SpinnySpinny

We went to the tailor today, for what was supposed to be the fitting but there wasn’t anything to be done. So we left with the finished jacket. The Harris Tweed fabric is classic. There was some “miscommunication” about the aforementioned elbow patches and the tailor assures us they can be added later if desired. I think it looks great without them and I swear I didn’t call him about it or anything. Here’s some pictures:

The Boyfriend is immensely happy with it, although I think I’m going to have to smack him if he keeps unbuttoning the sleeve vents. Yes, you have functioning buttons, that’s one of those custom tailor things. You don’t need to point this out to anyone who happens to be walking by.

I briefly thought I should have asked for a couple fabric scraps, this stuff is expensive and it would be interesting to play around with. I’m having to resist fiddling with the kemp, however.

It took about six weeks, but the comment spammers have finally found me. I already had compulsory moderation for first-time posters, but basically I’m getting nothing but spam comments.

If you are a real person and want to leave a comment, here are the things to know:

• You must enter a name and email.
• If Akismet thinks you are a spammer, you lose.
• If this is your first comment, it will go to moderation.
• If there are any links in it, it will go to moderation.
• If you comment again with the same name and email (and I approved your previous comment) then comments without links are automatically approved.

Comments are encouraged (I know you are out there, I can see you in my website logs.) But spam is evil and moderation is unfortunately one of the few defenses I have.

Here’s the organza I made blue:

It’s hard to get a good picture of sheer fabric, particularly when the room with good lighting has a striped sheet on the bed. But there it is. I gathered the fabric along both selvedges and then bunched it up and tied it with rubber bands, kinda like one of those old broomstick skirts. The folds of fabric all crammed together made the dye take unevenly and the rubber bands made white stripes where it kept out most of it out. Indigo isn’t very energetic when it comes to working around resists, like some other dyes that will wick under ties to color the fabric.

No, I have no idea what I am going to do with it. I got a bolt of the stuff on sale a while back and I’m mostly just playing with it. I typically make clothing from soft fabrics that drape well and organza is stiff no matter what you to it. It would make an interesting sheer layer over something else.

I had this week off, so some friends came over again. We made things blue. I gathered and tied about 5 meters of silk organza, which I’ll get a picture of later. I just washed it this morning.

Of course, we do what you should never do, dye stuff in the kitchen surrounded by food:

It was instant indigo, which is far less complicated than a traditional fermentation vat. I’ve done the whole big deal (with and without the stale urine part) and while that is technically interesting, I’m not going to do it in my kitchen in an afternoon.

I needed something to work on at the Swedish Christmas Fair, so I dug out some Romney fleece I had sitting around and started on a medium-weight single. It’s really long staple (20 cm) so combing out with the dog brush is fine and it’s fast to spin. Normally demo yarn is total crap but this stuff is so mindless to work with that it’s coming out fine.

I’m finally following through on a project I’ve been talking about for years, spin direction patterns. You can get interesting subtle patterns like checks and stripes in a plain-weave fabric by changing the direction the yarn is spun. Light reflects differently off each yarn and it makes it look like a much more complex fabric.

This was common in early Scandinavian weaving of the Viking era, so I want to do a sample for an upcoming talk at the local Swedish cultural society meeting. I also saw a really nice Peruvian piece at the Textile Museum a few years back, done with 2-ply. It’s one of those interesting techniques that you can only do with handspun because you just can’t buy the right yarn.

So far I’ve gotten almost a full bobbin done Z. It’s not great yarn for me as I’m not much paying attention to size but it will be fine for a sample. I will probably have to do it on the table loom just because the smaller one has less yarn lost to loom waste. That’s a big deal when you are spinning it all.

It’s also using up some fiber I’ll never make a real project from. I bought some of this fleece years ago to use for students and never did anything with it. It’s coarse and not great for clothing, not to mention the annoying canary stain that causes it to all come out vaguely yellowish.