Here’s the latest in the shop for hand dyed spinning fiber……
I heard you, and there are a few Rainbows:
Tussah Silk!!
The rest of these are Corriedale combed top. BTW, I have proudly just dyed and sold nearly an entire bump (that’s about 22 pounds) of Corrie!!! Yes, more is on the way!
And then I have some fall and other things for you:
Superwash Merino-
Blue Faced Leicester Combed Top-
Thanks for joining me for this week’s fiber update, next week will be scrumptious yarns!
It was beautiful this morning….had to share! Click on ’em to go to Flickr and see them huge!
It has been quite the Thursday. We do library story time this day, and for once we were early. Or not. Cub 2 left the backpack with the essential DUE TODAY or ELSE videos in it. So one round trip later, and there we were. In the pouring rain. The cubs were thrilled to use their umbrellas, at least!
After the library, we did grocery shopping. This was a bad idea, since we were all hungry (despite snacks I had packed), but fairly essential since basics to make about anything were in short supply. The cubs tried to slip in candy and pop tarts and stuff….but I did relent in the end and let them toss in a take and bake pizza (it was terrible).
I did enjoy my lunch, after I got all the stuff unloaded and changed into some warm dry clothes. I bought stuff to make pseudo-reubens (no corned beef at this store, so plain beef had to do), and yum yum!
Next thing I know, Mr. Tiger is home (what? ), which means the afternoon was shot and I needed to make dinner. This evening, I’m packing boxes and knitting custom scarves.
Anyway, I had intended to put up a few braids of fiber today, but the light was terrible with the rain, and I’d really like to have a few more to put up at once to make it worth your trip over to the shop (wouldn’t want to fatigue your mouse!!!). So, please forgive me for not having an update this week. I’ll have plenty of new pretty stuff next week.
It’s been awhile since I talked about my WIP’s, so here goes!
Yes, yes, this is not much progress on what we’ve dubbed ‘The Giant Bacon’. I do have an excuse…..I made the cast on chain WAAAAAY too tight, and so the Giant Bacon was becoming the Giant C due to my loosening gauge. So I had to tediously pick out the cast on and crochet something else there. Here’s the result, and I’m back to adding actual inches to the blanket. (No comments please about the acrylic. This blanket had better last forever, as long as it is taking to make!!!)
Next are my Flower Garden socks. These are knit from Tiger Cub, and are in a bag I can grab when going someplace where I must wait. I’m reforming the stitches to make 2x rib, then casting off. One sock done, second sock half way done.
And finally we have my experiments with Paton’s Chunky. The colors are perfect to go with my winter coat, but I’m not sure yet what to do with it. This is a drop stitch wave pattern I got for free off Ravelry, but the repeat is just not working well with the length of the variegation. This one is due to be frogged and I’ll try something else. Any suggestions?
Today’s featured project is from Tracy. She started with this 8oz braid of Corriedale, named Deep Rainbow. She spun it into a thick single, then took it to an art yarn class…..
And this beautiful coiled yarn is what she came home with! Isn’t it fun and fabulous?!
LOL, I’m hearing you, people, and yes rainbows are on my agenda for fiber dyeing next week…so stay tuned!!! Enjoy your weekend, and if you are lucky enough to go to Rhinebeck I hope you stay warm enough!
Here’s this week’s hand dyed yarn and fiber update. The fiber is BFL I posted a couple of weeks ago, but I had it in skeins. Seems people like braids better, so I braided and rephotographed.
The yarn is Tiger Twist, Bengal (BFL sock….very yummy!), some Siberian Worsted, and a skein of Tiger Cub just for good measure! Browse the new guys under All Items at the shop!
Welcome to my new feature in the blog…..customer projects (Finished Objects). I hope to keep this going, so if you’d like to be featured some Friday, do drop me a line here or on Ravelry.
