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Bright colours for a dull day

I should really stir my stumps and look for some work (paid work, I mean), but I am enjoying this period of indulgence in wooliness. I have spun and plied the carded bats.

From this

To this

To this (plying)

To this

I have washed the yarn and it's hanging up to dry. The kinkiness should drop out.

I don't think there's enough for a scarf and I'm wondering whether to weave some table mats. I've no idea what to use for the weft, or how many I'll get. I estimate there's about 125 yards here.

Distracted from main task

As usual, I have been distracted from my main project(s) - but I couldn't resist taking advantage of some days at home in order to dye and card some blended bats.

I started with some white carded wool of unknown breed. I'm not that impressed with it - it's very short stapled and feels rather over-processed. First I dyed the five 25g rovings with Landscape dyes:

 

Once they were rinsed and dried I carded each one and then started to blend the colours. I should really have dyed in primary colours, I realised as soon as I got started. All the colours I chose - light green, dark green, orange, violet and magenta - are secondary colours, that is they're already mixtures of two colours (i.e. blue and yellow make green, etc.). Thus when you mix them again you're actually mixing several colours together and there's always the danger that you'll just end up with brown. Anyway, I  managed to avoid that:

 

I have divided each little bat into two mini bats so that I can spin two nearly identical singles for plying together.

 

I laid them out in the order I intended to spin, but I've already gone wrong! Never mind, I can do a bit of judicious breaking and splicing when I come to ply them together. I have spun half of them up and should be able to do the rest and the plying tomorrow. The wool, being short-stapled and soft, didn't card terribly evenly and I am ending up with quite a tweedy yarn, which is fine by me. I intend to weave it into a simple scarf.

More on the fleece

I thought I'd fill in some of the gaps in my explanation of turning the raw fleece into knittable wool. I showed you the washed fleece and said I took out a lock at a time and flick carded it. Here's a little lock that's been detangled in this way:

 

I could have spun this directly, but the locks are so small that I thought I'd be forever joining new ones in. Also, some locks are longer than others and some are slightly coarser, so it seems sensible to blend them altogether on the drum carder:

 

Once I've got enough fibre on the carder (it starts getting messy if you put too much on), it has to be doffed:

 

It's a bit like peeling hair off your hairbrush - but much nicer! There's a tool to help you but basically if you go carefully you can do it easily with your hands.

This is now a batt:

Before I learnt about using the flick carder I was getting much more textured fibre (in other words, it had lumps and knots still in it) and when I spun and knitted a sample I was pleasantly surprised at how nice it was. Quite a tweedy effect:

 

For now I'm going with the smoother preparation, but there's obviously lots of scope for experimentation.

Working from scratch

I've learnt about myself that I enjoy doing things from scratch. I like growing vegetables from seed, for instance, and I loved pottery when I took a class in that a few years ago. So now I'm making wool from scratch. I bought a fleece at Woolfest: a lovely moorit shetland fleece. I can't remember if I've posted this picture before or not. Here is is spread out in its raw state. It smells sheepy, but really not pooey or nasty at all.

 

I've been washing it in smallish amounts. My method is to soak a bundle overnight in cold water, squeeze it out well and then to put it  into very hot water with washing up liquid and allow it to soak for a while. The cold water soak gets rid of dust, grit and some of the vegetable matter; the hot water melts the lanolin (oil) and finishes the cleaning process. I then give it a couple of rinses in roughly equally hot water (a bit cooler of course because the first wash has cooled down), stuff it in an old pillowcase and spin it in the washing machine. It then dries very quickly if you spread it out in a warm place, e.g., near a radiator (but not on it).

Then it looks something like this.

 

You can see the bleached tips of the locks. I now pull out a lock at a time and flick card it. The flick carder is a bit like a dog grooming brush. It gets rid of bits of vegetation, undoes tangles and eliminates short hairs. All these things would make the spinning difficult and uneven.

I have recently bought a drum carder, so the next stage is to put the teased out locks through the carder, very slowly and carefully. After a couple of passes through the carder I end up with a lovely bouncy, squishy batt that I can spin.

 

I'll show you what happens next in a future post.

It was all going so well...

Until my Mac took a hissy fit the other day. I'm back downstairs on the family dinosaur PC and some of the photos I was going to post are locked in the Mac, which is at the repairers.

However, I've been spinning away and finished the corriedale batt. Here's the finished result. I think I've rather overspun it - it's not as soft as it could be. It's just over 100g of roughly dk weight and I'm not sure what to make with it just yet.

I had previously spun some lovely bouncy top (probably merino) dyed by Freyalyn that I bought at Woolfest. It's a bit more uneven, but I managed to retain more softness and elasticity. I've even knitted a tiny sample and this is knitting up at about 5 stitches per inch.  Here it is enjoying a sudden ray of sunshine. I think it would make a nice man-hat (which reminds me, my son is 20 tomorrow - how old does that make me!!).

Apologies to non-spinners, but there's not much knitting to show you except more aran sleeve...

