SpinnySpinny

Along with all the bad chintz and ugly crochet baby blankets, sometimes you find really interesting things at thrift stores. When I have time to kill, I sometimes go just to see what’s there. Several times I’ve found little towels that were obviously woven by hand, with overshot borders and neatly done hemstitching and everything.

Today I found a blanket made of dozens of little woven squares. It was obviously done with one of those little square frame looms, something like a small version of the plastic potholder loom. This one is in purple and green frosted acrylic. Pretty nasty yarn as those things go, but firmly woven and well put together. It was $4. I got it to add to the travel gear, as short of melting the thing there isn’t much that is going to hurt it. And it’s sturdy enough to put up with a fair bit of abuse. As long as it stays dry, acrylic is a fine insulation layer.

I also found a pillowcase made from the exact same obnoxious polyester fleece (lime green with blue flowers) that I made a bathrobe out of some years ago. It took me a while to like this kind of “fleece” but I’ve learned to appreciate warm layers. Just don’t get near it if you are the least bit sweaty or it will feel like you are wearing a plastic bag. (That’s not too far off, really.) I had to get it, just because. From the slightly crunchy texture of one corner, apparently somebody tried to iron it.

Another recent shopping find, not from Goodwill, is a clothes moth trap. I’ve seen a few moths around, at times uncertain of the type but not willing to hold them for questioning. They appear to be coming from outside, as it’s never far from one of our horribly drafty windows. The baited glue trap is basically an early warning system, as it’s not the moths that cause trouble. I put one in the textile closet so I can monitor the situation.

Just because I have given up on getting this yarn done in time for the San Mateo County Fair, that doesn’t mean I’m not working on it. I finished spinning all the fiber I had prepped a few weeks ago, so now I’m back to flicking wool. I’ve been doing a lot of sorting and messy prep work on the kitchen floor, as it’s the easiest to clean. Flicking wool throws little bits of junk everywhere no matter how I try to contain in. I’m going to vacuum and mop in the morning anyway because we have guests coming over, so I figured this would be as good a time as any. The loom parts are put away for tomorrow.

While I was at the store the other day, I got some Ashland Bay top in two identical colorways of Merino and Merino/tussah. Again, everybody was shocked I bought something not natural color, but I’ve been branching out. I’m also coming to terms with commercial top and feel better about spinning it. I’d still much rather do all my own prep, but I’ve gotten better at spinning commercial top without too much reworking (as long as I’m not overly fussy about the results.) Since the two blends are the same except for fiber content, I had this idea to weave a twill block pattern with one in the warp and one in the weft. When you do this with two colors, you get some blocks more the warp color and others more the weft color. If the colors contrast enough, you get this shimmery op-art sort of effect.

The two yarns would differ only in sheen, the silk being reflective and the Merino matte. I haven’t tried anything like this before but the theory makes sense. At any rate, it should make nice fabric. It will be singles, and I’ll almost certainly do one with S twist and the other with Z. I’m not sure which, however, so I want to experiment with twist direction in another fiber first. I bought some discount (because it had some bad spots) brown Blue Faced Leicester top a few weeks ago for exactly that purpose.

The heddle sorting continues. As does the spinning of solid color singles for sock yarn. I’ll spare you the details, other than to say I’ve got a bobbin and a half done. The president of Spindles and Flyers, a friend of mine, has been trying to talk me into submitting a skein for the San Mateo County Fair. The entry form deadline is coming up fast and items must be delivered near the end of the month. I don’t know if I will have anything finished by then. I have a day or so more to think about it.

So, of course, I went shopping at monthly spinning night instead of actually getting any spinning done. I’ve been thinking I should try some socks from commercial sock yarn before I set out to do with handspun, so I can contemplate what I want. I’ve only done a couple socks and it’s been a while. So I picked up enough to do two pairs, one short and one tall. I’ve been looking at sock yarns but not happy with what I’ve seen in a few other shops, the colors were oddly muted and mostly they were the instant Fair Isle stripy things. Stripes are ok, but I didn’t want funky patterns that would only get weird if I don’t work on the recommended number of stitches. After pawing through an entire bin, I found some I could live with at Carolina Homespun. Everyone was amazed that they were not gray. (There was only one skein of gray in the yarn I wanted.) Now I just have to work out the toe-up thing so I can knit until I run out of yarn.

More loom arranging. After getting the heddles off the first harness I grabbed (which had a lot more than I thought it ought to) I determined that there is some method to this upside-down thing. Most of the rest are flipped top to bottom in groups of ten. This would make them much easier to count. But, as I still have to redistribute them and add more, I’ll get them all going the same way anyway. I prefer to work with heddles that are all going the same way, and counting doesn’t bother me so much. I can always mark them some other way later.

Today I finally started in on getting the big loom set up. There’s still cleaning and organizing to do before I can actually put the big pieces together. This thing had been sitting in a garage for a while, so some of the metal parts have a bit of surface rust. And the previous owner managed to put the heddles in every which way. I took some fine steel wool and polished the apron rods. Those are the things you actually connect the warp yarns to when you are warping the loom. They aren’t perfect and they certainly aren’t perfectly smooth, but they don’t need to be. They only need to not get nasty rust stains all over everything. (Why yes, I do have the metal kind of wool hanging around here as well, in the hall closet with all the other “homeowner” stuff. Which grade would you like? Natural or synthetic? Want some finishing oil with that?)

So that was the easy part. I looked at some other things that might need to be de-rusted and determined that it’s a good thing I don’t expect to do a lot of funky chunky warps. The 5 dent carbon steel reed is a mess. Many of the other metal parts have some sort of powder coat finish (think metal computer boxes) so they aren’t a problem. But the harnesses are frightening me.

Heddles are designed to go on the loom all the same way, so that when you thread them the eyes all face the same way. You don’t want to accidentally thread one in the wrong direction and have your warp snag on an errant heddle. Bad news. I guess the previous owner was a novice weaver when she got this loom, because they are put on in little clumps of this way and that. Basically half of them are randomly upside down. I need to shuffle a bunch of heddles around anyway to get them distributed the way I like, so I’m going to take them off and put them back on all the same way.

Because most of you probably have never owned a big floor loom, this is, shall we say, a non-trivial operation. There’s over a thousand of those suckers, spread across twelve harnesses. I managed to empty one. The general process is to put a big needle on either end of a cord and thread both ends of the heddles on it as they come off the harnesses. And I’m constantly switching which needle takes the top or bottom end of the heddles. Eventually they all come off in the right order and in the right direction, neatly threaded on a string. I’ll get that done and then start thinking about actually counting them. Yikes.