Moving and Spinning

 

This was another project to take along to my Sit and Knit group, SNB Rosanna. But it did take a long time to finish. Originally, I was going to block it before sewing it together and finishing the neckline and cuffs. However, it sat there unable to find space, as I spent the year, getting our house ready for sale, and, eventually, selling and moving. Currently, I don't have the space to block, either, and despite the fact that it's Summer and I don't really need it, I decided to finish it off, and, wear it.

For the past couple of years, I've been spinning up the fleeces and tops that I had in my stash. These are natural colours and I have lots of different colours, but not enough of one for a whole jumper. So, I have been searching for patterns that have multiple colours.

This pattern is from 'The Knitter'. It's knitted in two pieces, bottom up and include the sleeves. 

It was pretty easy to knit as most of the rows were either stocking stitch or garter stitch. There's one row where you do short row knitting to get the bobble. This row takes ages!

Fortunately, the yarn fit to the pattern pretty well. 

Using up leftovers

This month (September) we experimented with 4ply cable yarns for our online Experimental Spinning session. Four ply cable yarns are basically two singles overplyed together,  twice, then the two resulting overplyed yarns are plyed together in the opposite direction.

A video that was recommended on the day is Wool n' Spinning presents Cabled Yarn by Rachel Smith. Lots of good information and hints.

I decided to use up some leftovers and came up with these yarns.

I was quite happy, so did a bit of a deep dive into my leftovers and came up with these:

And I finished with these yarns:

I made mostly 4ply cable yarns, but I did have a S spun single that I added to the end bits of my plying creating a few 3ply yarns. All sorts of matching yarns. They do need washing as the singles I've used are quite old.

I'm very happy with all of these and they'll end up being used in the mitred square rug that I've been working on. I've stopped that for the moment as I've run out of little bits of handspun yarn and I really should be moving on to other projects. It has been a bit of a distraction, however pleasant, and I should get on with Stuart's jumper and weaving the plastic rugs for my residency in Ivanhoe.

 

Experimental Spinning in isolation

As the Handweavers & Spinners Guild of Victoria has closed because of COVID-19 we have held our meetings virtually with a combination of WhatsApp and Zoom. It's hard to figure out how best to use them. I suspect many of the features are there, just have to find them.

One good outcome is that I seem inclined to finish the different yarns we've done so far.

This is the bead yarn that seems to be a leftover from the last time we covered beads. The beads are dalmation beads and I put them on the single as it was spun. I've got some black alpaca that I'll spin and combine with this one.

We were supposed to look at Border Leicester, however, we weren't able to obtain some in time. I found some English Leicester and decided to do some tail spinning. I've only done it once before and this time it was more successful.

For information on Border Leicesters see: https://www.thespinningloft.com/sheep-o-pedia/border-leic... and https://www.borderleicester.com.au/why-borders

I found a good video on tailspinning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv24qJaEhpk

The last one I've completed so far, we were blending all sorts of bits and pieces. I had wool, alpaca, threads and core spun around some 4 ply yarn which  worked quite well.

For core spinning yarn by Ninja Chickens- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhRGnWdJeOc's 

This month we were playing with compost yarn that uses fabric and buttons. Lots of feathers were on the agenda for others in our virtual Experimental Group.

Making fabric

Back in the day when I was studying Studio Textiles at RMIT, by the way, no longer a course, you can do fashion instead. Anyway, we had to come up with a business plan and mine was to make fabric, till the reality was that even a small designer needed a run of at least 30metres!

However, I've come back to that abandoned plan and am trying fabric lengths. I've started by diving into my handspun stash, and creating open warps. Simple weaving but, I think, quite effective. Then I'm putting them on Etsy (I'm teesjourney on Etsy) and am waiting to see what happens!

Here are my efforts so far:

The first using cream 3ply as the starting point and the warp. All the cream based yarns with the most gentle textures and colours.

Cream 3ply commercial cream warp with handspun yarn weft.

Lots of lovely soft textures and colours.

 The next was a full five metres starting with a fine black mercerised cotton warp and alternating stripes of black and colours. There are two repeats and I used the Fibonacci sequence as my starting point.

Five metres of black and coloured stripes.

I love the fabric all rolled up and waiting. 

The next one is sorted and waiting. Purple warp and, hopefully, matching weft yarns.

And would you believe, my handspun stash box seems quite full!

