never ever thought I would fall in love so deeply with spinning cotton.  I just can't get enough of it.  I realize that much of that has to do with the preparation of that particular top that makes it so easy to spin.  Believe it or not, I love cotton.  Next time I'll let you in on the little experiement in cotton my Mom and I have going.  Actually, she's done all the work to this point!

Silk Vid

Take a look here and see what you think.  Just remember, it's nothing fancy!

Sampling

Hope you had a wonderful holiday weekend.  I spent mine visiting yarn shops in Bloomington, IL, such as MaryLynn's Yarn Garden and Ewe Knits.  Both are wonderful, warm, friendly spots and I thoroughly enjoyed the chats I had in both places.  Don't think I got out without buying stuff, either!  More on that another day.

The rest of the weekend I spent sampling, getting some knitting started and also some dull things like getting the house straightened and washing clothes and dishes.

The fun stuff included...

finishing a project I've had in mind for a long time, which was to spin some black wool roving to match some beautiful jewel tone Nashua Creative Focus worsted yarns I got in South Dakota a couple of years ago.  It's a wonderful singles yarn and, although the actual Nashua yarn is wool and alpaca, I just used wool for my version.

It was mildly successful but I really had a hard time walking the fine line between getting too much twist into the singles or not enough.  I knew, too, that no matter how little twist I was able to get away with, I would still have an unstable yarn.  But, lo and behold, the first time I've gone on Ravelry in about 3 weeks, I stumbled on a discussion string about this very thing and was told that it should go into a really hot bath then into a cold one and it should be "roughed up" (their term, not mine!).  This fulls (slightly felts) the yarn which gives it strength and stability for knitting.  Who knew?

Oh, yeah, the reason I wanted to do this is because I thought this yarn in colors I've got would make a wonderful mondrian sort of something.  I've always liked that look.  I'm thinking I might do some sort of bag.  That could be cool, right?

The other finished project pertains to some silk hankies I finally got spun.  These were a purchase from Stitches a couple of years ago.  I started spinning them by poking my finger through the middle and drafting out but then I thought I'd try spinning from the corner.  It worked a lot better for me so I'll definitely be using that technique in future.  I did a video showing how to do it and will post it when I get it edited.  It's nothing fancy but it does show the process.

I spun the singles medium to very fine and, of course, with the hankies you get a good bit of texture in the yarn.  Then I navajo plied it, mostly because I was too lazy to try to wind half of it off onto another bobbin.  They say that necessity is the mother of invention but I have to say that sometimes it's laziness that's the mother of invention.  I would never have originally thought to finish this as a 3-ply but it looks great and I'm much happier than I would have been otherwise.  And when I got it finished, I suddenly realized that the colors matched exactly some linen in my stash.  I've decided to do a little vest in stripes with the purple and green linen and this beautiful veriagated silk. 

But, is that all?  Nao, there's mooorah!  (Remember that from My Cousin, Vinny?)

Anyway, back to spinning...

I started playing around with some red hankies and red merino/bamboo that I think will go very pretty together.  And I started playing with some tri-colored cotton.  You can see a little of both here.

Way down yonder, in the land of cotton...

COTTON UPDATE

I would like to report that the cotton jag has not lifted, even though it was interrupted for a few days with the retreat.  I'm finally feeling like I'm getting the hang of the spinning of the cotton although I'm still having trouble with the regularity of that spinning, i.e. the unevenness of it all.

However, I got impatient last night.  I had one prety full bobbin (ok, it was half full but with another half full bobbin, it would have been a full bobbin when it was plied) and had started on the second one.  I kept thinking, "I wonder what this is going to look like.  I wonder if this is going to work. Hummmmm...." until I could stand it no more.  I whipped off the partially filled bobbin and whipped on a new bobbin for plying (I really did whip them off and on - I was curious) and got to gettin'.

