DesigKnit

Last Monday, our spinning guild had an informal workshop on spinning art yarns led by Carrie (ravelry link, or here’s her Etsy shop). I barely got to try any of the techniques we covered at the meeting, because I was too engaged in sitting and watching her spin and hearing about all the details of the different techniques. So yesterday, I sat down to spin some samples in between packing boxes.

I started out with corespinning, where you spin your fiber onto another yarn “core.” Since all the strength of the yarn comes from the core, you spin very, very lightly and get a very fluffy yarn.

I have decided that I very much like corespun, though I have no idea what I will use it for. There is so little twist that it will probably be a pretty delicate yarn, but it is soft. It would be perfect for any garment where you want a halo, or just a very light fabric. It also uses a lot less fiber than traditional spinning, and it will keep long color repeats together when you don’t want a single or a chain-plied yarn. I also found that you can make a very tight corespun that is more like a traditional yarn (and probably more rugged), or you can go for loft, depending on the tension you apply while you spin.

Next, I tried thick-and-thin, which is supposed to be hard but I found to be much more intuitive than the “easier” corespinning. I think that’s because I usually spin long draw, and that’s pretty much what you’re doing when you spin thick-and-thin; you just let the twist grab onto a large bunch of fibers, draft out to get back to a thin yarn, and then start spinning normally again at the end of the staple.  It makes a very stable yarn, with very fluffy bits.

And here’s one of the “thick” spots all by itself. The trick is to make sure that the twist catches both ends of the staple so that the yarn doesn’t fall apart when you pull on it. I was snapping these hard enough to hear it, and they didn’t move at all. They are really long because I was using BFL as my spinning fiber. Shorter fibers will give you shorter thick spots.

Once you have thick-and-thin, you can start playing with coils. The easiest one is the supercoil. You ply your thick and thin with a core yarn, and then just scrunch the thick-and-thin ply up along the core. (I hear tell that this is very similar to what you do to make a boucle yarn, but I haven’t tried that one yet.) This looks like it should be a necklace or something, doesn’t it?

Since the coils aren’t really held down with anything, I found that mine move around a lot in the final yarn. Maybe I just haven’t practiced enough yet, but I think it’s in the nature of this yarn to move around a bit. Maybe it would be better with a binder yarn spun around it? I think it would also help to have a stickier core; I just used weaving cotton because it was a good color match. I’m not sure what I would use this for, but it was fun to make. I didn’t make much of it, because it requires a ton of singles to keep up with all that scrunching.

Next, I tried beehives. Again, you ply thick and thin with a core yarn, but this time you only scrunch when you get to a thick spot. This gives you long stretches of “normal” 2-ply yarn with the occasional beehive in between. This was a little trickier because you have to anchor the beginning and end of each beehive, but I actually like it better because they don’t really move around once they’re anchored in place. (You may have guessed by now that I generally prefer my fiber to stay where I put it rather than wandering around while I knit…)

And finally, I tried autowrapping. Basically, you add an extra yarn during the plying, but don’t hold onto it. You just let it hang there and “autowrap” itself around whatever else you’re doing. In this case, I used a silver metallic thread that Branden picked up for me at JoAnn’s fabric while he was out running errands. Since I had silver, I switched to a blue fiber instead of the butterscotch. I started out by corespinning the blue fiber, and then I plied it with some laceweight leftovers in the stash. While I plied those two together, I let the silver autowrap away. And this is what I came out with.

This is an incredibly soft, fluffy yarn with just a hint of glitter. I couldn’t get it to photograph well, but you can just barely see it there if you look closely. Still a fairly delicate yarn, but I think this will wear a lot better because the plying and the extra wrapping should help hold everything in place. I can definitely see using this, either for weaving or for knitting confections.

I also played around with cocoons in that skein. Here, you just insert a small amount of unspun fiber between your plies, and anchor it down. You’d also use something similar to put in beads and other foreign objects. I don’t generally care for lumps and bumps in my yarn, but it does add some interesting texture, and you wouldn’t have to make them as huge as I did. Again, perhaps for weaving, where I tend to like irregularities in the yarn much more than in my knitted fabric. (Ellen, I thought of cardinals when I was practicing this…)

You can see the autowrapped thread a little more clearly there; by letting it wrap on after you’ve plied, it becomes another ply wrapped around the surface of the other two instead of getting buried in the yarn.

