What do I want my sweater to feel like? Sturdy and windproof, or soft and snuggly? Or somewhere in-between?
It shouldn't be too soft. I once bought a lambswool sweater, and wore it out at the elbows in six weeks. When I took it back to complain, the manageress told me that 30 wears was pretty much the expected life of a lambswool sweater. I want at least 200 wears, so I think I need to make it from fibre that's at least 24 microns thick, processed and spun in a way to keep the fibres fairly parallel.
This would mean using a fairly soft fleece of at least average staple length. If you remember my prismatic fleece grading system (PFGS) this corresponds to indigo. I dug through my buckets and pulled out several bags colour-coded indigo. I pulled out several handfuls of each fleece and put them all together in a big box. Now to find out if they can all be prepped and spun up together to form the kind of sweater yarn I want.
After some research on the internet I concluded that the best equipment for combing fine fleece, of about 4 inch staple length, would be fine hand combs like the Valkyrie extra-fine wool combs, and if I owned a pair, these are what I would be using. Sadly, these are beyond my budget. What have I got that will do a good enough job?
I have carders, a flick carder, some Afro combs and a selection of dog combs.
The carders don't pull out the vegetable matter or the short fibres, and however I used them I couldn't get the fibres parallel enough for my liking. However I spun carder prep, the result was fluffy and in a jumper I feared it would result in pilling.
The dog combs are a good choice for short or very fine fibres which are difficult to process with my other tools. However, it is easy to grip them too hard and end up with aching hands. After a few tries I put them to one side, reminding myself to try them on a fine Shetland fleece I have in the loft.
The flick carder works well on staples that are at least 4 inches long, and produces a very fluffy pile of fibres that are very easy to disarrange. Once your pile of fibre is disarranged you end up with a "cloud" of fibre, that you can't spin shortdraw. Again, the result is fluffy yarn that I don't think will be very hard-wearing.
The Afro combs do a good job on well-defined locks about 3 to 5 inches long. The resulting sliver (or maybe it's called roving) is not as well-organised as properly combed and dizzed top, but you get rid of some of the shorter fibres and most of the vegetable matter, and the resulting sliver / roving can be pulled out and coiled round to make neat little nests. Best of all, I can comb comfortably sitting at a table watching a horror movie on my laptop. I therefore decided to prepare my kilogramme or so of fibre using Afro combs, and I returned to the loft all fleeces that refused to submit to Afro combing.
So now I had a big box of Afro combed "nests". The big box was important because I was mixing up several different fleeces, and wanted to mix them evenly. The box contains about 200g of nests, which is about 120 nests or about 3 films' worth of combing. As long as I stirred the nests around every day or so, that's quite a good randomiser. I planned to add in more mixing up at the plying stage (see next post).
How to spin these nests? They weren't prepared well enough for a true worsted short forward draw. There were patches of short fibres which drafted and spun unevenly. There were even some neps and noils left that I had to stop to pick out. A short backward draw seemed to work the best, with just a little twist entering the drafting zone, and a little smoothing of the fibres with the forward hand. This produced a yarn with just a little fuzz. I used a whorl with a ratio of 18:1 and aimed for the lower end of my default singles diameter, which is about 30 WPI. I planned to 3 ply this later, which should help even out the thick and thin bits in the singles, even if it gave me a worsted weight rather than double knitting yarn.
As I spun I applied the ankle test to the yarn. You have already heard of the bra test, and the boxer shorts test (since discontinued) for unspun fibre? Well, the ankle test works as follows. Take a length of singles off the bobbin, ply it the way you plan to ply for the project, and tie it around your ankle. If, when you next have a bath or shower, you discover it round your ankle and wonder what it is doing there, then it passes the test - it is soft and not itchy. It is advisable to perform this test as well as the bra test, because the way you spin your fibre can affect the feel of the finished yarn.
If my yarn had failed the sock test I would have tried combing it more carefully, spinning it with a short forward draw, or more probably started all over again with softer fleece. I could have bought commercially combed top. I might even have had to buy the minicombs. Sadly...er, I mean happily, it passed the test first time. The Afro combs worked well enough for this yarn.
Next post: storing the singles and plying.
Saturday 25 April 2015
Saturday 18 April 2015
Colour handling: spinning for a sweater part 3
So, a quick recap. I have a lot of fleece, roughly graded into seven different classes of quality. Three of these classes might be suitable for spinning for a sweater to be worn at least partly next to the skin. I am reasonably confident that, given enough pots of tea and a large enough supply of old horror flicks, I can spin enough double knitting weight yarn to knit a simple, circular top-down sweater. (Top down sweaters are more forgiving of you not knowing your exact guage before you start, and my guage can vary from skein to skein). Is there anything further I should consider before I start spinning up samples?
One area I have really not got my head around yet is colour. When I first started to spin, once I had spun a few singles then I would ply them together, irrespective of colour. White, black, brown and grey yarn was mixed together and didn't actually look too bad. Whoever designed sheep clearly put some thought into not making them in clashing colours. But then I started to mess about with dyes. I tried dying skeins of yarn and got a lot of rather streaky, uneven cakes of yarn out of it. With careful colour combining, most of them were successfully made into hats, but a sweater is a bigger project and a poor use of colour can be disastrous.
I consulted more experienced dyers, who recommended I dye the fleece first and then spin it. I dyed about a kilogramme of fleece in various colours and learned the following:
a) Some of my fleece stash was badly washed and still contained lanolin, which acts as a resist to dye;
b) Some of my fleece stash had been felted during washing (whoops!);
c) Some more fleece got felted during the dyeing process;
d) Dyed fleece loses some of its softness, and
e) Even with weighing out the dye powder and the fleece, I couldn't hit the same colour in different batches.
