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.

Sheep pinned down and waiting for sewing

 

 

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.

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.

The wheel - before we started tinkering with it

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.

The drive wheel is coming apart in the middle

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.

The jumbo flyer with its own maidens and mother of all

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....

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.

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.

Wool combs again: the less scary version

It's time to admit it, I haven't used the wool combs my MWAS (Man With A Shed) made me. I'm intimidated by their sheer weight. I don't have his upper body strength, and it's hard work for me to stand and swing a kilo or so of wood and ironware about. I'm not Peter Teal. I'm probably not even Mrs Teal.

But fortunately MWAS had another brilliant, and far more girl-friendly, idea. He went round the hairdressers in town and returned with a selection of Afro combs. Afro hair, I presume, needs careful handling to tame the crimp with the minimum of tangling, much like Romney fleece.

I use these combs the way my good friend Linda taught me to use her Viking minicombs. You load a half-dozen locks, butt end nearest the comb, on the spikes and push them down. Then you hold this in one hand, gently swinging at the tips with the other comb held at 90 degrees. Almost all of the fleece will transfer from one comb to the other over in five or 6 swings. What doesn't transfer over is tangled or too short: pull it off the comb and bin it. Repeat about four times, until what is left on the combs looks fine and even. Now pull that off into roving (through a diz if you feel like it) and wind the roving round your hand into a nest.

The only downside (well, apart from possible RSI) is that these combs don't fit a lot on them. They make 5g "mini-nests" whereas with proper woolcombs, I read, 10g nests are possible. Still, it's a good low-cost option, that I can let my kids use without fearing that they will stab themselves or each other with them.

Knitting for the homeless

About a year ago, a member of my local Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers organised a charity crafting day in aid of the homeless. It was great fun, by the way, and whoever organised it, I'd be up for another one any time!

Anyway, there was a man from the charity (to my shame I have forgotten which charity it was, except it was Northampton-based) who gave us a very interesting talk. He said that hypothermia was a real killer for people sleeping rough, because many are new to the streets and not prepared for the night cold. He said that, if you wanted to save their lives, it could be as simple as giving out woolly hats and flasks of hot soup.

I volunteered on the spot to knit some hats. I was learning to spin, how hard could it be? Well, it turned out that my spinning at the time too uneven. My knitting skills were pre-intermediate, and I couldn't compensate for the wildly varying thickness of this overspun, underplied yarn. So the hats didn't get knitted, and I felt a bit of a fraud.

A year later and my daughter has joined the Church. She asked me very sweetly what I would be giving up for Lent. I don't have a lot of really evil vices, certainly none that it would be easy to give up for a month. After a day or so of puzzling the question I replied "I'm not giving up anything! I'm going to knit the homeless a dozen hats!" After all, my spinning is now quite even now, I can spin faster than I can knit so I have a stash of yarn that wants busting. I have even learned to knit in the round. Time to finally put my needles where my mouth is.

Then I started wondering: what kind of hats do homeless people want? The kind that a) stop them from freezing to death and b) don't attract muggers. Because homeless people get mugged. They get mugged quite a lot. Are you shocked by that? I was shocked. As if being homeless and penniless isn't bad enough, there are people prepared to rough you up and nick your knitwear.

Very warm and largely unattractive knitwear seems to be called for. My stash yarn being mostly double knitting weight, I opted to double it and call it "chunky", which I would normally knit with 6 mm needles. I knit it with 5 mm needles, partly because I don't own 6 mm circulars, and partly because that would give a firm fabric. Firm knitted fabrics are more wind and rain proof than drapey ones, which must be a consideration if you are sleeping rough.

I'm knitting watchcaps (the Canadians call them "toques"), which want a bit of stretch. I don't know many stitch patterns, but I googled "thermal knitting" and found a waffle stitch tutorial. Waffle stitch looks warm and should have a bit of stretch in both directions. It's simple and looks rather attractive. Waffle stitch it is then.

How big is the average homeless person's head? I started off making hats to fit me because, well, my head is always to hand for reference. Then it occurred to me that a large proportion of the short-term homeless are ex-army. Blokes with big heads? My husband has a big head, and so he became my next hat model.

What about teenagers? Many rough sleepers are teenagers who have been kicked out of the house following a domestic tiff and have nowhere to sleep until things calm down and they can go back home. Fortunately I own a couple of teenagers, so they became hat models too.

As long as I knit top down, and stop knitting when my hat fits a family member and looks warm, yet mildly silly (think of your Grandma's tea-cosy) then I figure it's good enough to be seen on the streets of Northampton. Each hat took about 120g of yarn, and had a turn-up of about 3 inches over the ears, so that's a considerable thick layer of wool over the ears. With the turn-up turned down, they have a bit of a balaclava vibe going on. If I were sleeping rough, I would want to sleep in one of these hats.

