Recently in Fiber Category
Anyway, when she finally settled in for an afternoon nap, the sun was out and it was warm enough to sit out on my balcony. I had been thinking about knitting, but then I noticed these two lonely bobbins sitting on my bookcase -- I finished those up in September with the idea that the plied product would be a gift for a friend. I haven't had a chance to use my wheel since! Remembering how centered spinning always makes me feel, I grabbed my wheel and my lazy kate and those two bobbins and sat out in the sunshine for an hour and a half and plied those singles into a real live 2 ply sock yarn.
I know there is good luck and something special about this sock yarn because when I finished plying, the singles ran out at the exact same time -- that's never happened to me before, in spite of all the weighing out of fiber that I do. I'm looking forward to hanking it up on my niddy-noddy and giving it a good bath so that it can relax and I can feel the real final product -- both the colors (there's a lot of great green hiding a layer under) and the hand. Since these singles have been sitting for so long, the twist was completely dormant. It made for easy plying, but it also means that the final yarn is going to be different than what I see on my bobbin. Working with my wheel was excellent therapy for the afternoon. It didn't chase all the weird energy away, but it did help me get a little of my mommy equillibrium back.
With the help of my daugher (she sleeps in her Baby Bjorn when I spin) I have gotten the second bobbin of my Bonkers Limeola superwash merino spun. The roving that I had shifted from the very limey green seen in the first bobbin to the pale aqua of the second bobbin, so I spun the fiber for the second bobbin so that I could demonstrate the extremes. I think the colors go well together, when next to each other, but I am curious as to what the resulting yarn will look like when plying occurs.
Plying, unfortunately, may take me a little while to get to. Not only is it hard to come by the two straight hours or so I will need to ply and deal with the final yarn, but I only have 6 bobbins for my WooLee Winder and now all 6 of them are in use... so I may have to work on some other things to free a few of them up before I can ply (yes, I do have the plying head, but for sock yarn like this, I like the results I get from my WW bobbins a bit better).
Which means I have to get back to working on that big bale o' moorit CVM....
Buying a little fiber at the Michigan Fiber Festival does seem to have got my spinning pump primed again. One morning, while Z was sleeping, I pulled my spinning wheel into my office and pulled out the Limeola superwash merino that I purchased. As it turns out, spinning is a very nice, relaxing thing to do while keeping an eye on a sleeping baby. It didn't take me too many nap sessions to turn this first 2 ounces from roving into single.
When I started spinning this yarn, I didn't have a specific vision for it. It's a superwash merino, so I had decided that I would turn it into a 2 ply sock yarn, similar to what I have done before with the same kind of fiber, and then I'd make some socks to commemorate the end of the summer or something like that. As I was spinning, though, I got the distinct feeling that I was not the final destination for whatever would come out of this yarn. I was the one putting the twist into the fiber, the one who would turn a pair of singles into a two-ply yarn, but I wasn't the one who was going to take this yarn to the next level. I have an inkling of this project's final destination, but no idea of it's final incarnation.
Sometimes it's interesting how fiber talks to you when you're working with it.
We had a good adventure into Michigan for the Michigan Fiber Festival on Saturday. Zosia slept all the way there (and most of the way back), Mom got to do a little shopping, Dad got to catch a short nap, and Grandma and Grandpa got some high quality baby time. In fact, I didn't have the baby much at all except to nurse her. Zosia spent a lot of time in her Baby Bjorn with one of her grandparents while we strolled through the festival.
Which gave me the chance to take a look at the goods to be had. I was pretty reserved this festival. Really, I don't need any more yarn right now (at least not until I finish something I'm already working on) and I really don't need much fiber at the moment either. But I always get drawn into Tracy Bunkers booth. I guess last time I saw her, I must not have been spinning, because I didn't remember the spinning fiber. So I made up for that with a few spinning stash additions.