I didn't want to increase the wasteage of fleece in this project any further by having to reject batches of fleece that came out of the dye-pot the "wrong" colour. I therefore needed a colour scheme that could include random quantities of fleece in wildly different tones and hues.
Given the fleece that I have, the simplest colour scheme is to make a lot of rolags, each in one solid colour, throw them into a box and then pull them out at random and spin them. This gives a pleasing, if shouty loud, "bag of sweeties" colour scheme. But how to ply it?
Three possibilities sprang to mind. I could N-ply or Navaho ply it (i.e. make a 3 ply yarn structured as a crochet chain, which preserves the colour sequence, or I could ply two shouty loud singles together and get.......oh. It turns out you get a sort of nasty, mustard green.
I then tried plying a "bag of sweeties" single against an undyed white single. This had three benefits: the white calmed down the colours to a sort of pastel tone, the undyed wool softened the overall handle of the yarn, and it halved the total amount of dyed fleece I needed to use, reducing the overall cost of the project.
I spun and plied several bobbins of this "candy cane" mixture, and was pleased to find that the colour scheme stayed fairly consistent across the whole batch. It looks like this is a recipe that scales up quite easily.
Next post: spinning worsted, woollen or in-between?
One area I have really not got my head around yet is colour. When I first started to spin, once I had spun a few singles then I would ply them together, irrespective of colour. White, black, brown and grey yarn was mixed together and didn't actually look too bad. Whoever designed sheep clearly put some thought into not making them in clashing colours. But then I started to mess about with dyes. I tried dying skeins of yarn and got a lot of rather streaky, uneven cakes of yarn out of it. With careful colour combining, most of them were successfully made into hats, but a sweater is a bigger project and a poor use of colour can be disastrous.
I consulted more experienced dyers, who recommended I dye the fleece first and then spin it. I dyed about a kilogramme of fleece in various colours and learned the following:
a) Some of my fleece stash was badly washed and still contained lanolin, which acts as a resist to dye;
b) Some of my fleece stash had been felted during washing (whoops!);
c) Some more fleece got felted during the dyeing process;
d) Dyed fleece loses some of its softness, and
e) Even with weighing out the dye powder and the fleece, I couldn't hit the same colour in different batches.
I didn't want to increase the wasteage of fleece in this project any further by having to reject batches of fleece that came out of the dye-pot the "wrong" colour. I therefore needed a colour scheme that could include random quantities of fleece in wildly different tones and hues.
Given the fleece that I have, the simplest colour scheme is to make a lot of rolags, each in one solid colour, throw them into a box and then pull them out at random and spin them. This gives a pleasing, if shouty loud, "bag of sweeties" colour scheme. But how to ply it?
Three possibilities sprang to mind. I could N-ply or Navaho ply it (i.e. make a 3 ply yarn structured as a crochet chain, which preserves the colour sequence, or I could ply two shouty loud singles together and get.......oh. It turns out you get a sort of nasty, mustard green.
I then tried plying a "bag of sweeties" single against an undyed white single. This had three benefits: the white calmed down the colours to a sort of pastel tone, the undyed wool softened the overall handle of the yarn, and it halved the total amount of dyed fleece I needed to use, reducing the overall cost of the project.
I spun and plied several bobbins of this "candy cane" mixture, and was pleased to find that the colour scheme stayed fairly consistent across the whole batch. It looks like this is a recipe that scales up quite easily.
Next post: spinning worsted, woollen or in-between?
Thursday 16 April 2015
Designing your sweater: spinning for a sweater part 2.
Having all my fleece nicely sorted and labelled and stored, I noticed that I had several buckets of each quality. I should have enough to make several sweaters, shouldn't I?
I studied Mabel Ross' Essentials of yarn design carefully. She had some very definite views about how to spin for sweaters. Her worthy tome gives careful specifications for yarns for various types of sweater. But what kind of sweater should I knit?
After a lot of thought, and a great deal of browsing on Ravelry, I realised that there was one obvious answer: the kind that I CAN knit. I'm not a very good knitter. I like to knit in the round, stocking stitch, one colour, minimal shaping. Anything else is hard.
Back to Mabel Ross, she talks about sport weight and double knitting weight, aran weight, bulky and super bulky jumpers. Which thickness of jumper should I knit?
Again, there is one obvious answer for a novice spinner like myself. I should knit the type of jumper that uses the kind of yarn I can spin most consistently. I'm not experienced enough a spinner to have much of a repertoire.
I can't spin consistent singles thinner than about 30 WPI or thicker than about 18 WPI. Once plied up these range between sport weight and aran weight. At present about 80% of what I spin and ply turns out to be double knitting. About 10% is sport weight (keep for gloves) and 10% is aran weight (keep for hats). This variability means that for every 1 kg of yarn I spin there is only 800g of double knitting for my project, which is a bit irritating. Still, this is progress for me. A year ago my spinning was so uneven that 1kg of spun fibre would only yield 500g of double knitting, and most of that was pretty badly plied.
So, for my sweater I shall spin double knitting because I can spin double knitting. I shall knit a plain, simple sweater because I can knit one. Ravelry is a great source of free patterns - plug in your specifications and find a pattern.
The last consideration is: what grade of fleece should I use? (See the last post for my patented prismatic fleece grading scale). What have I got enough of? Red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Which would be the best for a plain, simple sweater in double knitting? It depends how much of the skin it will be in contact with. Quite a lot, probably. I wear such a jumper over a tee shirt, so my arms and neck are bare under the sweater. Blue (ine downs or Shetland) would be best. Or, if that proves to be not hard-wearing enough, green (medium downs) or even yellow (demi-lustre).
