More than one way to skin a skein

I’ve started working on a post over the last couple of weeks but just haven’t been able to get everything together at one time.

I’m not going to go through the new hats but here’s a picture of the collection.  I gave away the alpaca fair isle one to a friend but I’ve got plenty more where that came from so I think there is one more hat in my future but for the most part I think it’s over.  For now.  Except the one I’ve got going to match the scarf I made with the last of the Kickapoo Creek silk/merino/alpaca.  That’s all.   I think.

I had a great time once again at the Bishophill Spin-In.  There were some unexpected surprises and some intoxicating fibers.  The 2 big surprises (no, make that 3) came from a stall run by a couple who were disposing of an estate that comprised 7 storage lockers of crafting treasures.  From them I obtained some very rare and exciting bobbin lace books (scoooore!), a Schacht warping board (20 yard warping board that probably cost over $200 for $35) and a bobbin lace bobbin winder (that usually costs more than $100 for $30). 

Wasn’t expecting those at all.  I’d been pricing warping boards because the only one I have is a small one on the back of my rigid heddle loom.  Problem is if I have that loom warped (which I do), I can’t use the warping board.  

But, on to the fiber, which is the whole reason for going there.  I’ll tell you more about the fleece I got another time but I also got the most beautiful roving from a local farm.  The sheep is Blue-faced Leicester.  It is the best prepared roving I’ve ever had.  It’s from Floya’s Fleece (sorry, no website link can I find).  She’s from Chana, IL, and her fiber is fabulous.  I got a mixture of white, med brown and dark brown and I’m going to do something special with it. I’m just itching to spin it but I don’t want to be rushed with other things.  I want to just enjoy the process.

I also got a fiber mixture from Fae Ridge Farm which I wasn’t at all convinced I really wanted but I have a very pushy friend.  Never go shopping with Mary if you don’t have an iron will.  I’m just saying.  Anyway, I’ve lost the tag that gives all the fibers mixed for this roving but I just wasn’t convinced except I really liked the colors.  Definitely not love at first sight but the second I started spinning, I started getting courted.  Then I plied and got wooed.  And then I washed and I was hooked.

It was in a cloud preparation, which I 'm particularly fond of, and I’ve spun it to a 3-ply almost worsted weight.  So far I have about 200 yards with probably another 100 to go and, although the intention was to spin a sock yarn, I’m not sure that’s what this lovely stuff wants to be.  It’s predominantly Border Leicester so it’s not totally soft (although it’s really pretty wonderful) and it’s a little chunkier than I would normally have for socks…we’ll have to see.

But the thing I look forward to every year is the dyed silk hankies from Lone Tree Wools.  I get them every year and every year they’re the first thing I spin and I can’t wait until the next year to get more.

You know I love to spin hankies.  I spin them corner to corner and have posted a video to show how I do it (in case you’re interested).  But I’ve discovered that it doesn’t do very well as a 2-ply yarn.  I really like it to have 3 plies – gives it a bit of structure.  I’ve had this discussion with several friends lately and seem to have some support on this but I’ve never looked up the discussions on Ravelry to see what the wider opinion is.  I don’t guess it really matters, it’s my yarn and I’ll make it like it want to.

But this brings us to a dilemma that every spinner faces from time to time.  How many plies?  After you’ve spent all this time spinning the singles, do you go for the yardage or do you go for the perfect yarn?  Of course, with every ply you add, you decrease your yardage by a significant amount.  Having the perfect yarn, though…

So I decided on a 3-ply but I didn’t want to do a Navajo ply with this because silk doesn’t absorb that little bump you get at the end of each chain like wool can.  I tried to guestimate* how much to spin onto each bobbin and got pretty close on the first 2 but the third bobbin was a lot more.  Coulda, woulda, shoulda.  It just was.

I tried to figure out how best to do it so that I could spin a true 3-ply off of my 3 uneven bobbins and here’s what I came up with.

I had 2 pretty even bobbins so I left the singles on those bobbins.

Then I wound the 3^rd bobbin into a ball.

To begin with, I spun with the inside and outside ends of the ball along with one of the bobbins – 3 strands.  I continued that until I realized I was going to run out of the ball then I started using 1 strand from the ball with strands from each of the bobbins.  I did that until the ball ran out.  At that point, I was close to the end but I had about twice as much on one bobbin as I had on the other.  So I wound the long bobbin strand on my hand and Andean plied the hand strand with the remaining bobbin strand until I was finished.  

It worked out beautifully.  Once the strand on my hand was finished, I had about 4 inches on the remaining bobbin.  Pretty darn close.  Can’t wait to wind this off and get it washed!

The moral of the story is there’s more than one way to get a 3 ply yarn.

* Just a little note to say that an organized spinner would have separated her fiber out before she started spinning so that all 3 bobbins were even to begin with.  I had my reasons.

Warm Hands

Back in February, the Yarn Harlot had a post about knitting mittens from unspun silk hankies, also known as mawata.  I had heard about doing this before but seeing hers gave me that, "I could do that" sort of feeling and, being the possessor of mawata in the undyed format, I decided to truck along.

I got my mawata (have a look at her post because she's got a good explanation of silk and how it gets to be like this) and started drafting. 

I drafted more finely than she did.  That is, I took the hankie as you see it here, stuck my finger through the middle of it and pulled it out into a big circle.  Then I broke the circle open and drafted out until it looked like the strand at the top of this pic.

And I knitted, like she did, just my basic, everyday old mitten pattern until I ended up with these.