In all, it was another fun set of experiments. I will definitely think about using the corespun and the thick-and-thin in the future, and possibly the beehives. I don’t know about the rest of the techniques, but it was fun to learn them, and it never hurts to have a few more ideas in your toolbox. I definitely learned a lot from this two hour (free!) workshop, and it was fun to try so many new things. Though I’m still not an art yarn addict, I’m really looking forward to coming up with ways to use these new yarns in the future; I think that they will give me lots of options that the more traditionally spun yarns don’t, especially where loft and softness are important, or when I’m looking for unusual texture to add to woven cloth.

This has been one of those weeks where I find myself saying “what, Thursday already?” Since it’s almost the weekend again, I suppose it’s about time that I post about what I did last weekend.

First, I finished up the leftovers from my doubleweave workshop. There were about 2 yards of warp left over, and the fabric was only about 4 inches wide. What do you do with such a small strip of fabric? Well, I made coasters.

I made some with a dark weft, and some with a light weft. And then I repeated the edging pattern over and over again to make one that looks like it has zigzags all along it (those are my favorites).

I just love these. We’ve been needing new coasters for a while now, and I’m thrilled to bits with my little magic carpets. (Though they may have had a certain Disney song stuck in my head all weekend.…)

Then, I wove the last few feet of warp on the big loom, so that it will be ready to return next weekend while we have the truck to move Branden to Chicago.

I can’t remember if I’ve blogged about this one before. It’s a rayon warp, with Madeline Tosh laceweight as the weft. The colors are very similar, but the two yarns look different in the light, and the subtle color gradations in the laceweight make for pretty contrast.

This is the most complicated threading that I’ve done yet, and it was a lot of fun. I definitely want to play more with complex weave patterns. So many things to try…

At the end, I had a few feet of warp left after I ran out of laceweight, so I switched to cotton and did some playing around.

These are two different patterns that use the same warp threading, and you just lift the threads (treadle) in a different way. It’s interesting to me how much difference the weft color makes. I really love the dark laceweight, and the off white, but I don’t really care for the medium toned purple. The colors go well together, but I don’t like the way they interact with the pattern; I find it very hard to see. The off white looks great, though. I think I got enough of that one to make something with it, too.

I think the final finishing on these will probably have to wait until after the move. I did manage to hem stitch the ends of each of the coasters, but these larger pieces will take a little more time and work to get done. Still, I’m excited to know that they’re almost ready to use!

Once the coasters were finished, the little loom was left empty. We can’t have that, so this week I’ve been working on threading up a new project.

This is a new doubleweave warp. The first part wasn’t behaving quite as nicely as I wanted (I was trying to work too close to the end to avoid waste), so I wove about 10″ that I think will probably become a drawstring bag of some sort. I finished that just before leaving for the bus this morning, and now it’s on to potholders.

So that’s my weaving progress report. Two things off the loom, and another on. I wonder what I’ll get done this weekend?

This is the first weekend in about two months that we have had nothing that has to be accomplished before Monday. (Well, there’s packing, but that will always have to get done…) It’s nice to have a couple of days off once in a while!

To celebrate, I spent yesterday dyeing. This time, I tried Jocelyn’s request for a Kestrel-colored yarn. There’s another photo here, in case one isn’t enough. They are beautiful birds.

This time, I was able to find colors in my sample card that came relatively close.

I wanted a little more orange in the brown color, and a little more blue in the black-blue mix, but it was close enough to make minor adjustments on the fly. That beautiful cream color is a very, very dilute mixture of pumpkin orange. I used that as my base dye, and then added accents of a slightly higher concentration. On top of that, I layered sapphire blue and black, and a mixture of chestnut and pumpkin orange. My sample up there is a 3:1 ratio, which I upped to 5:1, but you’d never be able to guess there’s that much orange in the reddish-brown color that came out. I had no idea that brown would be such a dominant color in a dye.

But that’s probably enough of the particulars, yes? You probably want to see the actual fiber.

I am thrilled with how this came out. The brown was a tad bit browner than I expected, and there was less of that creamy butterscotch than I was expecting, but I think it’s perfect. I’ve been petting it every chance I get. I’m a tiny bit worried that the colors will mix too much in the spinning, since the dark colors bled a bit into the light and it ate up my light-colored spacers that were supposed to prevent mixing. But I think it will be ok. Carefully spun, I think the colors should stay separate. There are only a couple of spots where the blue and orange bled into green, and they’re very small. So, I pronounce this one a success.

Here it is all braided up for Etsy:

As usual, I dyed a few different things all at once. I had a few ounces of BFL left over that weren’t quite enough to sell, so I used up some of the pumpkin dye making a beautiful butterscotch top.

I’m not sure what it will be; it’s not a color that I wear much, but I can see mixing it in with something else, just for fun.