A quick rummage through my fleece buckets shows that I have at least 1.5kg of each of the three grades, so I have a fair choice of yarns to spin.
Next blog post: deciding how to spin the yarn.
I studied Mabel Ross' Essentials of yarn design carefully. She had some very definite views about how to spin for sweaters. Her worthy tome gives careful specifications for yarns for various types of sweater. But what kind of sweater should I knit?
After a lot of thought, and a great deal of browsing on Ravelry, I realised that there was one obvious answer: the kind that I CAN knit. I'm not a very good knitter. I like to knit in the round, stocking stitch, one colour, minimal shaping. Anything else is hard.
Back to Mabel Ross, she talks about sport weight and double knitting weight, aran weight, bulky and super bulky jumpers. Which thickness of jumper should I knit?
Again, there is one obvious answer for a novice spinner like myself. I should knit the type of jumper that uses the kind of yarn I can spin most consistently. I'm not experienced enough a spinner to have much of a repertoire.
I can't spin consistent singles thinner than about 30 WPI or thicker than about 18 WPI. Once plied up these range between sport weight and aran weight. At present about 80% of what I spin and ply turns out to be double knitting. About 10% is sport weight (keep for gloves) and 10% is aran weight (keep for hats). This variability means that for every 1 kg of yarn I spin there is only 800g of double knitting for my project, which is a bit irritating. Still, this is progress for me. A year ago my spinning was so uneven that 1kg of spun fibre would only yield 500g of double knitting, and most of that was pretty badly plied.
So, for my sweater I shall spin double knitting because I can spin double knitting. I shall knit a plain, simple sweater because I can knit one. Ravelry is a great source of free patterns - plug in your specifications and find a pattern.
The last consideration is: what grade of fleece should I use? (See the last post for my patented prismatic fleece grading scale). What have I got enough of? Red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Which would be the best for a plain, simple sweater in double knitting? It depends how much of the skin it will be in contact with. Quite a lot, probably. I wear such a jumper over a tee shirt, so my arms and neck are bare under the sweater. Blue (ine downs or Shetland) would be best. Or, if that proves to be not hard-wearing enough, green (medium downs) or even yellow (demi-lustre).
A quick rummage through my fleece buckets shows that I have at least 1.5kg of each of the three grades, so I have a fair choice of yarns to spin.
Next blog post: deciding how to spin the yarn.
Sorting fleece by quality: Spinning for a sweater part 1
I want to knit myself a sweater so badly: a real, hand-spun, hand-knitted, all British wool sweater. It's one of the reasons I learned to spin, eighteen months ago, and I still haven't done it yet.
I've spun for countless hats, neckwarmers, mittens and even a number of children's jumpers. But to spin for an adult jumper has always been too hard. What makes spinning for one jumper harder than spinning for a dozen hats? Well, it turns out that it is quite hard to spin that much wool evenly and consistently. You need quality control and you need to be organised.
When I started buying fleeces I bought whatever looked pretty and fluffy on eBay. The fleeces looked big enough to make a whole sheep-cozy. I washed them all lovingly (felting a few along the way), dried them (unevenly, a few got musty and moldy in storage) and stored them in buckets up the loft.
Over the next year or so I opened the buckets periodically, threw out any fleece that smelled funny, pulled out handfuls that looked nice and spun them. The bits of fleeces that remained got pulled about and mixed up like ingredients in a great big Christmas pudding, so that if I had ever known which fleece was which to start with, after a year I didn't any more.
If you are looking to knit just a hat, you can simply open a bucket of fleece at random and pull out a few handfuls of fibre to process and spin. Hats weigh about 100g, and if you can't find at least 100g of nice fleece in a bucket, you have seriously screwed up along the way.
An adult's jumper on the other hand, a thick double-knitted, oversized, "it's a sack made out of wool with sleeves added" sort of jumper, can weigh nearly a kilogramme. Adding in a generous allowance for wastage you want about 1.5kg of fleece. And here's something I learned the hard way: the fleece must all look the same (crimp, staple length, colour) and feel the same (handle and strength) ot ir just won't spin up the same.
A year ago I thought I knew it all. I had worked out you needed to allow 1.5 kg of fleece for a jumper, so I bought raw fleeces that weighed more than 1.5kg. I realised that dirt, twigs, lanolin and sheep sweat all weighed quite a bit, so I look for fleeces that weighed at least 2.5kg. One large fleece = one large jumper, right? What could possibly go wrong?
As it turned out, many things can and did go wrong.The first problem was in the quality of the fibre itself.
Firstly, the fleeces I bought were far, far too coarse to make comfy sweaters. Leicester long wool, Herdwick (don't laugh, I was young and naive) and Oxford down, all produce lovely big fleeces and spin into nice worsted yarns but you wouldn't want them against your skin. After consulting a fleece guide I bought a Dorset downs shearling fleece and found parts of that were too rough to wear against the skin. Maybe some Dorset downs sheep produce soft wool, but this one hadn't. Perhaps it hadn't read the fleece guide.
Secondly, I hadn't realised how much the fibre quality can vary within an individual fleece. I have a Cambridge fleece, the back and hind quarters of which feel as rough as a kitchen scrubber, yet the shoulder wool is soft and fine enough for a scarf. Unfortunately, I haven't learned to tell the fleece quality until the fleece is washed, by which time I have usually mixed up my fleeces until I don't know which is which.
I needed a method for grading the softness of washed fleece, which did not depend on knowing any details about the breed or age of the sheep. I explained my trouble to my quality control superviser (aged eight and three quarters) and he thought about it.
"You need a standard of softness, Mum," he said. "How about the CN (comfiness number)? 100 CNs is so soft and snuggly that you can fall asleep snuggling it. 0 CNs is as rough as sandpaper."