Lace at Experimental

I always love the challenges that each session of Experimental Spinning brings, this time lace was on the agenda, courtesy of an article in the latest edition of Ashford's magazine, 'The Wheel'. It described a method of add those odd bits of lace to your spinning in quite a wild way. Not being a lace girl, cutting up lace seemed like an appropriate thing to do!

We had plenty of lace with a donation from our craft outlet volunteer, and lots from all our stashes.

The first part involved cutting up lace, taking lengths of wool top and threading the top through the lace.

You end up with a pile of lace and tops, like this!

Spinning isn't difficult, or slow, though having my lovely poly wheel with  big hooks certainly helps and even with that, there is some lace that is stiffer than others and does get caught. As I was going to ply this with a fine single, I hoped I could smooth those pieces of lace that had moved or were scrunched up too much, as I plyed.

That proved the case and the plying was done quite nicely and I ended up with yarn that is really quite sweet!

The lessons learnt....

I think that because the pieces of lace were quite short, when I plied they tended to keep sticking out rather than get wrapped. I think that the longer pieces would have been more twisted from the spinning, making the plying easier.
 

For further experimentation:

Trying to get the pieces of lace closer together, for that full-on lace look!

Dyeing would be interesting! All those different fibres!

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this yarn, but it was fun! For such an over the top look, it's not difficult or particularly slow.

An ode to Petlyn wool combs

Dear Julie and Joe,

Just thought I'd drop you a line to let you know how much fun I'm having with your English wool combs that I bought from you at the Australian Sheep and Wool Show in Bendigo this year. I also purchased some of Coral Stewarts' dyed fleece. More of a sentimental purchase, as I don't need any more fleece, but I do love her work and have a jacket and a jumper made from her dyed yarn, which I love.

Now I know that this was not the perfect start, whilst the fleece is dyed it was still very greasy, but I thought that knowing this was not the best start would allow me to experiment to find the best way to process it. Fleece is always tricky as you tend to get a muddying effect as there are no distinct blocks of colour. Well, this fleece, anyway.

I found the best way was to load a rough colour block at a time, then take it off with the free comb, load more, take off more, and keep going till I had this:

You can sort of see the layers that were created and when I 'dizzed' it off I got

It spun up beautifully, as you would expect using wool combs, I navaho plied the resulting single to try and keep some colours. It did turn out muddy in places and I did really lose the blue, but I love the yarn so much I didn't take a photo before I knit it up into a shrug to sell in my Etsy shop.

I really love the combs and have started work on my next project, and, as convener of Experimental Spinners at the guild, we're going to have a session playing with wool combs. A couple of us have wool combs and so does the guild. We're going to try colour blending and see what happens.

Thanks again for your marvellous products and your generosity in sharing your knowledge.

Cheers, Teresa

PS Hints on blending colours on wool combs would be appreciated!

Letter to the unknown customer

To whom it may concern,

Just thought I'd drop you a line to let you know that I've finally listed all my current fingerless mittens on Etsy. I know this is a little old fashioned writing a letter, but it feels better to be actually writing to someone, albeit unknown, than just speaking into the ether and wondering who is listening.

So let me tell you about my mittens. There are three different types that I've listed:

These are the last of the handspun yarn crocheted into a simple shape. I need to make more of these, but there's alot of spinning to do. I do have some gorgeous coloured tops in my stash waiting for me.

Then there's my new range:

I've made them with the boys in mind, but they do look good on women too! Currently, they come in black, grey or natural colours. I like addiing something different on the band and down the back of the hand.

Then there's my standby fingerless mittens, the ones with the buttons. They started this whole fingerless mitten making run.

There's the black and cream ones I always have, though I do need a couple of grey gloves, I am from Melbourne!

Then there are the couple of colours I currently have.












And, finally,

the chunky ones! Two are handspun and the other is from a stash dive with amazing buttons.

I have made an aweful lot of these fingerless mittens with buttons, over 150 if my records are to be believed, and the spreadsheet never lies, though I can hardly believe it! What makes it even more unbelievable is that each one is different. Sometimes it's just the yarn and I knit the square in stocking stitch with the thumb and the borders in moss stitch. That's my standard pattern, but alot are diving into the stitch books and playing with different stitches.

Anyway, I hope you like them and if you want to become a known customer head over to the fingerless mitten section of my Etsy shop.

Hope to hear from you,

Cheers, Teresa


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