Both of the bits of fiber I got are dyed in her Limeola colorway. The bundle on the left is a Silk/Merino/Alpaca blend and the roving on the right is superwash merino. I think both are destined to be two ply yarns. The Silk/Merino/Alpaca I'm going to attempt to get into the lace/sport weight range, the superwash merino is going to be, you guessed it, sock yarn. The whole green thing is out of my usual range of color selections -- perhaps my eye is being influenced by someone I know who has a passion for greens in this range?
Speaking of Alpaca, alpaca seems to be the new black these days. Almost every booth I went into seemed to have a good deal of alpaca or alpaca blend fibers and yarns. Alpaca is not generally my thing, as fiber goes, (not enough elasticity for me, and I find it to be a little hairy) so while I admired a lot of things, not very much ended up in my shopping basket.
Two other things that I was happy to find were Addi Turbo lace needles and Cat Bordi's new sock book. I always like to see creative new approaches to sock knitting and New Pathways for Sock Knitters looks like the kind of book that helps get the creative juices flowing. I've only been able to go through it at a cursory level, but her illustrations are lovely, and there are a number of sock projects I can see myself tackling. And I love how she demonstrates most of the sock designs and techniques on small sized socks -- given the new addition to my world, I think it would be kind of fun to try out a new technique and add to Ms. Z's wardrobe at the same time.
And speaking of Ms. Z... I didn't get too many pictures of her because she was busy entertaining her grandparents (and doing a lot of sleeping). But I did get one picture that I really loved.
Of course, you can't tell in this picture, but my Dad and Z are sitting on top of my parents' Gold Wing Trike (a Gold Wing where the rear axle has two wheels instead of just one) -- so Z has now officially been on her first motorcycle!
Apparently, when it comes to my spinning, I lack a certain amount of resolution. Especially when faced with the prospect of experimenting with some special fiber. What you see above is clearly not a skein of the CVM that I am supposed to be working on.
You see, on Sunday night, I decided that no harm would be done if I pulled out my Franquemont Fibers "Heartbreaker" and just weighed it. You know, so that I would know how much I had to deal with. But then it went a bit farther. I decided that, since I wanted to create striping intervals of my own design, that it would be good to know just how much of each color I had. So I opened up the little batt-buns and separated out the colors and weighed them. Then I got a bit carried away. I decided that I would "sample" a little bit, just to see what the superwash/silk/nylon blend spun up like, since firestar nylon is a new fiber to me. And then I realized that if I was going to spin just a bit, I might as well think about the color progression. How to make stripes that would knit up well in a pair of socks? And then suddenly I was separating the colors from one of those little batts into multiple small bits in a particular order and telling myself that one ounce of fiber really wouldn't take all that long to spin.
Which did, of course, turn out to be true. I can spin an ounce of fiber in about 3 hours. Especially when it is as well prepared as this fiber. No pre-drafting necessary on this stuff. It just slipped effortlessly through my fingers and into a single.
My goal with this fiber was to try to create two singles with similar color intervals, that, when plied, wouldn't barberpole very much. I've spun enough sock yarn now that I am pretty consistent within a particular range. So I wasn't too worried about my ability to get similar lengths of single out of equal weights of fiber. What I was concerned about was getting the equal weights of fiber. My scale, while okay for amounts above 5-10 g or so, doesn't do very well in the 1 gram range that I needed. So in the end, I decided that I would just have to wing it and use my eyeballs to "measure".
My results were mixed. On one hand, in most cases I did get the color bands that were supposed to over lap to over lap. And I did get pretty equal amounts of single on each of the two bobbins. On the other hand, I am pretty sure I ended up with a good deal more barberpoling than solid region once I got past the halfway point. I did contemplate breaking the singles and adjusting, but the nylon added some tensile strength that made this stuff harder to break and join easily. So after trying that once, I gave up and just spun my way on through.
Although the final result is not as close to what I initially envisions as I would like, it's hard to be disappointed in these colors, or in the resulting yarn after plying. I will tell you that this yarn is somewhat overplied (i.e. not balanced) and I will probably have to run it back through my wheel and remove some of the twist (or maybe not... it is for socks after all, and I don't think it's unbalanced enough to have a sever bias in a garment knitteed in the round).