For a small fee (a tongue-painter lollipop) he agreed to sort through my fleece stash and grade my fleeces. It turned out, most were only about 70 CNs, which he explained, was rough and itchy next to the skin. 80 CNs was the minimum for socks, 90 CNs for next-to-the-skin jumpers and neckwarmers.
With the CN system in place, the next step was to devise a standard system for sorting and labelling fibre. After some discussion we agreed on a colour coded system, Example breeds given are based on actual fleeces in my stash.
Red = 50 CNs or lower, fit only for carpets. e.g. Herwick and Leicester long wool
Orange = mountain and hill breeds mainly 50 - 60 CNs, fit for rugs and rough blankets. e.g. Oxford, Cambridge
Yellow = 60 - 70 CNs, fine enough to spin worsted for sturdy sweaters and shawls e.g. Romney lamb
Green = 70 - 80 CNs, can spin semi-worsted for sturdy kids' sweaters e.g. Dorset down
Blue = 80 - 90 CNs, The lower end of the next-to-the-skin soft range. Spin woollen for comfy sweaters. e.g. Shetland.
Indigo: as blue but longer staple and strong staples, can comb and spin worsted for socks. Eg the finer parts of the Romney lamb
Purple = 90 - 100 CNs, luxury yarns such as alpaca, spin woollen for snuggly shawls.
I got all my fleece buckets down from the loft and colour-coded them by tying wool around the handles. Then, one by one, I got the fleeces out. I examined them and felt them carefully.
I used the bra test to sort out the blue / indigo fleeces from the green ones. If you don't already know it, the bra test is a very useful way to test for next-to-the-skin softness in fleece: put a lock in your bra and if by the end of the day you have forgotten it was there, then it's soft enough for next to the skin wear. Since my quality controller does not wear a bra, I have to perform the tests myself. I thought of devising a boxer shorts test, but decided it would end up with wool going down the loo, causing all sorts of plumbing problems and invalidating the test results.
Having finally a means of distinguishing the softness of fleeces, I was astonished to learn how much the fibre can vary across an individual fleece. I found patches of blue and indigo fibre on otherwise orange fleeces, and vice versa. I also found that a lot of the fleeces I bought which from the breed description ought to be blue quality, in fact were green. So much for believing everything you read in books.
Having sorted the fleece out into pillowcases (of which I have a large collection, thanks to jumble sales) I had to label the pillowcases. I pinned on labels giving the breed and date of purchase (where I could remember it), the type (downs, long etc) and colour code. For good measure I tied the bags with colour-coded wool, then put the colour-coded bags into colour-coded buckets. That means that a bucket now contains, not one individual fleece (as before) but parts of two or three different fleeces. However they are parts of similar quality, and, as long as I keep the lustre wools separate from the downs wools (low crimp vs high crimp), they should spin up in a similar manner.
The next matter to address was the design, which will form the next post.
I've spun for countless hats, neckwarmers, mittens and even a number of children's jumpers. But to spin for an adult jumper has always been too hard. What makes spinning for one jumper harder than spinning for a dozen hats? Well, it turns out that it is quite hard to spin that much wool evenly and consistently. You need quality control and you need to be organised.
When I started buying fleeces I bought whatever looked pretty and fluffy on eBay. The fleeces looked big enough to make a whole sheep-cozy. I washed them all lovingly (felting a few along the way), dried them (unevenly, a few got musty and moldy in storage) and stored them in buckets up the loft.
Over the next year or so I opened the buckets periodically, threw out any fleece that smelled funny, pulled out handfuls that looked nice and spun them. The bits of fleeces that remained got pulled about and mixed up like ingredients in a great big Christmas pudding, so that if I had ever known which fleece was which to start with, after a year I didn't any more.
If you are looking to knit just a hat, you can simply open a bucket of fleece at random and pull out a few handfuls of fibre to process and spin. Hats weigh about 100g, and if you can't find at least 100g of nice fleece in a bucket, you have seriously screwed up along the way.
An adult's jumper on the other hand, a thick double-knitted, oversized, "it's a sack made out of wool with sleeves added" sort of jumper, can weigh nearly a kilogramme. Adding in a generous allowance for wastage you want about 1.5kg of fleece. And here's something I learned the hard way: the fleece must all look the same (crimp, staple length, colour) and feel the same (handle and strength) ot ir just won't spin up the same.
A year ago I thought I knew it all. I had worked out you needed to allow 1.5 kg of fleece for a jumper, so I bought raw fleeces that weighed more than 1.5kg. I realised that dirt, twigs, lanolin and sheep sweat all weighed quite a bit, so I look for fleeces that weighed at least 2.5kg. One large fleece = one large jumper, right? What could possibly go wrong?
As it turned out, many things can and did go wrong.The first problem was in the quality of the fibre itself.
Firstly, the fleeces I bought were far, far too coarse to make comfy sweaters. Leicester long wool, Herdwick (don't laugh, I was young and naive) and Oxford down, all produce lovely big fleeces and spin into nice worsted yarns but you wouldn't want them against your skin. After consulting a fleece guide I bought a Dorset downs shearling fleece and found parts of that were too rough to wear against the skin. Maybe some Dorset downs sheep produce soft wool, but this one hadn't. Perhaps it hadn't read the fleece guide.
Secondly, I hadn't realised how much the fibre quality can vary within an individual fleece. I have a Cambridge fleece, the back and hind quarters of which feel as rough as a kitchen scrubber, yet the shoulder wool is soft and fine enough for a scarf. Unfortunately, I haven't learned to tell the fleece quality until the fleece is washed, by which time I have usually mixed up my fleeces until I don't know which is which.
