SpinnySpinny

The cotton is in to boil, I had a bit of a problem there when one of my bobbins ran empty while plying but it’s all better now. Spin up more and then paste the whole mess back together and continue. Novelty yarns are great for hiding things like that. It isn’t even a good splice.

Much to my amazement, I skeined it off and the plying is almost perfectly balanced. Not what I would expect from thick and thin single plus the weird plying to get the eyelash blobs in there. Skeining it with the bobbin on the other side of the room helps even things out, but that still won’t fix too much or too little twist. I did a sample, but it’s hard to keep it even when you are also fooling with the yarn in the process.

Since this is partly naturally green cotton, not only am I boiling it but I am boiling it a good long time. I don’t even know how long, I’ll go fish it out when I feel like it. It took a while to even get it to sink in the water. I added some baking soda because I didn’t want to deal with boiling soapy water. (I wanted an alkaline solution.) Then it gets washed. Boiling cotton removes the waxy coating of the fibers, you don’t have to if you don’t want to but you are supposed to if you are going to dye the yarn. I don’t dye enough cotton to know what difference it makes. But with colored cottons, boiling makes the color darker. It’s supposed to make white cotton more white also, but it sure gets a bunch of nasty stuff out. The water is a nasty brown color.

Ow. I spent the day spinning cotton. Long draw is bad enough, with the castle wheel I tend to do some nasty things to my hands. I had to pull out both wrist supports and they aren’t perfect. But now my knees hurt. The Insanely Fast Flyer is really nice, but it’s hard to treadle at the highest ratios so I tend to use one of the lower ones and treadle more. All day long: treadle, treadle, treadle. I spun about 30g of fine cotton. It goes fast if I don’t care how even it is. This is for a 3-ply with eyelash sort of thing.

I also did some samples and carded fiber for another one of the blends. I started this thing with cotton and silk noil and I’ve finally given up and declared it dead. I hate spinning it and I don’t even like the yarn all that much. Technically, it’s fine, but it looks like forty year old drapes. I skeined off what I had because I needed the bobbin. The replacement is also cotton and silk but this time I made punis. Huge punis from putting far, far too much fiber on the cotton cards. But it works, both the fibers are already combed so I just need to mush them up together a bit and make the batts. White silk and brown cotton. I get to use up some of that nasty brick with the short staple length. One thing this project is good for is using up stuff I don’t like.

Now off to bed. I’m not even going to update the changes so it will be tomorrow sometime before you get to read this. I have a really early meeting in the morning and then I will be able to get back to fiber stuff.

Ok, no more dye experiments. I was going to be cute and dye the tussah skein. Bad Idea. It blew itself to little bits when I tried to microwave set it. Another new item for Misfits. Now I have to go get the fiber back out of storage and start over.

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.