SpinnySpinny

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.

I went off to a farm event this weekend where there were cute lambs, spinners to hang out with and Sally Fox and her cottons. I had been trying to contact her for some details of her organic colored cottons, so I wanted to go and speak to her in person. And I even managed to get a ride with friends. (There aren’t many farms near San Francisco, so it was a bit of a haul.)

Sally was happy to talk to me about cotton and I got all kinds of interesting technical data. She has done quite a bit of work developing new varieties of colored cottons and I wanted to be able to include those in my tables of fiber data for the COE. Many of the sources suggested in the reading list are decades old, before colored cottons were commercially processed. Sally pretty much created the commercial natural color cotton business and continues to develop new varieties.

I also finished the swatch from the 4-ply yarn I made of the medium woolen single. I knitted and then felted it, with baking soda in the water. This wool won’t make a hard felt so the finished fabric is still quite elastic. The thick garter stitch flattened a lot and I steam pressed it for a smooth finish.