I needed a method for grading the softness of washed fleece, which did not depend on knowing any details about the breed or age of the sheep. I explained my trouble to my quality control superviser (aged eight and three quarters) and he thought about it.
"You need a standard of softness, Mum," he said. "How about the CN (comfiness number)? 100 CNs is so soft and snuggly that you can fall asleep snuggling it. 0 CNs is as rough as sandpaper."
For a small fee (a tongue-painter lollipop) he agreed to sort through my fleece stash and grade my fleeces. It turned out, most were only about 70 CNs, which he explained, was rough and itchy next to the skin. 80 CNs was the minimum for socks, 90 CNs for next-to-the-skin jumpers and neckwarmers.
With the CN system in place, the next step was to devise a standard system for sorting and labelling fibre. After some discussion we agreed on a colour coded system, Example breeds given are based on actual fleeces in my stash.
Red = 50 CNs or lower, fit only for carpets. e.g. Herwick and Leicester long wool
Orange = mountain and hill breeds mainly 50 - 60 CNs, fit for rugs and rough blankets. e.g. Oxford, Cambridge
Yellow = 60 - 70 CNs, fine enough to spin worsted for sturdy sweaters and shawls e.g. Romney lamb
Green = 70 - 80 CNs, can spin semi-worsted for sturdy kids' sweaters e.g. Dorset down
Blue = 80 - 90 CNs, The lower end of the next-to-the-skin soft range. Spin woollen for comfy sweaters. e.g. Shetland.
Indigo: as blue but longer staple and strong staples, can comb and spin worsted for socks. Eg the finer parts of the Romney lamb
Purple = 90 - 100 CNs, luxury yarns such as alpaca, spin woollen for snuggly shawls.
I got all my fleece buckets down from the loft and colour-coded them by tying wool around the handles. Then, one by one, I got the fleeces out. I examined them and felt them carefully.
I used the bra test to sort out the blue / indigo fleeces from the green ones. If you don't already know it, the bra test is a very useful way to test for next-to-the-skin softness in fleece: put a lock in your bra and if by the end of the day you have forgotten it was there, then it's soft enough for next to the skin wear. Since my quality controller does not wear a bra, I have to perform the tests myself. I thought of devising a boxer shorts test, but decided it would end up with wool going down the loo, causing all sorts of plumbing problems and invalidating the test results.
Having finally a means of distinguishing the softness of fleeces, I was astonished to learn how much the fibre can vary across an individual fleece. I found patches of blue and indigo fibre on otherwise orange fleeces, and vice versa. I also found that a lot of the fleeces I bought which from the breed description ought to be blue quality, in fact were green. So much for believing everything you read in books.
Having sorted the fleece out into pillowcases (of which I have a large collection, thanks to jumble sales) I had to label the pillowcases. I pinned on labels giving the breed and date of purchase (where I could remember it), the type (downs, long etc) and colour code. For good measure I tied the bags with colour-coded wool, then put the colour-coded bags into colour-coded buckets. That means that a bucket now contains, not one individual fleece (as before) but parts of two or three different fleeces. However they are parts of similar quality, and, as long as I keep the lustre wools separate from the downs wools (low crimp vs high crimp), they should spin up in a similar manner.
The next matter to address was the design, which will form the next post.
Monday 9 March 2015
Making an exhibition piece
Mu Guild is having an exhibition and I'm excited. I don't understand what an exhibition is for and I'm still excited. They asked us to each submit an exhibition piece. They gave us 18 months notice and it was barely long enough for me.
I was a novice spinner, an average sort of knitter, I knew three crochet stitches, and I could recognise a rigid heddle loom when I saw one warped up. That was just about the extent of my fibre skills when this exhibition idea was thought up. I spent nearly 18 months biting my lip in a nervous way and wondering what the committee were expecting.
Several projects were designed, then failed the "do I have the skills to accomplish this?" test. You should have seen the beautiful Shetland lace shawl that existed only in my head. Likewise the Norwegian stranded knit jumper, a masterpiece of careful pattern-reading. Don't even ask about the Mona Flisa, a beautiful concept which I have no idea how to execute. So many ideas, so few actual hard skills.
I had to hand this over to a higher authority. At the tea table I asked for suggestions. My familiy chewed this over while chewing on sausages and chips.
"Why don't you weave a field of sheep?" asked my MWAS brightly. "You've got a loft full of fleeces. You could knit one sheep from each kind of fleece, then weave them a field to graze on. It could even be a game: guess which sheep was knitted from which fleece."
"Hmm...." I murmered. "That could work.....except I can't weave."
"I can!" he said confidently. "Who would know?"
Well, it grieved me to think that deception was the only was I was going to produce a piece for this exhibition, so I resolved to share the credit with him. Especially as it was his actual idea.
I got my fleeces out and looked hard at them. Stash organisation is not my strong point, so it took a little while to select ten fleeces that were different, and identifiable. There was Romney, there was Shetland, there was Herdwick and Leicester longwool, there was alpaca, there were a variety of downs types and a hybrid or two. I pulled out a few bags full and started to spin.
They seemed happy to spin up as worsted weight, so I was happy to let them. The downs fleeces asked to be long drawn from rolags, the long wool locks preferred being flicked and spun short draw from the butt end. I was not in the mood to argue with them. Once 2 plied, washed, dried and caked (my eight year old was very helpful in this task), I was ready to knit sheep.
How do you knit a sheep? I have no idea. A search on Ravelry (www.ravelry.com) proved most helpful. It led me to this pattern on www.landlust.de for a baby's blanket with a flock of sheep on it, which looked much like the project I had in mind.
