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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!

3-ply spinning

I have spun up the bluefaced leicester top that I dyed a little while ago. Here it is unspun.

 

I spun it on Sue's Ashford Traditional wheel. The first, smaller, skein is more tightly spun and plyed than the second one. I navajo-plyed both of them, which is a way of plying where you keep the colours together rather than blending them. It was quite scary at first, with loops all over the place and the whole thing twisting back on itself, but I got into a rhythm and was quite pleased with the second skein. There's only 50g here altogether, so I'll have to think of a nice little project for the yarn.