Hers were cushy, thick silk mittens.  Mine are thinner, not as cushy but every bit as warm (did you read how warm silk is?) and I made mine so they could be an inner mitten.  I'll have this lovely silk on the inside and wool on the outside. 

Definitely the best of both worlds.  (And it's still cold enough to wear them - unfortunately!)

Counting on my fingers.

I've been feeling a little torn lately but only realized this morning what might be the problem.  I started counting...

1.  Baby bonnet - It's getting along and I'm on the last round.  I changed the last round a little to match the photo.  It was the only instructions in the whole pattern that wasn't completely clear but the photo was really good so I think this is a good representation and I think it will finish it off nicely once I get the ribbons in it.

2.  Baby sweater.  A friend just had a baby so I'm back in baby-land.  Know how hard it is to pick just one thing?  I always decide I'm going to dress the baby until they're 18! It's so hard.  But as soon as I saw this little vintage matinee jacket, I knew it was the very thing.  The new parents are Canadian and this is a vintage Canadian pattern.  Seemed just the thing. The top section is smocked with a contrasting color and their nursery is yellow and lavendar so I decided just to go with those colors.  Besides, I already had the yellow and I think it's such a great color to brighten up the winter.

3.  Clun Forest wool being spun for socks.  I've got 2 bobbins and need just 1 more to finish it off.  This is the first time I've ever spun Clun Forest and everything I've read talked about it being difficult and not so fun to spin.  Once I kind of got used to it, it hasn't actually been so bad. The difference between this and other wools is that it's a very short staple.  It's got a lot of bounce but it's short.  I'm spinning it using a pretty high ratio.  It's not really soft but it's supposed to be great for outer wear and supposed to be really great for socks.  I'll let you know.

4.  White on white project 1.  One of my spinning buddies, Mary, made a comment about a white on white project.  It really caught my interest so I decided to do something with white on white on white.  This is the first white - it's 1oz of merino/tussah silk mix and 1oz of cashmere/tussah silk mix.  It's going to be a 2-ply of the the two.  You can't imagine how rich this fiber is.  I'm spinning it on my Fricke wheel.

5.  White on white project 2.  The second white of the project is silk being spun from these silk hankies on my Kromski Minstrel.

6.  Gray Lace. This is not a part of the white on white project.  This is some gray wool roving that I'm spinning on my new Country Craftsman.  When I first got the wheel, I read that it's supposed to be particularly good spinning lace and this was on top of the pile.  Spins like buttah.

7.  Sock and shawl.  I was running out of time to take photos so I put some of these together.  Socks with Berroco Sox (my favorite sock yarn) and a "Half Square Shawl" from an 1850's knitting book.  Wait until you see this.  It's made with fingering weight and lace yarns using a lozenge pattern.  When I decided to try it out, I went straight to the stash.  I'd forgotten about the fingering weight yarn but it's a silk yarn that I've already used to make 1 shawl which I wear all the time.  I decided to pair it with a matching alpaca lace yarn from KnitPicks. 

8.  Lace and Lace.  Since I'm still able to sleep a couple of hours each night, I guess I've decided I've got too much time on my hands.  I started this orange shawl from "Victorian Lace Knitting" about a month ago.  As you can see, I haven't gotten too far but it's beautiful and I love this yarn.  It's got a light variagation and is merino soft.  Next to it is some blue-faced leicester from Frabjous Fibers that I recently finished spinning.  It's the one that I loved in roving but wasn't so crazy about once it was plied and finished.  Well, I just got looking at it this morning and decided I did like it so not it's ready to be cast on and I know exactly what I want it to be.  I won't say it out loud yet, you'll just have to wait and see.

On top of these projects, I've got 3 classes at Lincoln Land, starting the new Heritage Knitting program with the Old State Capital folks and having a full-time job.

It's all beginning to make sense now.

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.

Weekend work

I just wanted to do a quick post to show better pictures of the skeins I finished this weekend. The green is a 2-ply fingering weight spun from 4 ounces of handpainted wool. I bought it a couple of weeks ago at Bishop Hill for a present for a colleague that loves these greens. It was a little bit difficult to spin because there was some slight felting with the dying but I'm pleased with how it came out. I'm getting a little bit better at controlling the size of my singles. Spinning a consistent single is my biggest problem so I felt this was a bit of a victory. It's not perfect but it's definitely better than I've done before.

The silk skein is 2-ply spun from dyed hankies.

(Click on the pictures to see larger images.)

This is the beginning of some Blue-faced Leicester that I bought quite awhile ago in St Louis. I prepped it to spin for sock yarn but it got pushed to the back. I finally got it pulled out this weekend and started spinning it. OMG! I've never spun anything that spins as beautifully as this. There's 8 ounces of it that I've got stripped into 4 2-ounce strips for spinning a 4-ply sock yarn.

Spinning things

I've finished my first go at silk hankies spun on the wheel. It came out fairly well but I did make a few live and learn mistakes:

1. I didn't get enough twist into the singles. I think I assumed that because silk was such a long staple that it wouldn't need as much twist. I used the next to the largest ratio but I think I would use a smaller ratio because it really does need a lot more twist that I added.
2. I drafted it too thin. It works fine but I think I would prefer to have it a little heavier. I'm glad that I got 370 yards out of it (18 grams) but I think when I do the red hankies (23 grams) I'm going to for about 250 yards.

I also got a good start on the hand-painted wool I bought at Bishop Hill. I've got about a quarter of it left to spin for singles and then I think I'm going to 2-ply it. I've been debating about whether I want to Navajo ply to keep the color pattern or 2-ply. We'll see when we get there.