Now, there were a couple of small problems with this pattern. First, it is for crochet, not knitting. My crochet skills are extremely basic, and I even had to go out and buy some crochet hooks. Second, there is a chart. I had seen crochet charts before but assumed they were some kind of black wizardry. Now I was going to have to learn to read and follow a chart. At least it was one chart, to be followed ten times over. I should get the hang of it eventually even by trial and error. Thirdly, the pattern is in German. I had to do some research to work out how to translate German crochet abbreviations into English crochet terms, then find tutorials to show me how to do these new stitches.
Still, it was for an exhibition piece, and after nearly 18 months of deliberation I decided that the point of an exhibition was to show off what you had learned. By crikey, if I learned nothing else from making this piece, I learned how to knit from a German crochet chart.
A stroke of luck then happened: a Guild member destashed a considerable amount of rug yarn in my direction. I was now very well served for different shades of green rug wool. My MWAS rifled through the sacks, picked out a few cones, and started to weave,
A fundamental lack of communication between us lead to a field rather smaller than the sheep actually needed to avoid charges of cruelty from the RSPCA. But time was ticking by, and I was in no mood to ask my MWAS to start again. I culled the flock to eight members, and sewed them in place.
The committee approved my piece, and the flock will be going into the exhibition, with or without the "Which sheep is which?" quiz is undecided yet. I'm very pleased with it. If I were doing it again I would do it differently, and better, but that shows how much I learned from the process, which I guess is the point. After all, if exhibitions are just showing off the skills we had all along, the would be fairly dull affairs. Our exhibition will show a range of skill levels, from the novice spinner's first handspun socks to the expert weaver's expert weaving. And in the case of this piece, it is a showcase of my family's new and growing love of wool.
I was a novice spinner, an average sort of knitter, I knew three crochet stitches, and I could recognise a rigid heddle loom when I saw one warped up. That was just about the extent of my fibre skills when this exhibition idea was thought up. I spent nearly 18 months biting my lip in a nervous way and wondering what the committee were expecting.
Several projects were designed, then failed the "do I have the skills to accomplish this?" test. You should have seen the beautiful Shetland lace shawl that existed only in my head. Likewise the Norwegian stranded knit jumper, a masterpiece of careful pattern-reading. Don't even ask about the Mona Flisa, a beautiful concept which I have no idea how to execute. So many ideas, so few actual hard skills.
I had to hand this over to a higher authority. At the tea table I asked for suggestions. My familiy chewed this over while chewing on sausages and chips.
"Why don't you weave a field of sheep?" asked my MWAS brightly. "You've got a loft full of fleeces. You could knit one sheep from each kind of fleece, then weave them a field to graze on. It could even be a game: guess which sheep was knitted from which fleece."
"Hmm...." I murmered. "That could work.....except I can't weave."
"I can!" he said confidently. "Who would know?"
Well, it grieved me to think that deception was the only was I was going to produce a piece for this exhibition, so I resolved to share the credit with him. Especially as it was his actual idea.
I got my fleeces out and looked hard at them. Stash organisation is not my strong point, so it took a little while to select ten fleeces that were different, and identifiable. There was Romney, there was Shetland, there was Herdwick and Leicester longwool, there was alpaca, there were a variety of downs types and a hybrid or two. I pulled out a few bags full and started to spin.
They seemed happy to spin up as worsted weight, so I was happy to let them. The downs fleeces asked to be long drawn from rolags, the long wool locks preferred being flicked and spun short draw from the butt end. I was not in the mood to argue with them. Once 2 plied, washed, dried and caked (my eight year old was very helpful in this task), I was ready to knit sheep.
How do you knit a sheep? I have no idea. A search on Ravelry (www.ravelry.com) proved most helpful. It led me to this pattern on www.landlust.de for a baby's blanket with a flock of sheep on it, which looked much like the project I had in mind.
Now, there were a couple of small problems with this pattern. First, it is for crochet, not knitting. My crochet skills are extremely basic, and I even had to go out and buy some crochet hooks. Second, there is a chart. I had seen crochet charts before but assumed they were some kind of black wizardry. Now I was going to have to learn to read and follow a chart. At least it was one chart, to be followed ten times over. I should get the hang of it eventually even by trial and error. Thirdly, the pattern is in German. I had to do some research to work out how to translate German crochet abbreviations into English crochet terms, then find tutorials to show me how to do these new stitches.
Still, it was for an exhibition piece, and after nearly 18 months of deliberation I decided that the point of an exhibition was to show off what you had learned. By crikey, if I learned nothing else from making this piece, I learned how to knit from a German crochet chart.
A stroke of luck then happened: a Guild member destashed a considerable amount of rug yarn in my direction. I was now very well served for different shades of green rug wool. My MWAS rifled through the sacks, picked out a few cones, and started to weave,
A fundamental lack of communication between us lead to a field rather smaller than the sheep actually needed to avoid charges of cruelty from the RSPCA. But time was ticking by, and I was in no mood to ask my MWAS to start again. I culled the flock to eight members, and sewed them in place.
 | |||
| Sheep pinned down and waiting for sewing |
Why do you need a second wheel, Mum?
A friend of mine, an arts student and craftswoman back in the day, is moving house. Reluctantly, she has decided to part with her pottery and spinning equipment. I asked to buy her 70's Ashford Traditional spinning wheel and all its accessories. My MWAS looked dubious. He has heard horror stories about old spinning wheels that are kept in a loft or an attic for decades. They turn magical and cause hypersomnia or something. Anyway, my friend obligingly brought the wheel round for us to look at.
It looked in pretty good nick, all things considered. I mean, it didn't actually WORK. The wheel was coming apart, there was no drive band, the brake springs were rusted. But my husband does not own a shed for nothing and he likes a challenge.
