Knitting Battlemaidens

Onion skin

Remember all that 50/50 alpaca BFL fiber I turned into batts on the drumcarder?  Well, I decided to spin it up so that I could blog about the entire process.  So, here are the updated pics.

First, I spun it into a Z-twist singles on my Schacht Matchless wheel.  There are 526 yards to 6 oz, probably enough to make a shawl.  The white was pretty, but I was inspired by all the fall colors outside to dip into my onion skin bag (I keep a brown paper grocery bag in the pantry to collect onion skins all year long.  I get almost a pound a year).  I mordant the wool separately with alum, then dye it in the onion brew which has been steeped for about 24 hours.  If you want to reproduce this process, I suggest you get a good book on the topic.  S gave me Wild Color several years ago and that's the only book I consult.  (I don't know why the price is so bizarre on Amazon.  It's a good book, but find something cheaper.)

So the pumpkin orange color is gorgeous enough that I think I can pull off wearing an orange shawl.  I'm normally more of a green, brown, navy blue, gray sort of person.  I'll just be sure to keep it isolated from my scarf and purse, so my husband doesn't think the disease is spreading.

-M

Spinning uncarded fibers

Sometimes, if I feel like doing things primitively or want a novelty yarn, I spin just from clumps of fiber in my hand.  This also works well for fibers that are floaty, difficult to card on their own, and easier to wash when they're secured in a yarn- think angora rabbit and chiengora (dog hair).  Luckily, these are pretty clean fibers right off the animal, and won't do a great deal of harm to your wheel or spindle if you spin them raw.  If you haven't done much fiber preparation before, you may disagree with my judgment of dog hair as being "clean."  But after you've pulled off manure tags and urine stained locks while skirting a sheep fleece, bunnies and dogs start seeming clean and nice smelling.

For downy fibers, like angora and chiengora, you simply have to pick though the fiber well to get out all the VM and felted tags.  If the fiber is exceptionally clean, still pick at it a bit to fluff it up and mix different areas of the fleece together.   Then, simply start spinning, drafting out of your handful of fiber.  It's very easy to join a new handful; just stop when you have a little tuft left and then add it to your new handful.  (These pictures are chocolate angora except the spinning picture is Newfoundland/Siberian Husky fur)

 

For sheep's wool, the process is a little different if the fleece has distinct lock structure.  You have to open up all the locks, or at least the cut ends of the locks if you want to retain the curled tips, because you can't really spin a compressed lock at all.  To do this on a large scale, like the people at Ozark Handspun, you should think about investing in a picker to speed up this step.  If I want to spin one lock at a time to create color patterning, texture, and have little curlies stick out, I have to rejoin the fiber I'm drafting at almost every new lock.  As always, the fluffy, unspun tail of the yarn from the last handful gets stretched and drafted together for a bit with the new bunch of fiber.

I've read the the folks at Ozark Handspun use a core (a fine strong thread in the center of the yarn) to spin the wool around so they can create a softly spun yarn without sacrificing integrity.  I don't really know how to corespin- I just make sure my joins are strong enough and my twist tight enough to hold everything together.  Although, this does limit me to making lockspun yarns with a more consistent thickness, as the twist always concentrates in the thin areas and your thick bits can drift apart if the you don't put in enough twist.  But then the amount of twist required to hold together the thick areas makes the thinner areas too tightly spun and they go into angry little coils.

To make your own novelty yarn, check out fiber festivals or online for dyed locks from a soft longwool  breed (or dye your own).  Wensleydale and Teeswater are perfect, or a lamb fleece from a Romney, Border Leicester, Lincoln, Coopworth sheep, or kid mohair.  These photos show some dyed Romney locks I purchased at a local shepherd's festival from Blackberry Patch Farms.

Another thing- if you don't happen to have a wheel designed for spinning bulky novelty yarns, you might have to stop every now and then and help the yarn through the orifice or untangle it from the hooks on the flyer.   My Schacht Matchless did well enough, though it would be nice to have a larger bobbin capacity for this type of spinning.

If you want a little info on tailspinning around a core, check out this great blog entry.

-M

PS

I found some more  suppliers of dyed longwool locks online, but just so you know, I haven't ordered from any of them before.

Steam Valley Fiber Farm, Apache Hill Wool and Fiber Co., Cranberry Moon Farm, and Northeast Fiber Arts Center

Blending on a drum carder

I purchased a Fricke Petite drumcarder about four years ago.  I had spent some time researching drumcarders offered by various companies, and this one was the best compromise of the traits I was looking for.  I decided that I haven't seen many carding photos or tutorials out there, so here is mine. I sometimes start with raw sheep, llama, or alpaca fleece and take it through all the processing steps, or start with commercially prepared fibers and blend by hand.  In this next sequence I'm starting with a raw alpaca fleece from Happy Valley Alpaca Farm.

