SpinnySpinny

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.

The Learning Exchange samples are going in the mail, The Boyfriend is off for the long weekend, and work is being relatively tame. I even already took care of my mother’s birthday present. I can hang out and do all the fiber stuff I want.

I’ve started spinning for some legwarmers, but not the kind you think. You see, I like the idea of handknit socks, but I don’t actually like knitting that fine so they fit in my shoes. But it’s Summer once again in San Francisco, so my legs are freezing all the time. I’m going to make just the leg part of some knee socks, out of one of the black lamb fleeces I got last summer. It will probably take a little elastic in the top cuff to make it work, but that’s really no different from the sock variety.

In the I-Have-A-Loom-Now department, I ordered some cotton weaving yarn. One is a big cone of singles blended natural green organic cotton, which I will probably ply with itself the same way I did with the stuff I found on pirns at the surplus craft store. It’s all really fine, presumably intended for weaving sheeting. I now have white, brown and green and I think somehow dishtowels will happen. I just need to get the studio cleaned up.

I haven’t been able to update the website, because our DSL is still not installed. The telco couldn’t get the address right and insisted we didn’t exist. I think our ISP finally re-ordered the circuit to get it correct. So instead of being offline a week, it’s going to be a month. I can still enjoy it from my personal laptop, but that doesn’t help you all that much. All five of you, as best as I can tell. I’ve been wanting to do some promotion for the website but I’ve held off knowing this would happen. I wouldn’t want to get everybody all excited and then have the website down.

But the world of textiles moves on, and as things get settled in the new place I’m getting back to spinning. I signed up for a Learning Exchange program with HGA, basically a sample swap with everyone getting bits of all the yarns. Each one is evaluated by the leader and everybody gets copies of the comments. I wanted to try the program, so I signed up for the Merino exchange. I’ve been spinning Merino for years, so I can explore without worrying too much about it. I know I can always produce some nice yarns just by going back to my normal spinning style. It’s a bit of a nuisance to do it in the middle of moving, but I’ll manage. I have two samples I like so far and I might do a third. There are more participants than the estimated 8 and each gets a fiber sample, small skein and wrapped wpi card. More of those detestable cards to cut, mark and wind. That right there may keep me to two yarns.

The loom is here, but it’s still in pieces. It will be a few more weeks before the place is together enough to start working on it, but I’m already ordering yarn and calling in various equipment out on loan.