It turns out that there is a hollow pin driven through the centre of the wheel attaching it to the shaft. If you can punch that out, then the wheel comes apart. Remove anything that shouldn't be there, upgrade the bearings AT THIS POINT if you want the new sealed type (this occurred to us too late), glue the wheel together and hammer the hollow pin back into place. Note you can't use a nail or other pointy object to hammer a hollow pin in or out, as you will cause the pin to splay and drive it into the wood. You have to use a blunt ended object like an Allen key, which will probably wreck the Allen key. We found this out the hard way.
While the glue on the wheel was setting, my eight-year-old and I got busy. The wheel came with a jumbo flyer, which I thought would be fun to try out. So he unscrewed the mother-of-all (two little screws underneath it) and replaced it with the mother-of-all that came with the jumbo flyer. This mother-of-all is exactly the same, but the front maiden has a larger bearing to accommodate the wider orifice of the jumbo flyer.
Now to replace the brake band, which now no longer fitted around the circumderence of the jumbo bobbin. Fortunately we had both a pair of Ashford springs and some nylon fishing line to hand, so this was just a matter of cutting a couple of lengths of nylon line, tying the springs to the ends, trimming the line until it was short enough (a sensible person would have measured it first) and then tying the line around the tension knob.
I thought the jumbo flyer had only one ratio. Looking closely I see it has two. I'm guessing they are the same as the modern jumbo flyers, about 4.5:1 and 9:1. The regular flyer that came with the wheel has only one ratio, maybe 6:1. So we can get a range of 3 ratios, if we can work out a way to swap between the flyers without having to replace the mother-of-all each time.
Studying the sites of my favourite Ashford dealers, I see there is a Ashford Jumbo Bearing Reducer Bush. Put simply, this is a circular piece of plastic that you can push into your jumbo maiden to reduce its bearing orifice size. Stop sniggering at the back there! I've ordered one and we'll see how it works. I've also ordered a stretchy drive band and a click bearing for the rear maiden, because it drives me crazy to have to twist the rear maiden every time I change bobbin.
My eight-year-old asked if this wheel was for him, so sweetly that I couldn't refuse him. I said it was, and that he could take it to Guild and sit next to me and spin. He already does my plying, and I figure a jumbo bobbin with a 9:1 ratio should be good for plying thicker yarns.
All it would take now, for this wheel to be nearly as good as my 1990 Ashford wheel, is to buy the newest flyer, which I believe has 4 ratios between 6:1 and 18:1. (I would steal the new flyer and put in on MY wheel, putting my 3 ratio flyer on the second wheel). This would cost about £40 I think, so it will have to wait a while.
This is not the end of my scheming, far from it. What I really covet is an Ashford Elizabeth 2. These beauties are double drive Saxony style wheels, with a 24" drive wheel, which are apparently very good for really fast, fine, even spinning. I can't afford a new one, and second hand ones are hard to find. But the though occurs to me, supposing you bough an Elizabeth drive wheel and fitted it into an Ashford table? Then you would have a (Scotch tension) Elizabeth. To make a double drive Elizabeth you would need to buy the double drive conversion kit - more money, but still possible. I could have an Ashford Tradional set up for Scotch tension and an Elizabeth / Traditional for double tension....
I'll post with pictures when Birdy's wheel is up and running. Fingers crossed that the reglued wheel will spin true....
It looked in pretty good nick, all things considered. I mean, it didn't actually WORK. The wheel was coming apart, there was no drive band, the brake springs were rusted. But my husband does not own a shed for nothing and he likes a challenge.
 |
| The wheel - before we started tinkering with it |
 | |
| The drive wheel is coming apart in the middle |
Now to replace the brake band, which now no longer fitted around the circumderence of the jumbo bobbin. Fortunately we had both a pair of Ashford springs and some nylon fishing line to hand, so this was just a matter of cutting a couple of lengths of nylon line, tying the springs to the ends, trimming the line until it was short enough (a sensible person would have measured it first) and then tying the line around the tension knob.
 | |
| The jumbo flyer with its own maidens and mother of all |
Studying the sites of my favourite Ashford dealers, I see there is a Ashford Jumbo Bearing Reducer Bush. Put simply, this is a circular piece of plastic that you can push into your jumbo maiden to reduce its bearing orifice size. Stop sniggering at the back there! I've ordered one and we'll see how it works. I've also ordered a stretchy drive band and a click bearing for the rear maiden, because it drives me crazy to have to twist the rear maiden every time I change bobbin.
My eight-year-old asked if this wheel was for him, so sweetly that I couldn't refuse him. I said it was, and that he could take it to Guild and sit next to me and spin. He already does my plying, and I figure a jumbo bobbin with a 9:1 ratio should be good for plying thicker yarns.
All it would take now, for this wheel to be nearly as good as my 1990 Ashford wheel, is to buy the newest flyer, which I believe has 4 ratios between 6:1 and 18:1. (I would steal the new flyer and put in on MY wheel, putting my 3 ratio flyer on the second wheel). This would cost about £40 I think, so it will have to wait a while.
This is not the end of my scheming, far from it. What I really covet is an Ashford Elizabeth 2. These beauties are double drive Saxony style wheels, with a 24" drive wheel, which are apparently very good for really fast, fine, even spinning. I can't afford a new one, and second hand ones are hard to find. But the though occurs to me, supposing you bough an Elizabeth drive wheel and fitted it into an Ashford table? Then you would have a (Scotch tension) Elizabeth. To make a double drive Elizabeth you would need to buy the double drive conversion kit - more money, but still possible. I could have an Ashford Tradional set up for Scotch tension and an Elizabeth / Traditional for double tension....
