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Autumn in June

I finished spinning my autumn-toned Blue Faced Leicester.

Jill asked whether one can forecast what the colours are going to look like. Not really! You can make educated guesses about how long the stripes will be, but it seems as if there are lots of changes in density and brightness from unspun fibre, to yarn to knitted piece. I don't have enough of this for a pair of socks, but I think these gloves are going to be nice:

My dilemma with these is whether to go straight on and do the little finger before finishing the palm as I usually do. I think not, because that will interrupt the sequence of stripes on the hand. I can live with each finger starting a bit abruptly.

I started these last weekend on our drive to and from Exeter to pick up son's stuff from University. I haven't touched them since because my commuting knitting is a mystery shawlette (urgh, hate that word) designed by Wendy Johnson. It's bottom up, which I've not done before and it has been fun to do. The rows are getting really short now and I'm confident of finishing it next week.

The spinster

While I was away in the States I rediscovered my motivation to spin. I've been treadling like a demented creature ever since. I really wanted to spin good 3-ply for socks. Not too thick, not too thin; not too soft, not too stiff. There are quite a few variables, but as I'm not a very organised or academic spinner I just launched in. I got some Corriedale top and played around with dyeing and spinning.

Attempt 1: soft, but colours went muddy, yarn is much too thin

Attempt 2: colours nice and bright, still too thin, a bit scratchy:

Attempt 3 - abandoned own dyeing and used commercial Falkland: nice and soft, but too thick:

The smaller skein is chain- or navajo-plied. It gives the effect of 3-ply, although in fact there is only one strand looped around itself. It enables one to keep the colours separated. The larger skein shows how the colours get mixed up when you ply three strands together.

Finally, I dyed some humbug bfl top (it's a mixture of natural brown and white) and am just finishing spinning it up. I did two colourways, blue and autumn colours, and am going to use both in the same pair of socks. In fact, I've done the first blue toe - photo to follow. This yarn is soft, not too thick and I love the colours! I chain-plied this.

Here's the autumn version before spinning.

 

A new experience

My friend Marcela came round for coffee today and I taught her to spin! She was remarkably quick on the uptake. I started her on a spindle and then she had a go on the wheel. A new experience for her - and for me as a first-time spinning teacher!

Mrs B. has been quiet today. I think the little Bs must have all flown. One of the was sitting in the honeysuckle under the nest for the whole of yesterday afternoon, being fed with titbits by Mrs and Mr B. I think there must have been more than one baby, but no sign of any of them today. I miss the squawking, which has been quite a feature of the last week or two.

I'm engaged on another dye-card-spin project. This time I took some brown merino top and am going to turn it into a 2-ply roughly-dk weight. I have about 200g.

Handspun

At the risk of boring the non-spinners, here are the results of my recent experiments in dyeing, carding, blending and spinning. The wool is 'Kent lambswool'. I'm not sure if this is Romney or not. It's fairly soft, but not soft enough to make a nice scarf, in my opinion.

First, the striped. I blended the batts, divided them in two so I'd have two repeats of each colour and spun with a long draw.  Then I chain (Navajo) plyed so that the colours remained unmixed. This is therefore a three-ply yarn. I intended it for socks but I don't think it's really strong enough. I abandoned the third skein (not shown) half way through because the singles kept breaking as I was plying. Pretty colours, though!

 

I dyed the second lot in brighter colours and, as I explained in the last post, I made layered batts in two sets: reds/pinks and blue/green, each with a contrast of yellow/green. Here's the pinky red skein. I decided to spin this as thick singles and not to ply. It looks plied because the layering of colours in the batts is maintained as you spin and you get the barber-pole effect.

I think this will probably end up as fingerless mittens - I tried it as a little lace cowl/scarf but I think it's just a bit tickly.

I have been knitting as well. I'm making a scarf from the Woodland Shawl pattern. Pics soon.

Layered batts

Carding on a drum carder is a good wool-based activity for a very hot day. You have to handle the fleece very gently and turn the handle very  s l o w l y.  I dyed some more of the Kent lambswool in brighter colours and blended them on the carder.

I split them up and made layered batts. These are thin layers of different colours carded only once so they don't blend but do stick together. They're a bit like those pink wafer biscuits. When you spin them you can get good colour effects, with colours remaining distinct.

I first tried a multi-coloured batt:

 but this was nasty when I spun it up, so I decided to make one skein of mainly red/pink with a light green contrast and one skein of blue with yellow contrast. I'll show you those next time.

I just need to ply the third skein of the previous carding experiment and then I'll show them all.

I need suggestions

At Woolfest I bought some Polwarth roving. That might not mean much to some readers; from others it might draw an appreciative nod. Polwarth is a breed of sheep developed in Australia. Its main ancestry is Merino, so you can tell that this sheep has fine, soft wool. Roving means that the wool has been cleaned and then carded, which is a way of preparing fleece to be soft and fluffy. Notice that the word 'soft' appears twice.

Well, I fell in love with two colourways produced by this particular dyer (now can't remember the name, but a Canadian): Autumn Garden and Winter Garden. Here is Autumn Garden spun and two-plied.

This is 250g of very soft, tweedy aran. There is one complete repeat of the colours in all.

The thing is: what I am going to do with it now?

The plan

Plan

To knit a pair of hand-dyed, handspun socks.

Execution

1    Take some carded 'Kent lambswool' (possibly Romney?) fleece, divide into several portions and dye each a different colour using Landscape acid dyes.

2    Card each colour to loosen up the fibres after dyeing.

3    Subdivide the colours and combine on the carder to make blended colours. Each little sausage is blended 2 to 3 times - no more because there is a danger of over-processing the fibre, which produces neps (tangles). Also, I don't want the colours to be too homogenised.

Well, that's how far I've got so far. Next is the spinning!

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.