SpinnySpinny

I cleaned up the kitchen enough to set up the sewing machine. It involved disassembling and hauling off to storage two large shelves that have been sitting in the middle of the floor since we moved in. One day they will be actually used, but the space for them has been “not ready” for months now. Sigh.

Sewing machine good. I haven’t made any new clothes in about a year and all my pants have holes in them. Now I have two new pairs, a dress that only needs to be hemmed and a bunch of new utility rags from some old clothes. Those old flannel dresses I made years ago make great hankies. While I was at it, I made a baby play mat from flannel and a vinyl tablecloth remnant I found. I have no interest in babies of my own, but baby stuff is fast and easy to sew and uses up odds and ends of fabric. Your new parent friends love you for it, too.

Now that sewing is happening again, this means I want to get all the fabric in one place. There is still some in storage so I’m not done yet, but I have two new shelves in the textile closet and a whole pile of stuff that is now in there instead of elsewhere. It’s so much easier to manage when things aren’t all piled on the floor. I’m still using the bed as a cutting table, but now there’s actually enough light to see what I’m doing. Amazing.

So, with all of this the thing that hasn’t gotten done is measuring warp for the next set of towels. I wound a ball so I could measure two ends at once, but it’s been sitting on top of the loom for weeks. I did at least do some fiber prep so I could get on with spinning more dark brown 3-ply. November is heading this way and I’m going to want those legwarmers when it starts raining.

With the machine-wash “Rambouillet” done, I came back home from the annual guild stash sale with yet more fleece. This time about a kilo of Coopworth, which is shiny and dense and looks a lot like mohair. It was one of the fleeces bought for a fiber study, so it was up for grabs in exchange for a donation to the guild. By the end of the meeting it was still sitting there, so I pulled out the $10 I had and tossed it in. I know why nobody wanted it, it is very greasy and caked with clay mud and who knows what else. But it was an interesting breed I haven’t worked with (some people like it for beginners) so I figured it was worth ten bucks.

I knew I wanted to card this, so I didn’t have to go through the long process of dividing the fleece into staples for washing. I just pulled off sections and put them in mesh bags. If only the others were so easy.

I did two scour-wash cycles, with a spin in the washer between. That front-loading washer really does get the water out, although in this case it’s filthy mud and the washer needed a bath when I was done, but hardly worse than the last experiment. I opened up the wet locks to get it to dry and there was still caked mud. In theory, it will flake off during picking and carding and the remainder will wash out later. We’ll see.

I didn’t have enough mesh bags for all of it, so the last bit was put in after and soaked overnight. I scoured it this morning by my usual non-washer method and it looks like the soak didn’t help much.

The other find from the meeting was four cones of 20/2 wool for weaving. It’s in this dreary off-white color called “bone” that makes it look more dirty than anything else. Perfect for dying. Combined with the two huge cones of black I already have, I could get some interesting fabric.

Almost a month ago I bought some fleece on eBay. I wasn’t going to, but it seemed like a good thing to do at the time. It was advertised as Rambouillet, a Merino-type fleece. It looked pretty dirty in the picture but the scoured example was good and white. For $4 a pound plus shipping, it was priced about what I would expect for backyard sheep fleece. I send the check, the seller says he will ship when he gets it. Ok, fine.

Problem Number One: two weeks and no package, so I send an email. It is a holiday weekend, so I’m not concerned that I don’t get an immediate reply. Until five days later when there is still no package and no response. Second email.

The next day I get a reply. Problem Number Two: the seller forgot to send the package. Oopsie! He remembered to cash the check, however — four days after it was sent.

Finally I get the package. Problem Number Three: this is supposed to be Rambouillet, a fine wool closely related to Merino. I expect it to have tons of grease and a tiny crimp. It’s supposed to be a ram fleece, so I’m fully prepared for it to be stinky. What I get has far less grease than I expect. The crimp is vaguely like a fine wool, but not particularly so. And it’s hardly “very white,” as advertised, because most of the tips are stained yellow from dirt. At least it’s not stinky. I hunt around for the very cleanest part to wash, and that does come out white, but most of the rest is caked in dirt and washes to yellow stained tips.

Problem Number Four: this is the springiest, most Down breed feeling Rambouillet I’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s not all that fine, being somewhere near a mediocre Corriedale. (The seller did say 60s count, which is about right even if it’s the very bottom of the range for the breed.) Even in the grease, which there isn’t very much of, it doesn’t have the blocky square-end staples I expect. I could see some of this in the seller’s photo, but it’s more than I expected and the whole fleece is the same way. It’s actually quite tippy. I’m hardly expecting the best quality fiber from a cheap backyard fleece, but I at least expect it to match the description.

