Spinning lessons

This Sunday I took a spinning course with Elinor Crosby at the Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design. It was a three hour class and I learned several cool things.

Here's a beauty. If you can't establish enough tension through your brake belt or your drive belt, you can lead the newly spun yarn through a little maze via your guides. This is especially good for thinner yarns, such as laces which can be spun with only a couple of fibres at a time.

In order for this to work, your yarn guides need to be on the same side of the spindle. Mine are not, they are on the top and the bottom of the U shaped thing. It has a real name but I forget.

If you don't own a spinning wheel, you might not know that there are all kinds of whorls or pulleys and knobs to twist. When I am feeling adventurous, I twist a few knobs and see what happens. This weekend, the relationships between the knobs and whorls was revealed and several things happened.

I learned how to spin really thin yarn,

This can be plied two, three, four or even eight strands together, giving rounder and stronger yarns. This yarn belongs to that naughty sheep Floozy. If only I had known this three years ago, as I agonize spinning her up. By drawing the fibres out to a thin yarn, a lot of the garbage just drops out. I've been stopping and picking out debris and then starting again. It has been frustrating to not get a flow of spinning. Now the decision regarding Floozy is to continue as I was, or to switch strategies half way through. Hmm.

I learned how to spin a loftier yarn. This fleece is was not as well prepared as it could have been and is full of nubbins. It could be used to make a novelty yarn, or I could live with it and knit or weave something that looks cool with blumps. I have a very nice table mat made with bumpy yarn in the weft and linen in the warp. I could try that some day.

I learned how to figure out what yarn I want to spin, rather than spinning and hoping that what comes out at the end is useable. Both these yarns are a result of me making a decision ahead of time as to what diameter of single I wanted. These were spun on the middle whorl with medium tension on your left view and higher tension on the right view.

My fellow student was a nut for dying and there was a lot of talk about dying, batts, carding and strategies to get interesting colours. I brought out my recent colour disasters.

The skein on your right is from a door prize, I may have mentioned earlier, the skein on your left is a double ply. The colours get muddy and brown.

Here is where I tried mixing it with a strong pink and really. Ick. The spinning group helped me decide that the right view skein colour is better as a single, that I should wash it, see if the over spinning comes out and use it as a weft in something. Or donate it and let someone else figure it out. I like this idea best.

The spinning group helped me decide what to do with the pink. Here we've added a brown, about 2 parts pink to one part medium brown. I like it already. I have enough to make a small sample and head out shopping.

On the edge of LaLa

Advice: just when your head is clearing up from a concussion, do not bounce on the bed.

I was bored, it seemed like a good idea when I hadn't been physically active for 3 weeks beyond small walks and small putterings around the house. Bored? Bed? Bounce! Bad!!

What does one do with oneself when one is restricted to the couch with little to no reading, computer, TV or other fun things. Well, after a while, I decided that I could do the dishes and I could spin. To spin, I'm still seated, my head is not bending up or down, left or right, I can let my gaze wander around instead of focusing dead ahead and it doesn't require a lot of intellectual rigor.

I decided to finish some old projects...

On the top is the latest skein of Romney, from the sheep "Floozy", heading towards becoming a woven blanket. In the middle is a two ply of merino. The colours are all muddy browns, pinks, greens and even the yellow is brownish. I received the bag of fleece as a door prize. Unimpressed with the colours, I decided to try adding some pink to liven it up. The bottom skein shows the results. Hmmm.

Floozy is looking like all the other Floozies I've spun. It must be close to 1000 metres by now, all done by the spinning wheel.

The colours don't look so bad here, but they are rather dull, don't you think?  It is spun on the drop spindle several months ago and now plied on the wheel.

Here is a single ply of earth colours plus a single ply of the solid rose pink. It just doesn't work for me. Now there is too much pink and it is kind of loud. I was hoping for a pinky earth affect. Probably I should have carded the two together before spinning, but hey, the bag of earth was free, the bag of pink was cheap and it isn't a project I'm committed to. I'll have to think of what to do with the remainder of the fleece and the entire bobbin of spun earth colours. Maybe a donation to the upcoming Maritime Fibre Retreat, but sssh, in case I change my mind.

Now here is something I can get a bit excited about. Before the head smash, I had put together the fabric pieces for this block and over the past three weeks, I've been puttering around it with needle and thread.