Here's what I got.  About 248 yards of cotton.  Real. Cotton.  I mean, can you believe it?  There were a couple of places where it came apart so I had to knot it but for my first real go at a skein of spun cotton, I don't think that's too bad.  It came out fairly fine but you can see that it's not very even but it'll do until something better comes along!

I'm now trying to plot what sort of summer top I'm going to make.  This should get me some distance down the line in making something before the end of the summer.

I should mention that it's only 1 1/4 ounces or 36 grams.  Raw cotton is much, much lighter than the commercially spun yarn one finds.  I suspect that's to do with making something that will take a lot of wear (commercial) as opposed to what I've done.  But it's like air.  Most unexpected.

Once I got the hank spun and onto the niddy noddy, I tied 4 ties around it to prepare it for the boiling.  With this kind of cotton, boiling helps set the twist and helps clean off the naturally forming substances that you don't want in your finished yarn.  Some gunk came off but not a whole heck of a lot and the color did deepen a little but not as much as I'd expected.  Not to worry.  I've got me 248 yards of my very own handspun cotton yarn!

Gone Loopy

One of the things I said I was going to start trying after the Retreat was over, is art yarns or specialty yarns.  Well, here's my first try - a boucle yarn.

OK, I didn't say it was great boucle yarn but it's boucle, all the same. 

I began by following instructions in an articly by Jacey Boggs in the Summer 2010 issue of Spin Off.  The basic recipe she quotes out of Judith MacMc's book, The Intentional Spinner, is that you need 1 yarn S spun, 1 yarn Z spun, 1 thick ply, 1 thin ply, one high twist ply and one low twist.  I followed her sample by using some mohair for a high twist, thin Z spun single (photo insert on the right).  Then I used some merino to make a low twist, slightly thicker S spun single (photo insert on the left).  The idea is that you make the first ply step by spinning in the direction of the merino (in this case).  By plying in the direction of the low spun single, you add twist to that ply while removing it from the high twist single. 

You're supposed to make loops with the high twist singles as you ply them together.  I found that really difficult but she says that's normal.  My loops were, for the most part, more like fun fur than anything else!  And anyone who knows me, knows how much I love fun fur (said with every ounce of irony at my disposal). 

Once you have this first ply accomplished, my previously low twist merino singles became a high twist ply and I also found it difficult to move fast enough to keep this from happening.  The next step is to use a "binder" to cable with skein.  Jacey suggests using seaming thread because of its high tensile strength.  I don't know what that is so for the first sample, I just used regular sewing thread.  You can see the sample on the left side of this photo.

It was okay but I decided to go back to the Intentional Spinner and see what Judith says.  Now she suggested you could cable the yarn back on itself.  So I tried that.  First, I took my bobbin of merino and ran it back through the wheel, removing as much twist as I could while still holding it together.  The I plied the merino and mohair together.  I found that if I kind of rubbed my fingers together as the mohair got to the merino, it helped me form the characteristic boucle loops a little better.  Once I finished all the mohair that I'd spun, I wound off half the yarn onto a second bobbing and started the cabling process.  You can see this skeinlette on the right side of the photo above.

Oddly enough, the cabling step evened out the twist and both skeinlettes were perfectly balanced.  Much to my surprise.

Too Much Fun

I've finally got some pics from the weekend.  We had a table full of patterns and resource material for participants to dig through and we used these a lot through the weekend.

The facility turned out to be more than perfect and the staff at the RiverBank Lodge were fabulous. I can't say enough good things about them.  We had little gift bags for everyone that become project bags.  There was a workbook (with companion cd full of period pattern books), projects, and other fun bits and pieces.

We had four absolutely terrific ladies and they were such a great mixture of personalities but all of them came game for anything and ready to try their hand at whatever we threw at them.  That attitude always makes it so much fun to teach. 

Jane and I found the worst written pattern that could ever have been produced and used it for our first session.  It was a great way to learn the common terms of the time and laugh.  Plus it's a really cute pattern!  I'll show you one day.

I could go on and on and on but I'll stop here and let you enjoy some pictures of the area around the RiverBank Lodge....