Fiber Musings

Random thoughts of a fiber enthusiast - mostly fiber related, sometimes coherent

Category: Spin Page 43 of 69

A New Challenge!

By

On 4 Mar, 2009

In Spin

Have you seen this?  Interweave’s Spin-Off Magazine is having celebrating the International Year of Fibers by offering up a contest.  You need to process the fiber from scratch to a completed scarf of your own design…all by May 20, 2009.  (Thankfully, you don’t need to raise nor sheer the sheep yourself, but I think you should get bonus points if you do!)

That’s TWELVE weeks from now, folks!

If you follow the guidelines set forth by both Spin-Off and Keep the Fleece, you can enter your scarf into both contests.  Two birds, one stone.  Or rather, two contests, one scarf.

So, are you in?

I have a raw lamb’s fleece and a couple of alpaca fleeces in the garage.  I have some silk cocoons in the storage bin.  I have some brand spanking new Forsythe 4 pitch combs (just came in the mail last week).

Okay, it’s time for this project manager to start building a project plan and get this going!  There’s lots to do. Decide on a theme.  Scour the fleece (or degum the silk cocoons?).  Decide on how to process the fleece (comb or card or spin from the lock, a la Stove?).  Create a new scarf design.  Spin some samples (wheel or spindle?)  Do a swatch (knit or weave?)

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Gotta run. Lots of things to do!

P.S. $5 per entry? Who are you kidding here? What over achiever will be able to submit more than one entry in this amount of time?!

Still Plugging Along

By

On 22 Feb, 2009

In Knit, Spin

Garter stitch shawl on 3.00mm shawl is deathly dull, no matter how pretty the yarn is.

12 bobbins of singles? 6 down. So far, over 1400 yards of light worsted weight yarn. I think I will have well over 2400 yards by the time I’m done. More than enough for a sweater.

Singles

By

On 20 Feb, 2009

In Spin

rovings_rmb_empty

Do you know what this is?  This is the bottom of a capacious Rovings bag.  It seemed bottomless while I was spinning it.  Now, it looks like this:

rovings_rmb_bobbins

12 bobbins of singles.  I spun all of the singles on my Schacht Matchless with the Woolee Winder.  All on the same bobbin, and then wound off onto cardboard spools.  Alden would have been so proud.

The bag contained 6 color repeats (brown, chartreuse, blue, pink, grey/white).  Each repeat filled about 1.5 bobbins.  I labeled them 1-6, and A & B.  I will be finishing off the yarn as a 3 ply, plying color repeats 1, 3, and 5 together, then 2, 4, and 6 together.  This should nicely balance out any inconsistencies in the singles.

The singles are approximately 32 wpi.  The sample shows that the 3-ply yarn is about 12 wpi, pre-washing.  Yeah, a huge difference.  The reason is that the singles are softly spun with a long draw, and measured under slight tension. The yarn poofs up quite a bit in the plying.  After washing, the yarn should bloom to a nice worsted weight yarn.

Specs:
Fiber: Rovings polworth
Colorway: Rocky Mountain High; last seen here in the upper right hand corner
Weight: 925 grams
Purchased: Soar 2006 (Lake Tahoe)
Singles: 32 wpi

If you are interested in perfecting your long draw, I highly recommend getting your hands on some of Rovings rovings (not their combed top, but their rovings).  The fiber is wonderfully prepared for long draw.  You’ll find that it’s very easy to find your rhythm.

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