From the 31 g that I spun, I ended up with 110 yards of 2 ply yarn -- pretty respectable, I think. Since this was about a quarter of what I ordered, I should have plenty of yarn for a pair of socks when the project is finished. When I soaked the yarn after plying it gave off no dye whatsoever, and it has a nice soft hand now that it is dry and skeined.
The nylon didn't turn out to be a problem to spin, but I did notice that the fiber was a little rougher on my fingers than straight wool or wool silk blends have been in the past. I can only assume that this is due to the nylon being a bit more durable than my skin. But this is sort of a minor quibble when I think about the added durability that will be present in the final yarn and knitted product. And it in no way detracts from how nice this fiber was to spin or how nice it will feel when worn in a sock.
I am not sure how I am going to handle the next three batts. A part of me would like to find a more precise weighing device, but given that I have just made another rather large purchase (more about that on Friday) I am not really prepared to invest in an expensive gram-sensitive balance at the moment. So, more than likely, I will end up using the eyeball method again. Any suggestions out there from anyone else who has tried this sort of thing?
Aside from the toe of my second Regia Silk sock, I find myself with not so much to talk about this morning. Soon I will have hoardes of 9-patch quilt blocks to show and tell about, but for right now, they are mostly just pieced together strips of fabric and really not all that interesting. So, instead, I'm showing of something that is much more interesting and beautiful.
Lately, I've been itching to spin. You'd think I'd just sit down in front of my wheel and do it, but instead I've been substituting the purchase of fiber. But I've been trying to be moderate in this area -- just enough for small projects. Sock yarn is my favorite small project spinning right now, so when I saw Abby talking about her Luxury Sock Yarn Batts with silk and BFL, well, it was just time to start cruising her Ebay shop again. And I ended up with 3 batts of a colorway she calls Tamale Pie.
I've been curious about BFL in sock yarn for a while. First of all, because of some lovely sock yarn that Emma sent me as part of one of our trades that was made of BFL. Secondly, because BFL is supposedly one of those wools that doesn't felt quite as readily. And finally, just because I have enjoyed spinning BFL and I thought it would be fun to have it in a sock blend.
Last time I didn't give you a good close-up of the batt I received. This time, since I had beautiful light and even better weather, I thought it would be nice to get a close-up so that it was possible to see how truly well prepared this fiber is. I think it's fair to say that my hair isn't this well combed on most days. And as far as the touch sensation goes, well, its lovely stuff and it will be a treat to spin.
I also got some silk samples from Abby. I'm still not an expert at silk identification, but I think the skein on the left is tussah and the skein on the right is bombyx. Since I've really only spun tussah up to this point, I'm looking forward to seeing how they compare.
Now... I have to get back to my rotary cutter and some strip pieces... lots and lots of 9 patches ahead!
So... I mentioned a post or so back that I had been doing some shopping. Well, indeed I have. I'm not hitting the highest heights of fiber consumerism, but I have made a recent purchase that I just have to talk about.
One of the things that I am always trying to find more of is good spinning blogs -- blogs by people who have been spinning for a long time and really have a deep body of knowledge that they bring to bear when they talk about a spinning subject. I wish now I could remember how I came across Abby's Yarns so I could give credit where credit is due. Abby Franquemont has a great blog and an incredibly rich knowledge of fiber and spinning. She talks about everything from yarn construction to yarn pricing, she's talked about what to look for in spinning wheels and answers questions from people who are looking for help with their technique.
After reading her blog for a while, I took the plunge and ordered some of her Franquemont Fibers Luxury Sock Batts. The blend that I ordered is a blend of superwash merino, silk and nylon in a colorway called "Heartbreaker". Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while will not be surprised that I picked a blue, teal and purple colorway -- I decided if I was going to make luxury sock yarn, it was going to be for me, and it was going to be in my favorite colors.
Let me just say that this is probably some of the best prepared fiber I've ever had my hands on. when I untucked one of those little buns (holding one feels like holding a baby bird in your hand) I was treated to some of the softest, smoothest fiber I've ever had. The whole "like buttah" thing? Well, "buttah" don't have anything on this stuff.