Long time, no blog

Time just flies when there's lots happening. I'm not doing anything particularly adventurous or exciting, but I am having new experiences and that's how I like it. For a start I'm well into my new working life. I'm already on my third job! I didn't expect to enjoy the academic texts so much and thought I would be scouring round for more 'interesting' jobs. But actually academic books are interesting to edit because there's so much to keep in mind technically (I don't really have to understand the subject matter in any depth). They have lots of elements like headings, tables, references, notes and so on that I like fiddling around with. I'm learning some new mark-up systems, too.

Then, I've gone back to spinning. I bought a shetland moorit fleece at Woolfest and have just decided at last to have a go at preparing it for spinning. I think it's a nice one - not stinky at all, but even so the water is very dirty when the fleece has been in it! I'm doing bits at a time because drying is a bit of a problem now the weather has broken. Here's the fleece before I started processing it.

I'm washing it in small batches because I don't have an easy way of drying large amounts. I found that, once washed and teased out it is quite easy to spin using long backward draw. Before I spin seriously, however, I need to card the wool to get rid of the VM (vegetable matter). I'm very pleased with myself for getting the hang of long-draw spinning. It's much quicker to do than worsted draw and gives softer, lighter yarn (aka woollen yarn). I'm still producing uneven stuff of course, but I am improving.

I think what got me back into spinning was wanting to make some yarn for twined knitting. I've spun up about 120g of bfl, with a worsted draw. The singles were s-twist and then I made a 2-ply z-twist. I'll get photos in daylight. Now that I've been given the authoritative book on twined knitting (thank you, Jill!) I must get on with knitting it up.

The aran is progressing quite well. I'm on the first sleeve.

I have managed to incorporate visits to Stash on Wednesday mornings into my weekly routine. There was a very jolly group of us there today. I bought a Corriedale batt in the shop to spin up . Watch this space!

Twisty

I had to have a couple of go's at joining up the neck at the front, but now it's going well.

Meanwhile I've been indulging in another kind of twisting stitches: twined knitting or Tvåändsstickning (Swedish) or tvebandsstrikking (Norwegian). I think both those terms mean 'two-end knitting'. That's what you do: take the two ends of the ball of wool and knit with each end alternately, twisting between each stitch. You can also use two different colours, as I am doing. It sounds really laborious, but actually when you're shown how to do it right (as I was, at the IKnit weekender by the lovely Dutch Knitters) it's not so bad - hardly any slower than any other two-colour knitting. Your wool does get twisted up, though and you have to spend time untwisting (again, there's a technique for that). It would be less twisty with the real z-plied wool, but I'm using some lovely Gotland that I bought from Blacker at the weekend. I could spin my own z-ply, I suppose!

 

Katie

Katie has lived with us for ten years. I suppose she hasn't really featured much in the blog and I think it's because she usually runs away when I switch on the camera. The photo in my last post shows, however, that once she's on that cushion nothing is going to shift her!

Katie came to us from next-door-but-one as a kitten and she's been a most friendly and playful cat ever since. She's not blessed with the strongest of stomachs (cat owners know what I mean) but she does have some endearing habits. When Thomas picks her up she puts one paw on his chin (she doesn't do it with me). When I go to the loo downstairs she plays a sort of pat-a-cake underneath the door - she sticks her paw through the gap and waits for me to touch it; I have to get there before she moves away. This is all done with velvet paws.

Now I know you're interested you won't be able to escape the cat lurve.

My new colleague

She keeps me company and tells me all about the little birds outside.   She supports all my decisions and doesn't give me silly jobs to do. I don't have to make her cups of coffee and I can have the room at a temperature that suits me. What a brilliant colleague! The trouble is, I can't always read her mind. Don't you think she's trying to send brain waves in my direction? What does it all mean?

What a lovely day

I've just been up to the allotment and have picked this:

plus some potatoes. Here we have courgettes (rather large), patty pan squash, borlotti beans (semi-dried), french beans, tomatoes, lettuce and blackberries. The lettuce is quite interesting. I bought the seeds last year in Vilnius market (Lithuania). I have to say, however, that the lettuces are a little disappointing - not nearly as crisp as I'd hoped.

I have started work on my first job at home, a book on higher education management, which actually isn't as dull as it sounds. I had most of August off and was able to think about which way I'd like to go. When I was still in my job I was rather bored and was getting far more satisfaction out of knitting, spinning and dyeing than I was out of work and so I thought I might change direction completely and try to find work of some kind in that field. It was when I thought I would sell some hand-dyed wool on Etsy that I realised that I'm actually not cut out for it. The whole business of marketing oneself and one's wares is such hard work and, frankly, not my cup of tea at all. I think I'll stick to working at what I know best - editing, mainly academic books but with a willingness to tackle other types of text as they come my way.

Today is the sort of day when it's great to be freelance. I can take advantage of the sun and put in a few hours' work absolutely to suit myself.

Progress on the aran is going well, by the way. I'm nearly back to where I was before I ripped back. I'm definitely getting quicker and, I think, just a little more even.