Here I am, all finished with the Christmas scarf rush, so I had a chance to photograph some yarn and fiber and do an update today! Stop by the shop to check them all out.
Tiger Cub sock yarn is being discontinued…..not because I don’t think it is a great yarn (I do, and have numerous socks knit from it), but my studio is only so big, and new exciting yarns are calling for me to dye them (not to mention all the fiber that has been following me home). So, I need the shelf that Tiger Cub lives on.
What does that mean for you? Fantastic hand dyed sock yarn that was originally $22 is now $16. Yup, $16….that’s 30% off. Grab your favorites now before they are gone…..this is the final discount, and the remaining stock will disappear from the site on January 1.
There are many semi-solid and blended colors, plus a few variegated skeins. Can you hear them? They want to come live in your stash!
Just a quick post to let you know that I’m back home now, and wading through all my emails and getting packages ready to ship!
I have been having quite the enjoyable time this week dyeing up all these different fibers! New this week are Corrie X and Merino/Tencel. Check out the newest on the block. 
1. Tropical Rainbow – Hand Dyed Tussah Silk Sliver, 2. Lakeshore – Superwash Merino Top, 3. Faded Roses – Tussah Silk Sliver, 4. Winter’s Day – Corrie X Top, 5. Glastonbury Thorn – BFL Top, 6. Fiery – Hand dyed BFL Wool Top, 7. CMY Party – Hand Dyed Corrie X Top, 8. Purple People Eater – Hand Dyed Merino Tencel Top, 9. Dusty Rose – Superwash Merino Top, 10. RYB Party – Corrie X top, 11. Deep Forest – BFL Wool Top, 12. Rainbow – Hand Dyed Tussah Silk Sliver, 13. Aurora – Superwash Merino Wool Fiber, 14. CMY Party – Superwash Merino Top
Orders placed by noon CST Wednesday will ship immediately, otherwise I’m forbidden to turn on the internet until Friday, December 4th. It is a time to be thankful, and to enjoy being with loved ones. Happy Thankgiving to you and your family!
Today’s photo tutorial will focus on making a layered batt, which results in a multi-color roving when pulled….either straight from the swift of the drum carder, or made later by zig-zag tearing the batt. If you haven’t joined me for one of these before, the carder is a Big Tom from Ron Anderson at Fancy Kitty. This method will work on whatever carder you happen to have.
I started with three carded batts of wool I had hand dyed. Here I have magenta, navy blue, and white blended with some sparkly firestar. I ran both of these batts twice, so they are well carded and blended. Each batt is about 3 ounces.
Next, I pulled each batt into 3 parts, and weighed them out so that the finished batts would be as consistant as possible.
Now to the carder! I chose the fiber with the longest staple to put down first on the carder, to make it easier to get the batt or roving off the swift later. Here I am pulling a ‘leaf’ from my magenta batt. Just hold the end with both hands and gently scrunch and pull so the layers separate. (Making a heart frame for your carder is optional. LOL!)
Then if you continue to pull the layers apart, you get a nice thin and wide batt that will just flow onto the swift.
After I got all the layers of magenta on the carder, I did some burnishing. This is a dog slicker brush, it has nice flexible teeth that won’t damage the teeth on the carder. Then I continued in the same way, putting on the white with firestar, and the navy blue layers.
Now I have a nice full swift, and I’m ready to pull some roving. To start, lift up just a small portion of the batt.
Then thread the bit through something with a smallish hole to use as a diz. This is a button from my kids’ beading stuff. You can punch a hole (with a paper punch) in a plastic lid and that would do as well. Or you could get all fancy and purchase a real diz!
And then…..well….pull! Hold the diz close to the drum and guide it around in a spiral with one hand, and give the fiber a bit of a twist and pull with the other.
Here I am, with about half the roving pulled from the drum carder. And then, well….it happens to everyone……oops!
No biggie if you are pulling roving for yourself, just keep going and you’ll join it up again when spinning. Here’s my finished hand pulled roving.
Then I went back and layered the rest of the wool for two more batts. This time, I pulled them as batts. I wanted to try my hand at twisting them into buns….it was a bit challenging, since the batts on Tom are a yard long! I accordion folded the batts in thirds so that both sides would show, then twisted both ends, let it coil up, and tucked in the ends.
And last, but not least…..when I carded the original single color batts, I saved the stuff from the licker in, and carded it all together to make a nice art batt.
Thanks for joining me for yet another installment of fun with a drum carder!
Welcome the newest yarn in the zoo…. Zephyr Lace. This 50-50 blend of silk and merino is soft, lustrous, and has a great drape to it. 1200 yards in 4 oz skeins for your shawl or weaving projects.
Next is this week’s newest Bengal BFL sock yarn ….if you haven’t tried this yet, you are in for a treat! 4 plies make for a smooth round yarn, and BFL is a great long wool….more durable and pill resistant than merino, yet still soft. Oh, and it has a nice luster, too!
And I’ve also done a few new Tiger Twist yarns. This is a great sturdy high twist yarn that makes feet hugging socks (or hand hugging gloves)!
Finally, there are just too many great yarns out there to dye, and not enough space in my studio. I have therefore discontinued Tiger Cub. It is priced at a discount, so grab your favorites before they are gone.
Ok, so I don’t follow sports too much, other than what Mr. Tiger likes to watch while I’m spinning….but a friend of mine submitted a possible nickname for the Minnesota Vikings front four, ala Purple People Eaters of past years.