Aside from the incredible preparation, while the batts contain all three colors, Abby has placed them side by side so they can be easily separated. I am thinking that I am going to split them and try to spin some "self-striping" yarn by spinning a certain amount of each color into my single in a regular pattern and see if I can make two singles that I combine into a two ply that match up enough to maintain the striping pattern in the final yarn. All 4 of the little bundles I have amount to just over 4 ounces of fiber, so it shouldn't be a long spinning project.
Well, not once I get finished with my CVM. I've told myself that this is a treat that I can only have after I finish my moorit CVM project. In the coming weeks, we'll see how strong my will is.
Given my current fascination with knee socks, log cabin squares and fingerless mitts, I haven't gotten very much spinning done. But I have started a new spinning project. Remember this fiber? Lovely hand -dyed Romney roving from Fleecemakers. I'd never spun Romney before, but I've read the blogs of plenty of people who have nice things to say about it. This stuff is plenty soft, and the colors are deep and rich so I thought I'd try spinning up a bit to see what it wanted to do.
So far, the single I am spinning is considerably thicker than what I "normally" spin. I suspect this is because the fiber is a bit longer staple, but I think it also had to do with my attempt to get bits of all the colors blended into most areas so that I could avoid that whole stripey yarn thing. It may sound kind of funny, but I'm rather excited about this single, not so much because of the great color and soft hand of the fiber, but because I seem to have gotten some place where I am making more decisions about what the diameter of my single is going to be like. I think if I were to turn this into a two-ply, I'd get something closer to worsted weight rather than the something on the light end of DK weight, which is my "normal" result.
Now that I've finished up that pair of knee socks (more on that tomorrow when I can take some pictures during the daylight) and while I'm still thinking about designs for mitts, I suspect I'll put a bit more effort back into spinning. After all, I still have a whole lot of moorit CVM waiting to become yarn as well!
In scientific publishing, there's the concept of the "Least Publishable Unit". Because scientists are often judged by the number of publications to their record, it's sometimes seen as advantageous to publish your data in the smallest possible chunks that you can still put together as a story. Today's post might seem like I'm trying to mark out the "Least Bloggable Unit" given that the information would have fit very neatly with yesterday's post and that I had originally put everything together to be part of the same post. But that's not really the intention. As I was thinking about it, I decided that the spinning and the swatching were really two different stories, they just happened to involve the same yarn. That, and at the end of the day, this blog is still my fibery journal, and I wanted a little more time to think about the swatch that I'm going to talk about today.
After spinning the main skein, I had enough single left on one bobbin to spin up about 42 yards of 2-ply that I could use to swatch with. My first thoughts for a use for the yarn had been some fingerless mitts of my own design -- not because there aren't a lot of other lovely examples out there, but because I love to use small projects as templates to try things out. Somehow, if the experiement doesn't go well with a small project, the ripping process doesn't feel quite as painful and it's not hard for me to get started trying something else out.
I've talked before about the differences between 2-ply and 3-ply yarn, and since I was thinking about combining cables and lace in my mitts, I thought this would be a good opportunity to swatch and see how each type of pattern looked in the yarn. And while I know that the yarn has both silk and angora content, the information I have for the roving doesn't give me percentages to work with, so I wasn't completely sure what to expect from the yarn in terms of drape and elasticity.
I determined that the yarn I made came in around 14 WPI -- which made it a light DK. So I picked up a set of US 5 (3.75 mm) needles and cast on to see what the swatch would tell me. After knitting the swatch, I soaked and blocked it to see if washing would have any effect on the final fabric.
On plain stockinette, I get about 5.5 stitches/inch and a soft fabric that I like both the look and feel of. It has a reasonable amount of drape, and a reasonable amount of structure. Important, because I don't want floppy drapey mitts. So the size 5 needle was a decent call. Though, in a pinch, this yarn is probably fine enough to go down to a 4 if I wanted a denser fabric.
