SpinnySpinny

Finally I have the last required fiber, thanks to a local guild member who appears to have collected every possible spinning material ever produced. I have about 60g of camel hair top in a sortof beige shade called “blonde.” It’s really just hair, with the down removed. Once upon a time it came from a magical place called Straw Into Gold, a spinning shop in Berkeley that closed about a year before I moved here. It is entirely possible that this stuff has been sitting around since the 70s. I last saw someone spinning camel hair about fifteen years ago and nary a hint of it since. So now that problem is taken care of.

The now sky-blue silk/ingeo blend is ready to spin, it only took forever. I ended up doing basically punis yet again, because all that carding broke a lot of fiber and it’s now more like cotton. But other than that the blend is nice, so I’m not going to worry about it. I need to finish the Romney first, if I can keep from getting distracted I might have the single done tomorrow. Even with the extra I need to do the swatch. It’s so nice to spin something I enjoy. Now I just need to keep from getting distracted away from the rest of the writing. I have a little more than two months to finish this. Between the local science fiction convention and an expected business trip, The Boyfriend is going to be out of the house for a while starting next week so I get to do nothing but spin.

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.

No, the cotton is not done yet. But I did some other things at least.

This week I had my first real try at reeling silk. I did a basic how-to with a friend some months ago but he set everything up and we all just tried it for a few minutes. He was still there, but I did nearly everything so I could learn to use the equipment. It went exceptionally well and I got some very fine filament silk out of it. Now I have to decide just what I want to do with it. I have been thinking of using this for the medium silk skein and I have some ideas of how to do it. Now I can try some out and see what I think.

Today I went to a sheep shearing party. There is a park in San Ramon that is a farm, they have sheep for dog training. Every year there is a public event for shearing and there are demonstrations, kid art projects and so on. A bunch of local spinners went to more-or-less sit around and be colorful atmosphere and answer questions about spinning. It was windy and hard to get much spinning done but we had a good time showing off our stuff. Also, we can get basically all the wool we want from whatever is not claimed by someone else. It’s not great stuff, but it’s ok and I always need more dirty greasy wool, right? Yeah. Well, anyway, I came home with a bunch of wool that I have to figure out what to do with. I have a small bag of some kind of Suffolk that I think I might use for my remaining wool COE skein and a random fleece that looked usable. It was finer than most and not particularly nasty, even if it’s shorter than I like. The shearer was keeping some fleeces to sell to the local wool pool, but only the white ones so this landed in the discard pile. It’s several shades of gray, I sorted it out back and washed up some samples to have a look.

Much to my amazement, the cotton/silk fit on the high-speed bobbin. Barely. I plied until the first single bobbin ran empty and I had 30g of yarn. Just enough, and I couldn’t get much more on there. I didn’t boil this one because of the silk. When I get some time, I should look into more about that to see just how far I can go without damaging it. The chemistry of the water is involved, too. But it’s not critical so I’m not going to worry about it now. I did wash it well and the water turned nasty brown from the cotton.

I’m going to also use the cotton for something else, I want to do the cotton two-ply with the same fiber to make a complementary skein: warp and weft. I think I might even use that for my cotton swatch. I had some practice plain single so I plied it with the leftover cotton/silk to see what I got. I tried an experiment with the Insanely Fast Flyer, one of my yarn-guide clips is loose and tends to slip when I don’t want it to. So instead of stopping to move it to fill the bobbin, I tried tugging on the yarn. It works, sorta. It does move the clip and I can continue plying at full speed (a frightening thing at 44:1) but sometimes the yarn breaks. Generally a single breaks in my hand, so I am snagging it in the process. An interesting idea to look at later, but not now. One day I might actually get some replacement clips, I’ve been trying to get some through my local shop with no success. I still have one that works and I might be able to doctor up the other with a pair of pliers if I tried. I know the wheelmaker intends this for teeny tiny delicate yarns but there are other things that also require high twist.

As for that little sample, it’s a tiny skein and I was curious about how much was there so I counted it: 100 meters! Yikes, that’s fine. I took it to sock-knitting-chocolate-eating night over at Carolina Homespun and everyone was duly impressed. Judith MacKenzie McCuin, who is in town for some workshops, thought it amusing I considered it throwaway sample yarn. (My friends know me so well they joke about it.) Actually, I do toss a lot of yarn. Usually because I’m so frustrated with it I can’t imagine it being any good for anything. Or it’s such a small amount and I really need that bobbin. Lately I’ve been trying to at least ply some of the random singles I’ve got around and get them to good homes. I sent a package a while back to a primary school teacher and some for a charity art project. I have some I think I might give to a few of the folks I know knit for charity. I’ve had this idea that after I’m done with the COE work I’ll card up the growing odds and ends pile and spin some basic yarn for Afghans for Afghans. I’m feeling guilty I haven’t been able to do much work for them lately and the office is literally two blocks away. I got back into knitting when I first came to San Francisco by doing hats with donated 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.