SpinnySpinny

I haven’t thrown away the Coopworth yet, but I’m trying something different. I took some of the batt and combed it, and that gave something spinnable. The result still has some problems but most of the junk comes out and the yarn is strong enough for warp. It’s tedious, so we’ll see how long this lasts.

Today was hang out and do fiber at Casa Feorlen. Some friends came, we ate artichokes and chocolate, measured out a huge skein to dye self-striping sock yarn, made rope, wove little bands and warped the big loom. A friend of mine showed me how to warp back to front, a different way from how I usually do it and necessary for the bead leno gauze I want to experiment with. There was much confusion about this and that but eventually we got the warp beamed and I started threading. We’ll see how it goes after I finish. She also brought over a fancy fine fiber drum carder and left it behind for me to experiment with.

It’s a Pat Green Deb’s Delicate Deluxe, and I’ve got some serious equipment lust going on. I do usually like the result of combing, but using a carder is so much faster. I haven’t been able to experiment with the piles of Merino around here because the usual carder (borrowed from a different friend) can’t do fine fiber. With this I actually managed to blend Merino and Suri alpaca and the alpaca even mostly stayed in one place. The fine wool cards quite nicely, there are some neps but at least it actually forms a batt. On the other one it will hardly stick to the drum. I’ve been thinking about what to do with the gift alpaca and blending it with wool is high on the list. When I get a few minutes I’ll spin some of this blended batt and maybe I’ll do that while I have the spiffy carder.

In the weaving department, the back to front test project is some acrylic baby yarn. Slightly less nasty than Red Heart but still something I won’t be afraid to cut off if the experiment turns out to be a nightmare. It’s not designed to be weaving yarn, so you have to plan carefully to make sure you get what you are expecting. Since it’s so elastic, if the fabric looks good on the loom it will be like cardboard when you get it off and the warp relaxes. I’ll have to experiment with the tension to be sure I don’t beat it too firmly. I’ve had an offer for yet more baby yarn, as much as I hate acrylic knitting yarn I’ve been collecting sport weight or finer when I can find it cheap and/or free. It’s always good for something, just as long as that something isn’t knitting. It’s great for trying out new patterns or as waste yarn.

This weekend I borrowed the drum carder, so I could do a few things. One of those things was the Coopworth, which even scoured twice was still greasy. I tried to pick out the second cuts and VM and all those other annoying bits. What I wasn’t counting on was the tips to disintegrate in carding. So now I have carded batts with even more noils in them than before. And seemingly no less VM, despite cleaning up piles of it from the floor. Most of a day of carding produced six large batts.

I spun a section of one tonight. About ten minutes into it, with a lap full of junk I’d pulled out and a grungy-looking yarn on the bobbin, I skeined it off to wash. It didn’t look any better.

My original idea was to spin half S and half Z and do a striped warp. Not only do I not like this yarn, I don’t want to use it for warp either. It’s full of slubs from all the broken tips and then there’s still the VM. I’ll wait until morning and see how the skein looks dry, but this is seriously turning into a “Life’s too short” project. It’s one thing to go through hours and hours of work wondering if the end result will turn out like you imagined. It’s another entirely to do it for something you are certain is going to suck no matter what.

But I did finally get back to the Merino, I filled the last of the first bobbin. 132 grams. I could get a little more on there if I tried, but I’d have to stop and adjust it too much to be worth the bother. Now I just have to finish the other two.

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.