The next section I tried was a simple lace pattern. Anyone who has worked on my most recent sock pattern will recognize the Cat's Paw lace pattern -- it was the one I could remember easily without having to refer to a pattern book, and was actually a small enough motif to consider for a pair of mitts. I consider the lace results to be just okay. The fuzziness of the yarn muddies the lace definition a little bit, so I don't think anything complicated would show up very well. But it's doable.
The final section of the swatch is a couple of simple cables. I think I made a mistake with something in the cable on the right, which is why the close up focuses on the simple 6-stitch cable on the left. I was initially worried that this yarn, given that it's both two ply and made up of some not very elastic fibers, wouldn't be a good candidate for cabling. The swatch changed my mind completely. The cable definitely has a less three-dimensional quality than you might expect if I was working with a 3-ply yarn, but the cable still has nice definition and the flatter texture is probably a bonus for a pair of mits that I want to lay flat against my hands and not get caught on things while I work at my computer (my computer room gets quite cold during the day in the winter, and I find that my mouse hand is almost always ice cold if I spend the day working at home).
On the overall, I consider this swatch a success. I like the hand of the final fabric, and it looks like I'll have no problem with simple lace and cable textures. I can wear the fabric against my skin without irritation and I like that there is no terribly obvious striping. I think the tweedy quality adds to the final product without distracting too much from the knitted design. I am still frustrated with my camera's inability to reproduce the color of this yarn in a way that does not make it look like a sickly aqua, but hopefully by the time I have something interesting to show with this yarn again, I'll have figured out how to deal with that.
So the next step is for me to dig through some stitch dictionaries, doodle in my little paper journal, and figure out what I want to do on the small canvas of handknit fingerless mitts.
This picture is a repeat from my trip to the Michigan Fiber Festival last August. Unfortunately, it seems to be the only image I have of the 4 ounces of Wool, Angora and Silk roving that I bought from Jane Purcell (sadly websiteless, because her color combos are incredibly vivid and engaging). Those of you who know me in person probably know why I was drawn to this roving: the vivid color in that blue/green range that I just can't seem to have enough of. Unlike many rovings I'd purchased previously, this roving had also been blended so that the colors ran vertically through the roving instead of horizontally. And I was curious as to what kind of final effect that would create. Once I picked up the roving, it was hard not to pick up several more. To be honest, I now wish I'd given in to temptation. The wool/angora/silk combo is pleasantly soft and lofty and 4 ounces only gives you so many options.
When I started spinning, I was thinking something in the neighborhood of a 2 ply sport-to-DK weight yarn. I have to be honest, though, I really haven't gotten to the point in my spinning where I'm sophisticated enough to sample and work towards the yarn I envision. Mostly, I just start spinning a single and spin it where it "feels" right. Probably once I have become a more accomplished spinner, I'll push my fiber around more. But for now, I'm content to let the fiber lead.
The result of my efforts is this skein -- about 300 yards of tweedy happiness. It's about 14 WPI, which puts it in the light DK range. I wish that my camera could handle this saturated teal well -- all the pictures I took had a much bluer cast than is true to life.
Part of letting this fiber do what it wanted to do was to let the lighter green areas be a little slubby. I'm not sure, but if I had to guess, I'd say the light green fiber is probably mostly silk, given the way it behaves. Because there were little slubs in the fiber, I just let a lot of those come along as they wanted to. Between that and the general distribution of the light green and just a touch of midnight blue throughout the teal fiber, the result is a yarn with a lot of depth and dimensionality to go along with a very tweedy disposition. Something that appeals to me a great deal and tells me a lot about the kinds of rovings I should be looking for in the future. This is one of the first yarns that I have spun (besides the moorit CVM) where I really feel that I could make an actual garment out of this.
But, of course, 300 yards doesn't get me very far along the road to a garment. But I am thinking it might make a absolutely lovely pair of fingerless gloves to keep my hands warm while I use the computer -- now that the winter weather we expect to be present in January in Chicago finally seems to have come home to roost!
