SpinnySpinny

The silk is coming along, it’s basically the same technique as the worsted wool but I don’t like it as much. The fiber is slippery. But at least I’m going through it at a pretty good clip. Without all that fiber prep to do, it feels like it takes no time at all. That is at least a nice change. I’ll probably have half of it done this evening.

I pulled out my dyes and I have to decide what to use: electric purple, scary bright pink, turquoise blue or antique gold. I could live with any but the gold, I got that to match the color of one of the commercial yarns. The pink and purple were supposed to be for dye experiments in painted roving and I got the two brightest colors I could stand to put together. This was back about the time I bought that Merino/Tencel stuff, so it was clearly also the product of temporary insanity. If I really want to do this as an embroidered swatch, I probably don’t want to do multiple colors. The blue was from an old project, one of the hats shown in the Gallery. I dyed some silk noil for one of the blending skeins, too.

Like I need an excuse to go over to Pearl… but I should probably use what I’ve got. I have a feeling that means the purple. It’s Country Classic Spring Violet, you can see it on this color card over at Mielke’s Fiber Arts. (While you are over there, you could check out some of Adam’s nifty wood stuff. I have one of the Lizzy spindles and it’s Very Nice.) On the bombyx, it should give some serious purple.

I’ve finally gotten to writing the page about hackle blending I wanted to do. I don’t actually have a hackle, but you can do pretty much the same thing on a smaller scale with a wool comb. I did one of my blended yarns this way to get a striped top. The article shows how to make a two color striped top.

And after much yarn tossed in the trash, I’ve finally started the tussah silk for the fine skein. Dunking the fiber made a huge difference so now I’m planning how I want to dye the bombyx. I’m thinking of doing the silk swatch as an embroidered piece. I’m still toying with the idea of using it for brocade weft. The idea of pick-up pattern weaving is not a pleasant one, however.

The silk experiment is a success, and it’s a lot easier to work with this way. The fiber is very pretty, all soft and fluffy like that, but a pain to work with because it tries to escape at every opportunity. Now it looks like something wet and dead, but it spins better. Maybe if I get my act together, I’ll actually dye the bombyx to make it less dreadfully dull. The tussah at least has an interesting soft gold color.

As for the other tussah project, I realized last night that I have to wind off and empty the spindle. And it doesn’t look anywhere near full. But I’m spinning it with a sorta-long draw technique and the silk just slides all over the place. That 15g spindle now weighs 36g and I can’t get the fine yarn I was. I want to wind it on a bobbin for better storage but I’m actually thinking I’ll skein it to have a look. If I ever actually intend to do anything with this, I should try to spin something vaguely like it with the rest of the fiber.

I’ve started spinning some tussah silk top, trying to figure out how I want to work with it. I have tussah and bombyx top for the fine and extra fine yarns. I know it will be hard to get the finer bombyx to spin anything other than extra fine, so I’m trying fine with the tussah. It’s not that easy, either.

For a while now, my random spindle project has been some handpainted tussah. I like spinning that, so I thought about why and tried some of the undyed tussah on a spindle. The painted one drafts differently and is easier to control, it’s like the fibers are more likely to stick together rather than fly all over the place. So I tried an experiment and wet some regular tussah. After it dried, it was easier to work with because the outside layer formed something like a crust and held together more.

So I pulled off about 40g of it and wet it in the sink. The squeezed out fiber looks seriously nasty, like a pile of wet crumpled newspaper. But fleece doesn’t look all that nice when it’s wet either. I didn’t want to actually dye it, so I just dunked it in warm water. We’ll see what happens when it’s dry.

I went off to a farm event this weekend where there were cute lambs, spinners to hang out with and Sally Fox and her cottons. I had been trying to contact her for some details of her organic colored cottons, so I wanted to go and speak to her in person. And I even managed to get a ride with friends. (There aren’t many farms near San Francisco, so it was a bit of a haul.)

Sally was happy to talk to me about cotton and I got all kinds of interesting technical data. She has done quite a bit of work developing new varieties of colored cottons and I wanted to be able to include those in my tables of fiber data for the COE. Many of the sources suggested in the reading list are decades old, before colored cottons were commercially processed. Sally pretty much created the commercial natural color cotton business and continues to develop new varieties.

I also finished the swatch from the 4-ply yarn I made of the medium woolen single. I knitted and then felted it, with baking soda in the water. This wool won’t make a hard felt so the finished fabric is still quite elastic. The thick garter stitch flattened a lot and I steam pressed it for a smooth finish.