Fiber Musings

Or at least, Santa thought so.

It’s a Gilmore Looms Gem II.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit in through the door of the guest room.  (Santa was able to get it down the chimney but not through the guest room door, sigh.)  I’ll be re-arranging the living room in the coming days.

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This is a two-fer post — Black Bunny Hop and Dye-Spin-Knit-along. Not that I actually signed up for either, but there you go.

I think I have perfected the perfect handspun sock yarn. Before I go any further, I have to admit that I have never knit a pair of socks from my own handspun. Never. (Actually, I still haven’t yet, since I’ve only finished the first sock of the pair.) I’ve spun yarn from fibers that I’ve intended for socks, but for some reason, I never actually made socks from them. They never really seem “right,” but I didn’t know what “right” was either.

May I present to you…the perfect sock yarn…

The blue-green yarn is my handspun (aka the perfect sock yarn). The variegated yarn is Koigu.

Now, why is it perfect? Because it is soft, lofty, and squishy, just like Koigu. The fiber is blue-faced leicester from Black Bunny Fiber. I spun the singles using my variant of a long draw, so the yarn retained a lot of the loft. And I remembered what several of my past spinning instructors have told me … “underspin, overply.”

I never asked any of them exactly what that meant. In the comfort of my own home, and not having the experts nearby to explain to me, I decided that the “overply” part meant that your singles have set somewhat on the bobbin. Thus, the resulting plied yarn will appear a bit overspun while you are spinning it. Once wetted, the twist will relax back to a balanced yarn.

In the case of this particular yarn, I didn’t get a perfectly balanced yarn after I washed the finished yarn. When I hung it up to dry, there were still some kinks in the yarn. The skein didn’t twist back on itself, but there were kinks in the individual strands (sorry, I don’t take a picture of it while it was drying). Anyway, I didn’t weigh it down to block. I just left it to kink and dry, because I want to preserve the sproingy-ness of the yarn. (Note the high angle of twist in the ply, just like Koigu.)

The end result is what you see above. A puffy yarn that has really good structure and will wear well.

(click image to see details)

The sock is knitted from the toe up on size 1 needles. It’s a really dense fabric because I don’t want this pair of socks to wear out too quickly. After all, I spun it!

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are very good things.

Flower Basket Shawl. Cashmere/Wool.

I actually finished the shawl back in August, but finally blocked over the weekend. You can’t really tell that I was two rows short in the edging.

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I started spinning on my new Matchless this past weekend. No more clunking and rattling that I experienced with my old Matchless. Ah…peace and quiet. Except…wait! Why isn’t it drawing in? No matter how I adjust the scotch tension, it sometimes just refused to draw in. It felt as if some fiber was caught somewhere, and the twist doesn’t travel all the way to my drafting triangle. But it doesn’t happen all the time.

More research … I notice that this only happens when I use the hooks on the left side of the flyer, but doesn’t happen when I use the hooks on the right. I don’t see anything specifically, so … I think there is a burr in the orifice that only occurs when the yarn is drawing in from the left side of the orifice. My fingers are too fat to find the burr.

Then I remembered a tip that Judith showed me — lacing the yarn from side to side. This now has the yarn traveling through the orifice at the correct angle.

Lacing is useful when you are spinning a really fine yarn, and you want to reduce the take up. Why would you want to reduce the lace up? Reducing the take up allows you more time to put the twist that you need for a really fine yarn before the yarn winds on.

Lacing only works for spinning wheels whose hooks are on the same face of the flyer, such as the Majacrafts. This doesn’t work on the Ashford wheels, unless you add some more cup hooks on the flyer.

For now? I don’t need the extra time for the reason stated above. I need the extra time until weekend, when I can dig in the garage for my set of fine metal files and fix that darn burr.

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After pulling out my haul on Sunday, I suddenly couldn’t resist the bright, cheery, fluffy, not to mention Christmas-y, corriedale batts from Grafton Fibers. I had purchased 2 red batts. The observant amongst you will have noticed that the batts are different. They had the same red base, but one had been carded with black, and the other a sunny orange. My plan was to spin each as a single and ply them together.

The question was, how to I approach this vision of loveliness? I unrolled the snail (but not the rolag), and saw that there was a color progression from one end of the rolag to the other. I wanted to preserve the color progression.

I started to attenuate the rolag so I can spin off one end. But I wasn’t getting as much control over the fiber as I wished, and I was afraid that I was going to muddy the progression of colors. That I definitely didn’t want.

So, I unrolled the rolag and stripped the batt into a single long strip of roving. (See diagram at right) I carefully tore into the batt along the dotted lines to make a continuous strip.

Not only did this provide me with a long continuous strip of roving that preserved my color progression, but this also kept the fibers mostly aligned for a semi-worsted yarn. The rolag would have resulted in a pure woolen yarn.

I didn’t measure the widths of my strips, but just swagged it. If you want really even roving, you would want to pull it from a diz. For large batts like this, I usually make a really thick roving by pulling it through the hole in a CD. Again, by turning at each edge, you can get a long continuous roving.

I didn’t do that this time. I was too impatient. I wanted to spin RIGHT NOW. So, I spun both batts on my Matchless, and plied them up on Sunday night. Approximately 350 yards of beautiful red dk/worsted weight yarn. I even washed it to set the twist.

All before I went to bed on Sunday night. I paid for it on Monday morning. I was so groggy in the morning that I accidentally washed my hair with body wash instead of shampoo. Then I couldn’t understand why it was taking me so long to rinse the shampoo out. It just kept getting more and more sudsy. Threw my entire day off, I assure you.

But now, I get to figure out a scarf pattern for this lovely red yarn.

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