ThermalGal on Ravelry was in my spring ‘Transitions’ sock of the month club, and the yarn below was my spring/Easter offering….Jelly Beans on Silver Lynx (superwash merino, silk, nylon, and real silver!). Here is her sock blank:
She knit it using the Spring Forward pattern by Linda Welch. You can get full details of ThermalGal’s project on Ravelry.
Didn’t they turn out pretty?
In the top row, we have Tussah Silk. These are 4 oz braids, and are quite soft and luxurious.
The second row contains Corriedale, love to spin this….it’s like comfort spinning!
The first picture in row 3 is Firestar . I have 11 colors up right now, so you can blend them in your self to make sparkle batts, rolags, or carry along here or there with your spinning. Fabulous way to add bling without changing the hand of your fiber.
All the rest of the braids are a new fiber to the shop: Superwash Merino. You may ask why I didn’t have it in the shop before. Well, I really wanted to be sure of my methods before I went into superwash. It is a tricky fiber….dye hungry and slippery as all get out. We won’t discuss what happened to my test batch (well, maybe when I spin it…it wasn’t THAT bad!!!). I’m happy to report that my practice paid off, and I now have fluffy colored clouds to offer you. This stuff is 21.5 microns, so super duper soft. I love it, and I’m so glad I bought a whole bump. The undyed is also available in my natural fiber section, if you’d like to spin the natural, or try your hand at dyeing.
Next week, I’ll be doing a big hand dyed yarn update!!!
I thought it was about time for me to show you what I’ve been working on. This is 6 out of about 10 ounces of fiber dyed by Carol Lee. Mostly it yellow, green, and navy, but there are bits of red in there, too. The goal? A 3 ply with a good deal of twist that should make good socks. Due to the amount of twist I want to put in, I can get away with spinning this semi-woolen (or semi-worsted? Is that splitting hairs?). The idea is that I can spin long draw. When you have kids and a homeschool and a husband and a home business…..spinning time is precious and fast yardage is necessary. A quickly filling bobbin is just satisfying, you know?
The way this wool was dyed is totally random so even within the same 2-3 inch section there are variations. Thus I’m not trying to make stripes or anything, just spinning as is and I’ll let it all do what it wants.
Here I’m holding the end of my first 2 oz length of combed top. I held the end tightly in my right hand, and pulled, holding the left hand back at least a staple and a half. I was aiming for 4-5 inches to come off. Here it is pulled off:
Next, I drew the fiber out, and fluffed it sideways to make a long flat ‘batt’. I generally doubled the length, just pulling a bit at a time, then moving a bit down the fiber and pulling again, repeating a few times.
Then I roll the top up from one end to the other.
Then pull a little tuft fromt the center of your quickie rolag (also known as a fauxlag ):
And start spinning!
All right, yes that is WAY too thick for a 3 ply sock yarn. I did thin it out considerably after this. Trying to spin with one hand and take pictures with the other was beyond me, as I do a supported long draw. Also at that time, my Lendrum was shaking like crazy anytime I got any speed going. I discovered when unpacking my wheel after Wisconsin Sheep and Wool that two of my rubber feet had come off. I pried off the other, and now Lizzie spins just great again. Whew.
Anyway, I did the rolags for about half the first two ounces, and then I just went to spinning a single staple length from the fold. With the rolag, you have more fiber in there, so you are actively spining for longer, although you are also doing more prep. I get snatches of time, so to pull off a staple, fold it over my finger, and spin it fits in my schedule. My quicky rolags also had a tendency to wad up at the end, requiring a bit of re-ordering.
So what have you found works best for you to get a woolenish yarn from combed top?
For today’s Fiber Friday, I’m going to focus on my new drum carder, Big Tom. I’m not going to call this a review, since I don’t have any way to test this out side by side with any other carder. Instead I’ll call it a ‘tour’, and you can join me as I put Tom through his paces and show you how to make a striped batt. I’ll warn you that this is very photo intensive, if your connection is slow you may want to go get a cup of tea and a snack.
