SpinnySpinny

With The Boyfriend gone for the weekend, I’m getting a lot done. The Cascade-alike is drying and it is a bit fuzzy but other than that looks pretty good. I stuck all four bobbins on knitting needles in a plastic box to ply and that worked ok. It only tried to shred a little bit. It looks kinda like somebody washed a skein of Cascade 220, so I guess that’s not too bad. Not that I’m washing this stuff. I sprayed it with water and hung it to dry to set the twist.

I created a new Misfit this morning by attempting to copy some things that I see all over in the yarn stores, a thick and thin bulky spiral. It looks exactly like something I’d expect to find put up in a 50g ball and selling for $15. The thick parts are too thick and although it looks good now it is so low-twist that it would start to pill even just trying to knit it. Sound familiar? I don’t like the ones in the stores for the same reason. I did it again with the fat single a little more even and it is more stable. It looks disturbingly like something from Lion Brand. But it’s a special effect yarn from a blend of fibers, in this case wool, silk and ingeo. The sky blue silk/ingeo blend from before didn’t spin up as smooth as I’d hoped, so I did something else and used it for the binder with a big Merino single. I knew there was a reason I bought that bump of black top.

I have to spin more of the cotton/silk blend, because I don’t have enough for the wpi card. Fortunately I had some blended fiber left. I did a little but I need more, this stuff is so thin that there’s going to be like 30 meters wrapped around the little piece of cardboard. In the interest of avoiding that nuisance, I started on the camel hair. I’m doing another cable, in two colors and fairly thick. It will go fast. That’s a good thing.

Now I can get back to my reheated pizza. The Boyfriend goes away and see what happens? It’s not all bad, at least. There are vegetables. And soy cheese (because I can’t have very much of the real stuff.) I ordered two so I’d have it for a few days, the place messed up my order and in fixing it I ended up with four huge pizzas. I gave away a bunch and we will still be eating it for a week. At least it’s good pizza.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate low-twist yarns? I have three of four bobbins done of the Cascade-alike single. I don’t have more done because I have to force myself to spin it. It doesn’t even look like yarn on the bobbin, it’s like there are just strands of fiber wrapped around it. That is very close to the truth. I have to use the slowest possible ratio of my wheel, which is I think 6:1. I didn’t even own the “normal” flyer until a few months ago because it just isn’t something I use. And this is not a large single, either. Most commercial yarns are like this, even the one that is supposed to be a substitute for handspun lace yarn. I tried to reproduce that one a few months ago and I was using the same slow ratio for an even smaller single.

These are absolutely the product of modern mechanical spinning equipment, because they could never be made with a spindle. It would immediately break with a drop spindle and you don’t get an extra hand to do a worsted style technique with a supported spindle. Even traditional worsted wool is supposed to be hard and smooth, not this light and fluffy stuff. It’s easier to make a consistant yarn from combed wool, and that’s what everybody wants for reliable high-speed processing, so there is almost no true woolen commercial yarn anymore. Rumor has it there is some somewhere, but I actually have never seen it.

Now I remember what else I was going to say. This month’s guild meeting was the ongoing project of sampling fibers, 50 by 05. It started before I got there and was to celebrate the guild’s 50th year. So every few meetings we get a pile of samples, many from one terribly over-stashed member’s apartment. As usual, she didn’t want to take any of it home. Nobody was much interested in the camel hair, so I ended up with another color similar to the one she gave me earlier in the week. Now I can do something interesting with the two contrasting natural colors. I also came home with a good sized chunk of this amazing Cormo fleece. It looks very like the white Merino/Corrie I already have (which makes sense given the history of the breed.) Only after I washed it could I tell that the crimp was slightly different and a little less Merino-like. It still has that fine crimp, but washed it looks a more wavy. It’s almost like there is a second crimp pattern in the fleece. It should be a little more bouncy.

Another weekend of spinning. This is about how it’s going to be until everything is done. I finished more yarns over the weekend and now that The Boyfriend is done borrowing my camera I’ll get pictures taken. A local knitting group did a dye workshop a few blocks away, I stopped by for a visit Saturday afternoon and ended up with a bottle of extra dye. I need to dye some of the Andean two-ply for the traditional three color patterns, so now I have medium gray, white and blue. The white is from a Blue-faced Leicester top I picked up for fun, it’s similar fiber although not so long a staple length.

I also did the drop spindle skein, again because I didn’t like how it came out the first time. The fiber for that was a grab-bag of fleece that appears to be Border Leicester. It was cotted (tangled) and had some color variation, so I flicked, drum carded and then combed just a little. Saturday I reeled some silk and Sunday was the guild meeting where I did fiber prep. I tried an experiment with the mystery farm fleece, a 4/3 12-ply cable. It was lofty and bouncy and huge, and with that many plies it doesn’t matter what the single looks like. But the fiber is filthy, so there I was with the dog brush yet again to get the junk out. It’s short and fine and crimpy but obviously has some down breed in it. The woman from the farm thinks it might be part Rambouillet, closely related to Merino, but there’s no way to really know.

Today I’m working on the remaining woolen with the Suffolk fleece. I used a friend’s drum carder to make batts and now I’m tearing them into chunks to make rolags. I couldn’t do it with hand cards because I couldn’t get batts large enough for the yarn I need. I’m also doing it with the quill, because it has to be large and low twist. Long draw works really well that way and the Lendrum quill head is huge. It’s weird to work with this big spike pointing directly at me, I can’t draft as far as with a normal position but this yarn doesn’t take long. Even if it’s still slower to spin than it should be because I have to get it as perfectly even as possible. Woolen just doesn’t like to do that.

The silk is coming along, it’s basically the same technique as the worsted wool but I don’t like it as much. The fiber is slippery. But at least I’m going through it at a pretty good clip. Without all that fiber prep to do, it feels like it takes no time at all. That is at least a nice change. I’ll probably have half of it done this evening.

I pulled out my dyes and I have to decide what to use: electric purple, scary bright pink, turquoise blue or antique gold. I could live with any but the gold, I got that to match the color of one of the commercial yarns. The pink and purple were supposed to be for dye experiments in painted roving and I got the two brightest colors I could stand to put together. This was back about the time I bought that Merino/Tencel stuff, so it was clearly also the product of temporary insanity. If I really want to do this as an embroidered swatch, I probably don’t want to do multiple colors. The blue was from an old project, one of the hats shown in the Gallery. I dyed some silk noil for one of the blending skeins, too.

Like I need an excuse to go over to Pearl… but I should probably use what I’ve got. I have a feeling that means the purple. It’s Country Classic Spring Violet, you can see it on this color card over at Mielke’s Fiber Arts. (While you are over there, you could check out some of Adam’s nifty wood stuff. I have one of the Lizzy spindles and it’s Very Nice.) On the bombyx, it should give some serious purple.