This is a relatively clean fleece, but you can see in the picture on the left that there is still a bit of vegetable matter (VM).  The picture on the right shows the staple length (length of fibers) and also the lock structure.  As is typical for alpaca, it has a beautiful, lustrous, fine staple.  The lock is only loosely held together, mostly by the bit of gunk stuck to the tip.  I actually use those dirty and slightly mattered tips to pull locks from the fleece if I want to deal with each separately in some organized manner.   Alpaca fleeces are usually very dense on the animal, but when sheared they quickly relax and open up, as they don't have the crimp or scales that holds wool together so well.  As a result, it's best to buy a fleece that was skirted straight off the animal because it all gets jumbled up pretty quickly.

So next I pick out all the bits I don't want before I wash it.

 

I tend to pull off tips of the locks if I can.  If they can be pulled of with a firm tug, it means that the fiber is weak there from sun damage, for that is the only part of the lock that is exposed to weather (also, sometimes the fleece is parted down the spine).  This also gets rid of a majority of the dirt and VM present in the fleece.  I then washed the fiber in warm water with either a small amount of Dawn dish soap or wool wash (because alpaca isn't greasy, just dusty).  After it dries, I card just the alpaca once through on the drumcarder.

On the left is the alpaca batt and some Blue-faced Leicester top ready to go.  I weigh the out about a half ounce of each fiber to make a fifty-fifty blend, and make little piles of pre-weighed fiber to turn into batts.  For the first go around, I pull off staple length chunks from the batts, top, or roving (see above left).  I card about three tufts of each fiber in turn, to create thin, solid layers on the drum.  I usually feed the the tufts (or opened locks) at an angle, as it seems to aid in the goal of separating fibers slowly onto the large drum with no clumping.  After the ounce of fiber is the drum, I remove the batt and rip it into three to four strips.  Then I attenuate the strips out, just like predrafting for spinning.

Next, I feed the fiber in again, spreading the strip wide with my left hand so that the drum fills evenly across its width.  I repeat the last steps, usually mixing up strips from different batts so that the blend is more uniform throughout the whole batch.  Three to five passes is usually enough to get a nice even blend in each batt, with no visible chunks of different fibers.

Above left are finished batts, and on the right is a batt held up to the window to illustrate how clean and even the finished product is.

I love using this 50/50  alpaca/wool blend for spinning, as the yarn is warm, lustrous, and strong, yet lofty and elastic.  This is also the blend I usually use for cobweb felt scarves.

Tomorrow, we will overview spinning without carding.

-M

Avoidance Behavior

So there hasn't been much to post lately.  Not because I haven't been doing any crafts, but because I'm not really finishing much lately.  I've figured out the etiology of my shameful startitis- avoidance behavior relating to the unfinished gansey.  As it is now approaching a year overdue, I'm desperately looking for ways not to work on it, though I know it should be my priority right now.  Luckily (or unfortunately) for me, I have plenty of hobbies, therefore multiple ways of keeping busy without any gansey progress.  Besides the shameful number of barely-cast-on new projects that I'm too embarrassed to catalog here, I've got some other interesting distractions.

Felting-

 
I almost exclusively felt flat objects, such as scarves and yardage.  I guess I like dealing with felt as a fabric and not a sculpture right now.  The scarves are alpaca and merino with embedded hand spun novelty yarn and the newsboy caps are sewn from polwarth/llama felt with silk overlay.

Spinning-

On the left we have ounce skeins of two ply 100% alpaca, fiber originating at a farm down the road.  That swatch is for Norwegian mittens- I'm designing a pattern so I can offer a knitting kit at the farm store.  The white is wool/alpaca roving (also local) I spun up into a thick and thin singles. I'm envisioning a simple triangle garter shawl with a lace border for myself.

And finally, brain tanning-

I don't actually hunt, but it's that time of year where friends are happy to unload hides on you (at least if you live in backwoods Washington).  The deer hide is a giant, beautiful mule deer buck from Eastern WA and the coon is, again, from down the road.  In case you're wondering, the backdrop is the bedspread from my guest/fiber room, and no, I'm not ninety years old and do not have  a crystal bowl of ancient, sticky candies sitting on a doily draped bedside table.

I recently realized that I had previously photographed a drum carding sequence, and I think I'll do a little tutorial next week if I can manage the time.

-M