Today’s subject is some pretty basic wool, these are 2 oz handfuls of mill end domestic wool from Brown Sheep. I’ve hand dyed these by dropping in dyepots of other yarn and fiber that I needed to be exhausted. The wool is soft, but not especially fine, and really likes to stick to itself. There is also some mohair in there. It was ideal for me to ‘practice’ with, since it wasn’t likely to nep on me. (Or rather, some was already nepped, so it didn’t matter…I’m going for an artsy batt). The cloth is 90 on the licker and 120 on the swift. Other tpi densities are available, and it is easy to change out the swift. You can see other specifics on the Fancy Kitty site.
Why did I need to practice? Well, Big Tom is somewhat different from my previous Kitten carder, although just as beautiful….if not more!!
Tom has separate motors for the licker in and the swift, both on adjustable dials, and both independently controlled as far as direction. There are no numbers around the dials, or suggestions on how to set them, but I can figure that out as I go.
Alrighty, here’s the fiber….2 oz each of pink, yellow, and blue, with a bit of dyed firestar for each of them.
I wanted to card all these up separately first….to make the final batt smoother, and make it easier to do the stripes. Here is start to finish with the yellow. This was still in top form, so the cub and I pulled staple lengths from the end and fed them into the carder. We set the licker and swift speeds so that the swift went around about 4-5 times for every turn of the licker. This is similar to the speed of the Kitten, and most other drum carders.
After a good layer of yellow, I fed the firestar on directly to the drum. It likes to get caught in the licker, so it makes sense to just apply it to the swift. (Note, you could even turn the licker off, and build a whole batt directly on the swift this way.)
And here is the whole 2 oz of yellow and firestar on the drum. There seems to be a lot in the licker. Just like my kitten did, it seems to fill up to a point, but really does a good job of keeping the short fibers out of the batt. Once I cleaned the licker I saw that it wasn’t really that much.
Here’s an edge view of the batt on the swift. Still some room on there!
Split batt ready for doffing:
And here it is off the drum. Big Tom makes batts that are 36 inches long…yup, a whole yard!
The yellow was a piece of cake, but here is the blue. Looks like trouble!
Well, the joke was on me, because with a tiny bit of work, it ended up being all floofy and thin.
Instead, it was the pink that gave me trouble. You can see here that it was going on all clumpy.
Here is where the user really factors into drum carding. I had the swift going way too fast, and I was feeding in fiber that wasn’t floofed enough. A drum carder should make a gentle swooshing noise, especially if you have a brush, but if you are hearing tearing noises, you certainly ARE tearing your fibers. Try something different….go slower, flick card your fiber….SOMETHING. Garbage in, garbage out.
In this case, I should have taken my own advice…..I should have re-carded this pink batt before combining with the others. I didn’t. So yup, artsy batt it is (you’ll also see that I lost a fair amount of it on the next pass.)
Here’s all 3 color batts.
Hmmm…..I seem to have neglected to photograph the actual putting together of the batts. I ripped each batt in half (I was making two 3 oz batts), and balanced them out as much as possible with the scale. Then I ripped each half into thirds (so really 6ths of the original batts) and fed them into the carder….one third yellow, one third blue, one third pink, then repeating two more times. Hence 3 layers per batt. If I had wanted even better blending at the overlaps, I could have split the batts even thinner, and sent all three colors in at once. Or sent the whole batt through another time by peeling off full layers. It suited me to just send the bits through a bit thicker and let blending happen at the wheel. Here it is on the drum. As you can see, the yellow and blue came through the second pass wonderfully, but the pink really had needed the second carding.
Here it is ready to pull off:
This is mid-pull on the batt (I use a dowel method). As you can see, the fibers were nicely carded (even the pink), and pulled off very cleanly.
Finally, we have the finished batts!
Stay tuned for the next drum carding adventure with Big Tom, which will be some superwash merino. Yummy, and very fine!
Other posts you might be interested in:
