SpinnySpinny

Finally the brown cotton is done. Now I need to ply it. I tried but I immediately had problems with it snarling and breaking. I’m going to let it sit on the bobbins a while and hope it’s better behaved in a few weeks. I did some experiments with the other cottons I have but I still have to decide what I want from them.

In the meantime, there’s plenty more to do. I’m working on one of the blending skeins, I’ve decided to do the two ply as one of bamboo/tencel and the other of ingeo/silk. Each pair is close in length, which makes things a lot easier. The tencel is very shiny and the bamboo is not, together they are a nice in-between. I’m blending blue ingeo with bombyx top. It comes out sky blue with little white bits from the neps in the silk. (Just like the brick, it’s not great silk. Same source, too.) I just spent about four hours blending 18g of dark blue ingeo and white silk and I still have to make the rolags. Blending anything takes a long time with hand cards, even more for very different colors. The bamboo and tencel should be easier, I’m doing that with a hackle. (Well, a wool comb actually.)

A few days ago I pulled out a bunch of odds and ends from the combing waste and today I dyed it yellow-gold. I’m going to use it to reproduce one of the millspun yarns. Leftover junk is pretty close to “Approximately 100% Wool” if you ask me. That’s what that yarn is, take all the stuff hanging around and make something from it. Now I have to try to match it.

So now I’ve got the second bobbin of brown cotton started. Just as dull as the first. I’m getting slightly less broken yarn so far, but only by kicking The Boyfriend out of the house to remove distractions. I’m hoping to get this done before the weekend but that is going to require a lot of spinning time. I don’t normally have muscle aches after spinning but using the fastest ratio takes more effort to treadle and it’s leaving me with lower back pain. But, strangely, not anywhere else. It’s still not what I would call aerobic exercise, however.

I have such a light tension that I get some snarls winding on. But I can’t increase it or the yarn will break even more. I don’t normally rewind bobbins before plying, but the snarls will cause problems so I rewound the first bobbin to another to fix it. I’m strangely happy that it only broke three times in the process. Better now than during plying, anyway. I got some cardboard storage bobbins for this sort of thing but I don’t want to ply this fine yarn untensioned. I just used a spinning bobbin I don’t expect to need right away. Normally I don’t bother because I wind pretty evenly while spinning. Yes, winding a nice even storage bobbin makes for easy plying. But as long as you pay attention and not make horribly uneven and loose bobbins while spinning, it isn’t such a big deal. I rarely do it for any reason other than I need an empty bobbin and I don’t want to toss the yarn.

Yesterday was Fiber Extravaganza, I went to go hang out with a friend I haven’t been able to see in a while and we did fiber stuff. Lots of fiber stuff. I finally learned some Peruvian weaving I want to use for one of my swatches and did a few things on the amazing electric drum carder. And a most excellent dinner, even. I like hanging out with my fiber friends. Everybody else is at our regional annual conference going on this weekend a few hours south of here.

Some of the stuff I’m working on really needs a drum carder. I wasn’t happy with blending the fiber for two of the spindle skeins with the equipment I have: one had too much variation in texture and color than I wanted to deal with on combs and the remaining llama down isn’t making nice rolags like the first batch. I still have the really short tow flax to card, if I’m not able to get down there for another visit I’ll just have to do it by hand and I’m not thrilled at that.

The second cotton/silk bobbin continues, I’m more than half finished now. I have a ball of trash from broken yarn collecting, I thought maybe it was just I would get better at spinning it after the first bobbin but it’s still breaking just as much. I’m trying to get a nice thick and thin mix of both fibers to contrast the colors and textures and it’s actually very difficult to get a good thick and thin yarn on purpose. If it weren’t for this short staple silk I happen to have, I would have never tried to blend combed silk and cotton. The staple lengths are usually very different. I think a uniform blend would be interesting also, but not even the fancy electric drum carder I used yesterday could do it. As nice as it is, it’s pretty mundane as fancy electric drum carders go.

I should finish the cotton/silk in a day or two and then comes the plying. That will take at least another two days. I have to think about how I want to handle it because I don’t know if it will all fit on the small high-speed bobbins. But it will take much, much longer to ply on the other flyer. Supposedly it’s ok to have two lengths in a skein if it’s because it doesn’t fit the equipment. I don’t know how much that is actually true other than for the small supported spindle or maybe something done on a charka. I’ll have to think about that.

The cotton is in to boil, I had a bit of a problem there when one of my bobbins ran empty while plying but it’s all better now. Spin up more and then paste the whole mess back together and continue. Novelty yarns are great for hiding things like that. It isn’t even a good splice.

Much to my amazement, I skeined it off and the plying is almost perfectly balanced. Not what I would expect from thick and thin single plus the weird plying to get the eyelash blobs in there. Skeining it with the bobbin on the other side of the room helps even things out, but that still won’t fix too much or too little twist. I did a sample, but it’s hard to keep it even when you are also fooling with the yarn in the process.

Since this is partly naturally green cotton, not only am I boiling it but I am boiling it a good long time. I don’t even know how long, I’ll go fish it out when I feel like it. It took a while to even get it to sink in the water. I added some baking soda because I didn’t want to deal with boiling soapy water. (I wanted an alkaline solution.) Then it gets washed. Boiling cotton removes the waxy coating of the fibers, you don’t have to if you don’t want to but you are supposed to if you are going to dye the yarn. I don’t dye enough cotton to know what difference it makes. But with colored cottons, boiling makes the color darker. It’s supposed to make white cotton more white also, but it sure gets a bunch of nasty stuff out. The water is a nasty brown color.

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.