Yesterday was Fiber Extravaganza, I went to go hang out with a friend I haven’t been able to see in a while and we did fiber stuff. Lots of fiber stuff. I finally learned some Peruvian weaving I want to use for one of my swatches and did a few things on the amazing electric drum carder. And a most excellent dinner, even. I like hanging out with my fiber friends. Everybody else is at our regional annual conference going on this weekend a few hours south of here.
Some of the stuff I’m working on really needs a drum carder. I wasn’t happy with blending the fiber for two of the spindle skeins with the equipment I have: one had too much variation in texture and color than I wanted to deal with on combs and the remaining llama down isn’t making nice rolags like the first batch. I still have the really short tow flax to card, if I’m not able to get down there for another visit I’ll just have to do it by hand and I’m not thrilled at that.
The second cotton/silk bobbin continues, I’m more than half finished now. I have a ball of trash from broken yarn collecting, I thought maybe it was just I would get better at spinning it after the first bobbin but it’s still breaking just as much. I’m trying to get a nice thick and thin mix of both fibers to contrast the colors and textures and it’s actually very difficult to get a good thick and thin yarn on purpose. If it weren’t for this short staple silk I happen to have, I would have never tried to blend combed silk and cotton. The staple lengths are usually very different. I think a uniform blend would be interesting also, but not even the fancy electric drum carder I used yesterday could do it. As nice as it is, it’s pretty mundane as fancy electric drum carders go.
I should finish the cotton/silk in a day or two and then comes the plying. That will take at least another two days. I have to think about how I want to handle it because I don’t know if it will all fit on the small high-speed bobbins. But it will take much, much longer to ply on the other flyer. Supposedly it’s ok to have two lengths in a skein if it’s because it doesn’t fit the equipment. I don’t know how much that is actually true other than for the small supported spindle or maybe something done on a charka. I’ll have to think about that.