The name he submitted was “The Four Norsemen of the Apocalypse”. His suggestion is in the top 10…and actually right now is number 2.
I’d really love to see him win it, so if you are so inclined, please do stop by and vote. Chicago style….vote early, vote often!
For my non-knitting readers (or those who do knit, but are starting to get the feeling that WIP’s aren’t going to turn into FO’s in time), I’d like to mention my little custom scarf knitting service.
Choose two colors, and I will knit up (on my nifty manual knitting machine) a beautiful striped rugby scarf, lovingly finished by hand. The handsome scarf below is Navy Blue and Charcoal.
I have three sizes available (Regular, Long, and BIG) and three fringe options (none, 3″, and 7″). The regular navy and white on the left is part of a set of 25 I just completed for a soccer team, the center Long purple and gold is my personal scarf (University of Northern Iowa is my alma mater), and the red and gold BIG scarf is for an Iowa State Cyclone fan.
This scarf is showing one of two new colors for this year, light gray (paired with burgundy). I also have a ‘Carolina’ Sky Blue. If you need colors other that what is set up in the shop, please do contact me. I can get many others, I just don’t stock them all in my studio.
If you are considering ordering a scarf as a gift for Christmas, I encourage you to get your order in soon. The week of Thanksgiving until Christmas is a busy time for all of us, and there are only so many scarves I can make during that time and still keep up with the kids and our musical commitments. So get your favorite fan or wizard some stripes, and have that present safely tucked away in plenty of time!!
As of 2011, I no longer make these scarves. Sorry!
Want to see The Painted Tiger stuff in person (and meet me)? We will be at Sheep in the City, February 26-28. It sounds like a lot of fun (pajama party, anyone?), so I hope you can find a class you’d like to take, or be able to drop in to spin or knit awhile and say hi! Oh, and the first 50 people who register for the 3 days will receive a gift bag (registration opened today).
For today’s Fiber Friday, I’m going to take you on another photo adventure with my Big Tom drum carder by Ron nderson at Fancy Kitty (no affiliation, just a happy customer). Up to now, I’ve been carding medium domestic wool, and it has done a great job. Big Tom currently comes standard with 120 tpi on the swift, so it is certainly suited for fine fibers, and it was time I tried some.
My subject wool is this oatmeal mill-end Superwash Merino. I got it cheap, and yep, I got what I paid for…..it is a mess. Can I make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear? We shall see….
I have done a few batts of this, just feeding it in tufts, and not taking any special care. What I got seemed nice enough on the surface, although it seems rather dense for merino (me being used to the combed top I dye).
But, hold it up to the light, and you can see the problem:
Now, I know for a fact that most of those noils were in there to begin with, and I just pushed them down in the batt with the brush and then I *gasp* burnished those suckers down in there. So this is my own fault. My new mission, to get rid of the crud and make a nice fiber prep.
From looking at a variety of carders prior to my purchase, I knew that even the more ‘famous’ carders are advertised that they can card fine fibers ‘with care’. Well, what does that mean? I decided that I needed to take advantage of the construction of the carder. For reference, I’m carding this at around a 4-5 to 1 ratio between the swift and licker in. I removed the brush so any burnishing would be done deliberately by me.
I didn’t take any special care with the actual fiber, since I wanted to see how well the carder itself would deal with these imperfections. I pulled out tufts, and put them on the tray, lumps and all.
The licker in is really great at capturing short fibers and large blobs of neps and noils. So strategy one is to keep the licker as clean as possible so it can do its job.
When fairly clean the licker caught most of the junk, and if something got loose on the swift, it picked it back up when that spot came around again. Admittedly, it seemed like a boat load of fiber caught in the licker. Hold that thought, I’ll come back to it later.
The fine teeth of the swift will not easily absorb clumps, so it was pretty easy to see anything that got past the licker, and just pick them out. (Hence the reason for not having the brush on.) I found that it helped to have good direct lighting for this.
Although it was a little tedious to keep cleaning the licker and picking out bits (great preps take time, right?), soon I had enough of a batt to pull off. I’ve been asked a few times about doffing, so I’ll cover that here, too.
Here, I’m lifting the edge of the batt. I just use a knitting needle.
I have generally used two dowels or larger knitting needles for pulling the batt off, but had heard of the paper towel tube method and I said ‘duh, more torque’. (yes, I’m a geek). So this is actually a plastic wrap tube (sturdier), and a wooden dowel. Tuck the tube under the fiber, then use the dowel or needle to make a ‘brake’. (The ends will wrap up the other way over the dowel.) It makes it easier to get the batt started, since it cannot just spin on the tube.
Then just roll!
So how did Tom and I do? Check this out:
And here is all the fiber I had cleaned from the licker in while carding…
Just for fun, I put the brush back on, cranked it down, and fed all that junk through the carder.
It went right on, now that it was all fluffy, with little getting trapped on the licker in. But all the lumps went in there, too, since I had the brush on and wasn’t picking any. Again, on the surface, I got a nice looking batt, but using x-ray vision….
And here are the two batts side by side.
On the left is the junk batt, and on the right is the one I labored over. The junk batt is quite dense, while on the other hand the nice batt feels lighter (even though it actually weighs a bit more) and fluffed out very nicely….like merino should.
So, can Big Tom handle fine fibers….absolutely. With care and willingness to accept waste, Tom can turn a ratty mess into a fine fluffy batt. No piece of equipment is a miracle worker, so as always…if you aren’t getting the results you want, try something different. I’m glad I changed my method with this fiber, it has really opened up the possibilities of what I can do with it.