It turned out, at 120g per hat for a dozen hats, that was more yarn than was in my stash. I've some good jumper yarn that I'm rather proud of, but I draw the line at using that to knit hats. I didn't think this one through properly.

Fortunately I have a stash of fleeces that also needs busting. I selected some Cheviot, some Dorset and some White Faced Woodland, carded up some rolags and got spinning. After months of spinning double knitting it's not easy to spin thicker. After a couple of days of frustration I achieved a woollen spun aran weight 2 ply, which is thinner than I was hoping for. I googled "why is it hard to spin thick?" and found a tutoral by Abby Franquemont which advised me to make it into 3-ply if I wanted bulky, spongy yarn. 3-plied yarn is naturally spongier than 2-ply yarn, provided the fibre has lots of "sproing" in it. Well, I guess the thicker and spongier the yarn, the warmer the hat will be. And my fibre certainly has "sproing". So I'll try making a 3-ply yarn next, and hope to finally match the "chunky" fabric I created by knitting with two strands together of my double knitting.

The first hats were somewhat strange, badly proportioned with poorly thought-out stitch patterns, while I was working out my style. My family chuckled indulgently. Six hats later they are starting to steal hats out of the pile, announcing that they will go nicely with their favourite jackets. I take this as high praise. My hats look so warm and stylish that my teenagers are prepared to be seen out in public with them, despite the risk of meeting a homeless person wearing exactly the same hat.

Making a Yeti

Did I say I had too much long wool? It turns out, I have too little long wool. Far, far too little. How can three or four big buckets full possibly be too little, I hear you ask. Because my husband (the MWAS, the Man With A Shed) is making a Yeti costume. Out of fleece.

Yetis, it turns out, are Doctor Who monsters from about the 1970s. They are big, hairy, shambling beasts. To be more technical about it, they are actors shambling about in big, hairy costumes. Presumably back in the 20th century they used synthetic fabrics, so I dread to think how uncomfortable it was for those poor guys in the costumes.

My MWAS, as a new and keen cosplayer (translation: someone who dresses up as a Doctor Who character for fun) wants to be a Yeti. Since I have convinced him that wool-based fabrics are the best fabrics on the planet, or at least the best ones we can afford, he wants to make the costume out of fleece. He has watched me peg-looming a rug out of washed, but otherwise unprocessed, Romney, Herdwick abd Leicester Long wool and thought: "My word, that looks a lot like Yeti fur!"

He asked me if I had any fleece I could spare, and naively I pointed out the four buckets. He used them all, even the rather nice bits of Romney I'd been saving for.....y'know, something. Then he asked me for more.

"How much more?" I asked nervously.

"About five times as much!" was the answer. "And if possible, a bit felty and sort of brown. Like a Yeti."

A dining table full of Yeti pelt.

Blimey! I pride myself on being able to source fairly cheap fleece, but even so, it doesn't grow on trees. (I Googled it. Turns out it grows on sheep.) This could be one costly Yeti costume. Not to mention bulky, heavy, and hot.

This did not sound like a good idea. Nevertheless, I believe in standing by my MWAS no matter how crazy he is, so I contacted the lovely people who supply my Romney and asked if they had any felty, brown fleece going really cheap.

They explained to me the concept of belly wool, and that by virtue of growing fairly close to the ground on an outdoors-living animal, it's pretty gross. They offered me 15 kilos for postage only, and I jumped at it.

The postage was paid, and the fleece arrived. Holy ovine excrement, it smelled! It sat in our sitting room for four days before I insisted it went up the loft, in hessian sacks. We kept a third of it out, picked it over for twigs, short bits, bits that were more mud than fleece, and anything generally unpleasant. Then we threw it into a bucket of water and left it to soak in the garden.

I tried washing it all for my MWAS, but after a week my sinuses rebelled and I decided to teach him how to wash it for himself. I broke it down into the following easy-to-remember steps:

Put a large plastic bucket in the sink.

Fill with water, as hot as you can get.

Squeeze in washing-up liquid, while chanting "Great Cthulhu's tentacles!" (this is about a 1-second squeeze, which experiment has shown to be the ideal amount for this quantity of fleece)

Add a laundry bag, a third to a half filled with a large double handful of your soaked fleece. It's probably about half a pound, dry weight. Of course, at this stage it isn't dry any more. It is cold, wet, muddy and smelly. Did I mention the need for an apron? You'll wish now that you had worn an apron.

Note the time. Go and do something in another room. You will want to escape the smell.

15 minutes later, come back. Pull out the bag of fleece (erg!). Pour away the water (erg erg!) Refill the bucket with hot water.

Add washing-up liquid, this time chanting "Cthulhu lives!" This will give you a smaller quantity of detergent for the second wash. Go away for another 15 minutes.

Come back. Now you are on the rinses. Hot water only, no detergent. 15 minutes each or thereabouts.

