Fiber Musings

I have finally arrived! I move into our new rental on Sunday. It’ll be a few days before we get phone service, and a few weeks more for high speed internet access. So posting will be limited for the duration and minimal, if any, photos.

Black Sheep was a blast. I’m very glad that I decided to take a few extra days and the detour from I-5 on the way south. Thanks to Eva and her Dad for the hospitality!

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I just wanted to say that life is going to get a little hectic in the next few weeks so I won’t have time to blog. I received and accepted an offer from the company down in California (remember the trip from hell?). I start on June 23rd, so I’ll be a bit busy packing up my stuff and finding a place to live. Martin’s staying behind for a while to finish packing up the rest of the house and follow me down later in the summer — after we get our house rented.

I’m going to stop by The Black Sheep Gathering on my way down I-5, before I start my new job. Hey, a girl’s got to have her priorities, right? Right? Of course she does. I’ve even signed up for the Orenburg Lace spinning class.

Anyway, posts are going to be sporadic, and probably no pictures until I get myself set up and organized down there.

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Not much has been happening here. I did a little reorganizing of all the fiber strewn around the living room, then spent the afternoon doing an exchange on the menagerie …

Ray, Charles and Georgia spent the last 17 days or so with us. They were trapped by animal control, and we brought them home to help them get rid of their kitten colds and for a little bit of socialization. I think they were most likely feral because they did NOT want to be around people and most definitely did not want to be held. Now they come running when we go into the kitten nursery … er … our spare bathroom. And they purr like crazy. Unfortunately, we had to return them to MEOW because they are ready for adoption. If you are looking for some really sweet kittens, I suggest that you take a look at the cats and kittens available for adoption from MEOW at Pet Shelter or drop by for a visit. They are still at their old place on Mercer Island. They haven’t moved yet.

But, I didn’t come home empty handed … This mother cat and her litter of 5, were gracious to share the milk with 2 additional kittens that were not taking to the bottle, and they all came home with me. While I was doing the exchange, Martin was busy cleaning the kitten nursery and prepping it for the new litter. The 2 grey kittens were a bit of a surprise because they only told us about the mother and 5 kittens.

Mom is Tallulah Belle, and her 5 kittens are Titania, Harlequin, Isolde, Columbine, and Tristan. The 2 grey ones are Hyacinth and Huckleberry.

These little ones are definitely not feral. Extremely playful and will run you over if you are between them and the other kitten that they wanted to tackle.

They are about 5 weeks old and should be ready to be adopted in another 4-5 weeks. Mom is a little underweight right now. Once we fatten her up some, and the kittens are weaned, she, too, will be ready for adoption. She is a real sweetie of a lap cat. She climbed up on my lap immediately and started purring.

Just so that you know we haven’t abandoned our own kitties, here’s EliSpot keeping an eye on Martin while he was trimming the wisteria. This is outside our 2nd story window … she can climb both up and down the ladder. I’ve never known a cat to be able to do that. Rosie Toes and Hemingway spent the day in the shade.

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I went to the NwRSA Conference Spin-In on Saturday. What fun! I didn’t get my act together in time for the Back to Basics Spinning with Judith, but did have an opportunity to sit down to a free color workshop with one of my favorite people, Micayla Lee. I also bumped into a lot of people and had a nice spinning & chatting session with Georgean. Georgean pulled out her laptop and showed me The Sole Solution. I didn’t even realize that it was something that I needed, but I think it’s going on my birthday list (next week).

Of course, my pocketbook did not survive the vendor booths unscathed. Here’s what came home with me …

(Click on the thumbnails for larger pictures.)
These came from Pastiche. Can you believe that these cultivated silk rovings were dyed with natural dyes? She calls this line, Only Natural. In the sun light, you can see a bit of amber, green, blues, lavenders in all that beautiful greys (indigo, logwood purple, fustic and osage orange). Black Pearls indeed. Absolutely gorgeous. These were the only two skeins ever made because she has never been able to reproduce this dye lot. (I had it hidden until she got back to her booth so I can buy it.)

Discentra Designs. Now, this woman has an eye for color. Wow! Even though she was in the back corner of the gymnasium, you can see all her glorious colors as soon as you enter the room. It helps that she was upstairs near the railing. I bought 4 different rovings from her. One I started to spin almost immediately (below). Left to right, silk-wool-angora blend (colorway Lobelia), silk-wool blend (colorway Elessar), tussah silk (colorway Dimdrill Dale). She will be at Black Sheep, so look for her. Everything was absolutely worth salivating over.

Since I had a craving for some bright colors after working on that hand-painted teal/red/purple roving on a base of black, I dove right in to this silk as soon as I finished navajo plying the other. This is tussah in colorway Imprahil. I split the roving in half lengthwise, and am finished with the first half already (in 24 hours!). I was wonderful watching all these gorgeous colors slide through my fingers.

Then I found someone selling the Banana Belt hand painted rovings … I’ve been wanting to make a trip to Sequim just to see her stuff since I saw someone spinning some of her rovings at the Norman Kennedy workshop in April. And lucky for me, there they were! It took me several trips to the booth before settling on these two. I wanted to take everything! I can’t remember what the names of the colorways were. I seem to recall the one on the right was something like Oregon Spring or something. The colors reminded her of rhodies in spring. The left has a lot of brashy neon greens in the midst of all that darker green and browns. So for the purposes of the rest of the blog, I’ll call them BB Green and BB Spring.

Anyway, I decided to split these down lengthwise because I wanted to keep the color progression intact. Then came the fun part … I sat down and started spinning them in different ways to see how they’d turn out.

So here’s what they looked like spun up (left) and as knitted samples (right). From left to right, 2 ply, navajo ply – thick(er), navajo ply – thin(er), singles. It was very interesting how these colors played out. The 2 ply (sport weight)almost looks beaded, both in the skein and in the knitted fabric. And the end result looks much more spring-like. In the thicker of the 2 navajo ply (sport weight), the colors are much more intense. And with the shorter color transition, it stayed much truer to the original roving. The end result looks like late summer colors. The thinner navajo ply (fingering weight) resulted in a much softer, muted colors, similar to the single. Although it has a little more depth. The single looks a lot like Kureyon yarn, doesn’t it? Except it is fingering weight. And the singles definitely look fall-like.

Although I love Kureyon yarns, the single in this batch looks downright boring compared with the plied yarns. It lacked the depth of color that plying brought out. Current faves in this bunch are the thicker yarns, the thick navajo ply with the 2 ply coming in as a close second.

Interesting how you can get 3 different seasonal colors from one set of rovings, depending on how you spin and ply, isn’t it?

And here’s what the Spring colorway looks like. I didn’t do as many spun samples as I did with the green. Both of the samples are fingering weight, one 2 ply and one navajo ply. I think I like the 2 ply best in this bunch. The fine single in the navajo ply muted out the colors a little too much for my taste. The 2 ply looks like dappled sunlight in the woods with Oregon rhodies in bloom.

What do you think?

Felted Bag Update: The bag itself is done, but I’m struggling along with the strap. It’s 90 inches of double i-cord for the strap and I’m bored stiff. I-cord is difficult with unspun roving because you run the risk of pulling too tight and breaking the roving. So I can only do a few inches a day before I go bonkers. I’m at about 36″ … only 54″ left to go. Sigh. It really would have been faster to just use Brown Sheep, but I really wanted to try this. Anyway, I now know why most of the knitting with rovings projects (for felting) are on smaller scales. Sheer boredom factor.

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