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.

The right tool for the right job.

Despite my last market for the financial year being a 'bit disappointing', I actually had quite a successful year, almost reaching the first of my financial goals. So much so, that I purchased a number of equipment items.

If you know me, you know that I love hand tools. Mechanical, don't often break down, hand tools. I even don't have an electric beater, but a hand beater. Perhaps says as much about how often I bake, but I DO use it when I need to!

The first purchase for the year was the overlocker, but the second, perhaps the cheapest of all, is the swift. Organised by Amy (thankyou, again), I managed to obtain this beatiful and incredibly useful tool for simply holding skeins while you wind them. This may not seem like alot, but after the number of skeins I have knotted and struggled with, this is just heaven.

Then after much umming and aaring, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase a 16-shaft table loom, and then proceeded to add it a double back beam and a warping mill from the very helpful people at Ashford.

I do like playing with weave structures and the more complicated the better! There are a number of weaves in my sample books, most notably the eyelash weave, that require lots of shafts, so I can go back and revisit them, or make the sample for some of the weaves I didn't get to do. The table loom means that I can quickly warp and produce, hopefully interesting scarves, etc for my market stall.

The double back beam adds to the complexity by having two separate warps that can be woven in very different ways at different rates. I haven't put this on yet, but I will.

The warping mill, like the swift, makes a tedious job so much easier. 10 minutes to do my first warp, including fiddling time. Love it already!

So, keep an eye out for more weaving!