Repeat rinses until the water is....not clean, because life's too short and this belly fleece is FUNKY. Just until the water is clean enough that you would wash your muddy feet in it, if you had to. Imagine a camping holiday in Wales, with a shortage of hot water. THAT clean.

Spin the fleece in the spinner. If you haven't got a spinner, this bit is tricky. Luckily, we have a spin dryer and it isn't.

Spread the fleece out to dry on a wire rack, or in our case, the guinea pigs cage. The guinea pigs are used to it by now.

My MWAS has, so far, managed to wash...er, no fleece, that's NONE, all by himself. Eventually he will run out of clean fleece, and I will watch with interest to see what he does then.

Washing lambswool

 As I have mentioned in previous posts, I have lost several kilos of long-stapled wool due to careless washing. I don't think I'm felting it with unnecessary agitation (after all I've washed BFL/ Leicester longwool lambswool with no felting). Rather, I'm soaking and washing it without picking it, so the wool is dense and matted in the hot soapy water. It doesn't wash the mud out very well, not does it dry very well like that, so it's often still slightly damp when it goes into plastic buckets for storage. Six months later I have musty smelling, muddy fleece that doesn't want to be picked and flicked.

Lamsbwool locks before washing

A week ago I bought a lovely soft, white Romney lamb's fleece and was determined not to make the same mistake again. I thought of spinning it all up in the grease, and tried spinning a skein. It spun up well, and washed up nicely, but after washing was still creamy coloured and smelled more sheepy than I really like. I'm used to my skeins being white and clean, and I don't really want to sacrifice that for the sake of skipping a wash.

Moreover, I realise that wool "in the grease" has a shelf life of only a couple of months, before the waxes harden, the fibres stiffen and discolour, and the moths get the munchies. Since I put effort into buying fleeces as soon as possible after shearing for freshness, it seems counterproductive to then let the fleece go rancid and stale in my loft.

Is there a special technique for washing adult or lamb's long-stapled fleeces? I found the blog of one spinner who flicks each lock, then individually sews each one into a mesh bag before washing. Others wash their unpicked locks, half a dozen at a time, in roasting pans. I wanted a method that was unfussy yet reliable.

Theorising that my main mistake in the past had been the compactness of the fibre, not water temperature, type or quantity of detergent used, agitation etc, I decided to separate the fleece into individual locks at the start. This fleece is very open and it is easy to do this. There is also very little mud and vegetable matter, which there was plenty of in the fleeces I'd had problems with.

Fleece in small batches in laundry bags

I divided the locks into two piles, one pile I left unflicked, and the other pile I flicked. Then both piles were split into handfuls, about the volume and weight of a bra, each handful was put into a separate laundry bag, and soaked in cold water. The unflicked locks had an overnight soak, the flicked ones only about 20 - 30 minutes.

Then I boiled the kettle, and made a cup of tea.

Then I boiled the kettle again, and put about 5 litres of too-hot-for-hands water into a plastic trug. I added a 2-second squeeze of Bio-D (unscented, eco-friendly washing-up liquid) to the water, swished it around (ouch!) then put the fleece in.

Then I drank the tea.

Two rinses of equally hot water later, and the water was clear and clean. The fleece went into my laundry spinner to spin, and came out not at all felted.

The unflicked locks after washing

Probably unsurprisingly, the unflicked locks came out with dirt still in the tips, while the flicked locks came out snowy white and shiny, like underwear in a laundry commercial. I need to wait for the locks to dry and flick them for a true comparison (is that dirt going to flick out easily or not?), but I have to say, so far this method of washing flicked locks in small batches to allow plenty of spreading out space looks like a good one.

It uses more hot water than I am used to using, but I don't see there's any way round that. If I was abusing the fleece by washing too much of it at a time, then washing less of it at a time is going to take more of my time and hot water. The kettle doesn't like being boiled repeatedly, and often stops working for five minutes to cool down. I have a tea urn however, and tomorrow I'll get it out and see if that makes the process run more smoothly.

The flicked locks after washing

My main concern now is: how much space is it going to take to store it? Up until now I have squashed and stuffed washed fleece into buckets, at least 1.5 kg in a 40L bucket. Come to think about it, maybe the squashing process itself is to blame for the felting. The BFL / Leicester lambswool that I washed successfully never made it into a bucket. It's been in more or less constant use for sock yarn, so it's been in a pillowcase in the bathroom since June.

I have 3 kg (unwashed weight) of fleece, let's say 2 or 2.5kg after washing. In its compact, unwashed state it wouldn't quite fit into a 40L bucket. I was thinking that after washing it would take up two buckets. But if I store it flicked and washed, how many then? Three? Four? And will it felt in the bucket?

If anyone has any experience they would like to share with me, I would be very grateful. I really don't want to open a bucket in 6 months time and find a musty mess.