 

Detail shot of the 8" block. Time to gather some textiles for a second block.

And here is the Grand Christmas Present of all times, seen in public for the first time. Steve (yes, he did) asked for a toilet paper cover. I have no idea why. I think he wanted it originally for the camp, but no way Hosay. Do you know how  many pill bugs can hid in this? Ick.

A crochet rose on top...

with a band of stocking stitch around the perimeter. Ain't it grand? Since he asked for this beauty, he is now in charge of making sure it stays filled, meaning, one less job for me. Win-win.

A Lazy List from Photo file 033

Just a list of things that will either catch us up on things that have been left hanging or some other random topics that have little relationship to anything else:
The sock that could defeat an Olympian team of knitters, should one exist.

I was very excited to get this pattern designed by Yarnissima. It is called "Sottopassaggio"

I found it through the Twist Collective, a quarterly newsletter on knitting that is pretty neat. Here's the site:
http://twistcollective.com/
I love the cable that goes across from one toe to the opposite ankle and the second cable that starts up the other ankle. However....the cable that goes up the other ankle is a killer. At one point I was using 7 needles to try and get this baby. Didn't happen. In knitting the pattern is read from left to right for the first row and then right to left for the second row and so on. On this cable, the action of twisting the stitches to get the lines to loop over each other happens on the rows that read left to right. Seems simple since that is how we read English. BUT the maneuvering of the stitches occurs from behind and from right to left in the middle of the left to right instructions. This is like a double negative within a phrase that is itself negative inside a positive thought. It is like magic without wands. I was incapable of doing this. I tried two or three times following instructions, then two or three times inventing different solutions and finally, I ripped it out. No cable is going to happen on that ankle. Sorry Yarnissima. This sock is the opposite of the Road Trip Shawl.

These two bobbins are the singles spun from the batts of Floozy that were dyed with the Golden Rod. I claimed that the colour was like taupe covered with cat pee. At this point in the process I can say my mind has changed. It looks like a yucky yellow with too much grey in it. Then I plied it together and
I can't say I'm impressed. The nice yellow bits are lost, the yucky yellow bits are blurred by even more grey and I just don't like it. Steve says it looks good, but it doesn't grab me. I have 86 metres of this yarn and sometimes, at the conclusion of something that felt like a good idea at the time I simply think 'I could have read a good book."
In August we usually go to our camp as much as possible. Over the years we have worked ourselves in several fits of sweat and too many arguements until one day I threw down a hammer and said I never wanted to return again. Well you know how that went. Next weekend we finished the kitchen gazebo. That was two years ago and each summer we try to improve something but only one thing a year otherwise going up is no fun. We usually break that rule but knowing we are breaking the rule helps us to keep it to two things.

This year we replaced the roof with this fetching orangy-tan vinyl and voila, the leaking has stopped. On the walls you see screen. The leaking hasn't stopped there but that's to be expected from screen.
Currently we sleep in the kitchen gazebo. Last summer the sleeping tent had a leaky roof, the platform had sunk to a slant, and I was frustrated crawling around on the floor or the air mattress. Now when we sleep, we have more room to move about, but whatever the weather is doing, it is doing it in our sleeping area. Yes, there was quite a weekend where it was raining so hard, the old roof failed entirely and it was raining inside the gazebo. We rigged up a tarp over the mattress and crawled under to wait it out. It stopped raining outside but the roof had all these saggy pockets of water that had to drain so it continued to rain inside the gazebo for the rest of the night. Remember that feeling of how I could have been reading a good book? I thought that a few times as we waited for the night to be over.
The other thing we did this summer was to invest in clear vinyl curtains. They go over the screens on a windy or rainy day, making the space that more liveable. Being clear, you can still see the view, which is lovely.


Our number two project this summer is to build a foundation for a bunkhouse that will have a roof, glass in the window openings, walls that mist, rain, blackflies and wind can not penetrate and a floor (see walls). There will be room for a potty and it will be secure enough that we can get a futon instead of an air mattress. We don't dream big, but we do dream detailed.

Dying with Chives and Golden Rod

Most of the silliness is gone from my process of dying with plants found in my own garden. I am still putting the plant matter back into a colander and putting it back into the dye pot just because I haven't found anything to reassure me that the plant matter isn't needed. Looks like I need another resource book.