I notice that my washed samples have not even made the attempt to felt despite less-than-careful handling. I comb a bit of fiber and lay it out in a small batt for a felting sample. Following my normal felting procedure, it’s quite stubborn in not felting and only eventually starts to hold together. It’s still very springy. I wash another sample in my felting solution, making a point of swishing and squeezing the cut end, where wool fleece starts to felt first. After several rounds of rough handling, there is only the faintest suggestion of felting at the cut end. I pull out a lock of raw Merino from the closet and try the same thing: it starts to felt immediately.

If you handed me a sample of this without comment, my first suggestion would be that it was a Dorset crossed with a fine wool like a Merino or Rambouillet. Not a pure fine wool by any means. I could tell from the photo that it wasn’t the nicest stuff, but it wasn’t expensive either. It’s fine for what I intend to use it for, although I’m not so thrilled about the dirty tips not washing out as promised. If the seller said it was a Rambouillet cross, I would have probably still bought it. But now I’m cranky about it because it clearly isn’t.

I haven’t left feedback for the seller yet but sent another email. I already don’t expect to leave a glowing comment because of the shipping problem, but the question of breed on top of it makes me even less happy. I haven’t bought fiber from eBay in a long time because I’d rather see it in person, but I thought this would be a good inexpensive fiber to experiment with. This is what you get when you deal with people you don’t know.

I’ve been sick all week, so I’ve spent a good bit of time sitting around like a lump staring at the walls. Sometimes that’s all you can do. If you feel bad enough, you don’t even care.

I did start some more knitting, a baby hat of some yarn I’ve had stashed away for a few years waiting for a project. It’s one of four skeins of ostensibly matching 3-ply, but this one I got distracted on and one of the singles is much larger than the others. So it doesn’t match the rest, but it’s fine for something on it’s own. There is enough for a lace cap and maybe some booties or something. The pattern is an insanely simple four stitch yarn over lace, but at times it’s been too complicated for my fuzzy brain to deal with. So I started winding shuttles, something so stupid that it’s impossible to screw up.

The next piece on the loom is narrow, I actually prefer stick shuttles for that. They hold tons of yarn and are easy to handle. The boat shuttle would be faster for wider fabric, but for this I think it comes out about the same. What you lose in handling the shuttle is gained by not having to chase it down when you drop it for the 87th time or change the bobbin every ten minutes. If I’m going to throw something through the shed, I want it to be at least wider than my shuttle is long. Otherwise, I might as well pass it hand to hand. A while back I managed to acquire a Harrisville shuttlette, a short boat shuttle they suggest for narrow warps. I seem to recall the previous owner of my old floor loom gave it to me. I’m not terribly fond of boat shuttles in the first place, but oh how I hate this thing. All the bobbin-snagging madness of a standard boat shuttle with the added aerodynamic qualities of a brick. Just thinking of it reminds me I have to order that end-feed shuttle before I start the next project.

Today we went off to the fair, to have a look around and get a picture of my yarn in the display case. Fortunately there is more than one digital camera in the household.

My friend predicted I’d get a blue ribbon and I did. I’m not personally all that motivated by winning, so I had to be convinced to enter. It is another way to explore further what judging yarn means, so I can learn something there. (I won’t get the comments, if any, until after the fair ends.) Perhaps somebody will be inspired to explore traditional yarns as a result, and that is a good thing.

There was a group of spinners demonstrating in front of the yarn and weaving display, one turned out to be a yarn judge. I asked her about how they evaluated the entries and the judges were looking specifically for technical skill. I’ve talked to many people about entering their yarns in competition and have heard several stories of seemingly random results, so this is encouraging. It isn’t that I don’t care at all about creative visual design (let’s just say it isn’t high on my list) but I do think that some people don’t look past it to consider structure. It is the structure that interests me, and that is best seen by starting with even and consistent yarn. Such that apparently there was some discussion about whether on not my skein was actually spun by hand.

I get this comment once in a while, it’s still always weird when I do. (People ask me all the time where I buy my clothes, you would think I’d get used to it.) Some spinners believe one shouldn’t worry too much about making fine and even yarn because irregularities give it “character.” If they wanted even spinning, they would buy it already made. I actually don’t consider if yarn is machine or hand spun when evaluating it’s qualities, only that it has certain characteristics. Handspun yarn tends to have particular ones and machine spun others. It’s all still yarn. It’s the whole subject of what is “good” yarn where I get bogged down in the sea of opinions and personal preferences.