I'll post with pictures when Birdy's wheel is up and running. Fingers crossed that the reglued wheel will spin true....
Sunday 8 March 2015
Organising the stash
My stash is getting out of control. I have most of the fleeces, washed, in buckets up the loft. The spun yarn is under my bed, in a variety of stacker boxes. I have no idea what is there. I'm not even sure what I'm spinning right now. What can I do?
Back in January I admitted the exact nature of my wrongs to my eight year old, who put his fearsome problem-solving powers to work and came up with this answer: colour coding! Red for the coarsest of longwools, working through to purple for the alpaca. Colour code the stash buckets, colour code the pillowcases of fleece inside them, colour code the skeins of yarn to be washed, colour code the cakes of finished yarn. Genius! That boy will go far.
Looking through the finished yarns made me realise how really, really helpful it would be to label my yarn cakes. I like grey Romney, grey Gotland, and grey alpaca. They all look the same spun up. But they certainly won't knit the same. I had to make my best guess and sort out like with like into carrier bags. I put them into two large stacker boxes, one for longwools and another one for sweater and sock yarns. I also bought some luggage labels and vowed to label all skeins and cakes from now on.
Assigning a colour to each and every fleece in my stash really sorted out the sheep from the....er....alpacas. Why did I have so much coarse longwool? Why so little next-to-the-skin-soft wool? Why so many downs fleeces of short staple length, when the love of my life is Romney? Now I feel the need for an annual fleece-purchasing policy, where I actually take stock of what I need and buy that. That's starting to sound a bit too sensible for me, but the alternative is a loft full of Herdwick and a desire to knit vests.
Once the fleeces were sorted into the various hues of course longwools, fine longwools, medium downs, fine downs, very fine and alpacas, the skeins could be colour-coded too. I was lucky enough to be given several sacks of rug yarn recently, of varying hues. So I have plenty of nice, strong wool to use as skein ties. Each skein has ties which show the softness of the wool, in addition to a luggage label giving the date, the thickness, type of draw, weight, length and type of fleece if I can remember it.
For a couple of weeks I was stymied by the washing process. I draw a trug of warm, soapy water, take 4 to 6 skeins, remove their luggage tages and wash them. Then I have skeins with no labels, and labels with no skeins. The solution? More colour coding, this time on the tags and an extra tie on the skein. So the red tag goes back on the skein with the red tie, and so on. It takes lots of coloured wool, but I have lots, so that's fine.
The final complication is that I don't do my own caking. I outsource that to my eight-year old, who doesn't always respect the labels. I have to be careful to ask him to only cake one skein at a time, and to put the label back on the cake myself, before putting the cake in the appropriate stacker box.
It's not as cumbersome as it sounds, now that I'm used to it, and when I send my MWAS up the loft for wool, I can just ask him to "grab and bucket of green and a couple of blue" and there is little chance of confusion. Likewise, when I want to knit my little yarn caker a vest, I can just grab a handful of blue skeins of double knitting thickness and know that it will all knit up together, whether they were spun in one batch or not.
Back in January I admitted the exact nature of my wrongs to my eight year old, who put his fearsome problem-solving powers to work and came up with this answer: colour coding! Red for the coarsest of longwools, working through to purple for the alpaca. Colour code the stash buckets, colour code the pillowcases of fleece inside them, colour code the skeins of yarn to be washed, colour code the cakes of finished yarn. Genius! That boy will go far.
Looking through the finished yarns made me realise how really, really helpful it would be to label my yarn cakes. I like grey Romney, grey Gotland, and grey alpaca. They all look the same spun up. But they certainly won't knit the same. I had to make my best guess and sort out like with like into carrier bags. I put them into two large stacker boxes, one for longwools and another one for sweater and sock yarns. I also bought some luggage labels and vowed to label all skeins and cakes from now on.
Assigning a colour to each and every fleece in my stash really sorted out the sheep from the....er....alpacas. Why did I have so much coarse longwool? Why so little next-to-the-skin-soft wool? Why so many downs fleeces of short staple length, when the love of my life is Romney? Now I feel the need for an annual fleece-purchasing policy, where I actually take stock of what I need and buy that. That's starting to sound a bit too sensible for me, but the alternative is a loft full of Herdwick and a desire to knit vests.
Once the fleeces were sorted into the various hues of course longwools, fine longwools, medium downs, fine downs, very fine and alpacas, the skeins could be colour-coded too. I was lucky enough to be given several sacks of rug yarn recently, of varying hues. So I have plenty of nice, strong wool to use as skein ties. Each skein has ties which show the softness of the wool, in addition to a luggage label giving the date, the thickness, type of draw, weight, length and type of fleece if I can remember it.
For a couple of weeks I was stymied by the washing process. I draw a trug of warm, soapy water, take 4 to 6 skeins, remove their luggage tages and wash them. Then I have skeins with no labels, and labels with no skeins. The solution? More colour coding, this time on the tags and an extra tie on the skein. So the red tag goes back on the skein with the red tie, and so on. It takes lots of coloured wool, but I have lots, so that's fine.
 | |
| Romney lambswool, coded yellow for "fine longwool" |
The final complication is that I don't do my own caking. I outsource that to my eight-year old, who doesn't always respect the labels. I have to be careful to ask him to only cake one skein at a time, and to put the label back on the cake myself, before putting the cake in the appropriate stacker box.
It's not as cumbersome as it sounds, now that I'm used to it, and when I send my MWAS up the loft for wool, I can just ask him to "grab and bucket of green and a couple of blue" and there is little chance of confusion. Likewise, when I want to knit my little yarn caker a vest, I can just grab a handful of blue skeins of double knitting thickness and know that it will all knit up together, whether they were spun in one batch or not.
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