I did go to Joybilee Farms for entirely different reasons and she mentions that she lets the dye liquor ferment for a few days, build up a few bubbles before adding the wool. I did try to do something along those lines, at the end of the Golden Rod experiment.

http://joybilee-farm.blogspot.com or www.fibrearts.ca

Chives: Little Buggers.

I cut up more than 6 cups of chives, using my cup measurement method as opposed to the more normal one of using a scale of grams or ounces. I figured the same method should be used through out this process to be consistently wrong. The ratio of chives to wool was 3:1 and I had 2 cups of wool meaning I needed 6 cups of chives.

I soaked the wool as usual, did the whole routine as usual and look at this!

Nada. There isn't a drop of colour. I checked the book, Spectrum, Dye Plants of Ontario, edited by Nancy J. McGuffin, and my plant parts were correct (leaves) and my ratio was correct. I confess to a complete brain cramp. Once I had tidied everything up and started to write my notes I thought “Did I use Alum or Copper” I forget. I think it must have been alum because I don't remember having to pick chives out of my copper scrunchy. How do we forget things like this. It is sort of important. Never the less, that piece of information is gone. But since I didn't get any colour it hardly seems to matter.

The Burr House dyers group had their problems also. Here is an additional comment they made:

“The colours from the original dyebath of 1:1 ratio were pallid. A stronger dyebath was used in an iron pot and the skeins re-entered. Very strong rich shades resulted. The ammonia rinse gave an extremely deep golden yellow.”

I did not do an ammonia rinse, because I thought I had no colour to begin with and it wasn't until re-reading this book for the umpteenth time that I saw this sentence. To confess to my deep ignorance, I didn't even know you could still buy ammonia, I thought it was no longer on shelves because it is so toxic. Guess I need to go shopping.

Golden Rod: Great weed

An entirely different experience happened with the Golden Rod. First, I had way more fun collecting it. We were in Pugwash at a friend's cottage and she has a field of it, so out we trotted and gathered a bag of the stuff while the white wine cooled. It counts as growing in my garden because Steve designed the cottage and we've been visiting this site for two years watching this building grow. I have a bunch now growing in my own garden for next year.

The Golden Rod is hidden behind my hat.

The next day I made the liquor up. My mom, who was visiting for several days, was horrified. It was very hot in the house, a Maritime heatwave (3 days) was in effect and the fans were a churning. Plus we were having guests that night and Golden Rod is nothing if not stinky. We left it out on the back porch to cool and de-stink. It cooled, but never de-stunk.

Same usual mayhem in the dying of the wool but this time out came a rather interesting green. Alum and Golden Rod give a green that looks like it is soft but then you realize it is holding its breath trying not to let you know it is having a PMS experience. It is an angry soft green. And a little stinky.

I still had lots of the liquor left over and had a brain wave. Why not toss in some carded fleece? I scrunched in 4 small batts of the carded fleece, layering a rag of cotton between them in case they matted together. I put it out in the back yard, lid on, in the bright sun so it could cook. Then it rained and I heaved it into the back shed. Then I forgot. Then we took it out and gave it a rinse in the kitchen sink. Everyone fled except me. I had to see this through.

The unspun fleece is from that sleezy sheep Floozy I told you about a few months ago.

It starts out as an oatmeal/taupe and with the golden rod, it looks like an oatmeal taupe that cats peed on. The awfulness of the colour is not showing on my monitor. Squeeze your eyes while smelling vinegar and anchovies, you'll get the idea. I need to spin a few metres to see it is as awful as I think it is. One of the challenges is that it stinks too. The cats are very impressed. It is a full open-mouth-whiskers-straight-out-ears-back kind of stink. I am keeping it on the back porch in case the cats think it really is another cat's markings and they decide to join in. I think some Eco-wool or Woolite is in this fleece's short term future.

The future dying adventure plans include carrot tops, rue and fern bracken. I am tempted to try some Sunflowers and the Smoke tree. The Sunflowers I didn't grow myself so that seems a bit of cheat given that I wanted to use plants that were in my own garden and I can only buy them. I will have to ponder the ethics of that. The smoke tree in my yard is still a baby and it seems kind of harsh to prune it. Another dilemma. Would it be a cheat to use someone else's smoke tree twigs instead of my own? Anyone have a smoke tree to tempt me with?