And then I dyed another four ounces for sale.

I had some extra black dilutions left over, so I mixed those with a tiny bit of teal to make a fiber that looks like the dark, angry clouds of a summer thunderstorm. I’ll probably even get to compare it to reality this afternoon, since we’re supposed to be having some stormy weather again. That one is also on Etsy.

And finally, another one for me. When I bought my last shipment of fiber (well over a year ago now), I bought several 8-oz bundles of wool breeds I’d never tried before. I’ve been anxious to play with them, but just hadn’t gotten around to dyeing  them up yet. Yesterday, I dyed up some Polwarth in shades of teal.

This is destined to be some very fine laceweight. My sister is getting married in August, and I want to make a lacy sweater to go with the dress I’m planning to wear. I think I got the color right, don’t you?

The past year and a half have been relatively quiet, a period of stasis between the rush of teaching and getting a degree and whatever rush there will be in the rest of life. It’s been almost frustrating at times how little things are moving ahead, but now suddenly everything has become unpaused.

We got an apartment. We went on vacation (no, we haven’t even had a chance to look at the pictures yet). Branden is moving in two weeks. The badass project is ramping up. Check it out if you haven’t been there in a while. There are some truly amazing interviews up over there. My boss and I are in the crunch of paper writing that comes with finishing any position in academia. And now, there’s even a chance that I will have a job; one I thought I didn’t want but am suddenly realizing that I do.

Lots of change. Out of the static and into the dynamic. (I’m not complaining.)

And, amidst all this rush and bustle, the traveling sweater continues to travel, growing slowly day by day while I ride the bus to work and back.

Some things never change.

I love the fact that it is 8:00 and still light out. Realizing that the sun was still up inspired me to ply the BFL singles in time to take pictures. (As if I needed an excuse.)

Didn’t it spin up nicely? I love the way the colors work together in the final yarn.

It’s not my most even spinning job ever, but in this case I like the texture that comes from the unevenness. I think this is likely to be a weaving yarn, and a little extra texture can add a lot of interest.

I had split the singles onto two bobbins, and when I finished the 2-ply, I still had  some singles left over.

The color behaves differently in the singles, and I liked it both ways, so I decided to leave the last of the singles unplied. I’m not usually a big fan of knitting with singles, so these are the first I’ve ever spun. I think it will be interesting to see how the two different color sets go together.  From 4 oz of fiber, I got almost 200 yards of 2-ply, and about 100 yards of singles. Before I could ply the BFL, I had to free up some bobbins. I plied some of the Shetland that I’ve been spinning for Branden’s sweater the other night, leaving me with a pretty good pile of yarn.

If commercial roving is candy, then this is the wholesome, hearty comfort food that gets you through the winter. It’s turning out to be beautiful stuff. A couple of the mixed skeins seem to have gone missing somewhere in the craft closet, so this isn’t quite everything I have, but it’s close. I think I still need to spin up a few more skeins of the dark brown to get the color balance I want, but I’m about 90% of the way to a full sweater.  Actually, there’s more than a sweaters’ worth of yarn right there; I spun up almost 1400 yards of the light gray before deciding that it was only going to make up a third of the sweater. There will definitely be leftovers, but I don’t mind that one bit.

A friend asked me tonight if it was possible to subscribe to the blog directly. I said yes without thinking much of it, because it was easy and automatic in Blogger. But then I had to stop and think a minute. I’d never seen a function like that in the WordPress dashboard, and I’d never really thought much about it. I’m one of those Google Reader junkies with a million blogs and just as many unread items on any given day, so I don’t think much about direct subscriptions that aren’t through a feed reader. But I know that there are people out there who (probably wisely) avoid the slippery slope of RSS feed readers, so I asked Branden how you could subscribe directly. It took some poking, but there is now a “register” button at the bottom of the right sidebar (just below the archived list of posts). If you want to subscribe that way, you can just click the link and it should set you up with email updates. Let  us know if you have any trouble!

I realized just before we left for our trip to the Grand Canyon that I hadn’t thought about trip knitting at all (!). I don’t usually bring big projects, but the sweater is simple, and it was already in my work bag, so into the luggage it went.

I’m always amazed at people that go on vacation and actually finish their knitting. Or even make progress on it, for that matter. We usually have pretty active vacations, and so my knitting doesn’t usually increase very much on a trip. This time, I knit on the plane and for about half an hour one night in the hotel room. Other than that, the sweater was just tagging along, taking in the scenery. (And yes, it was with me in my bag pretty much everywhere, too. It really did get to see everything.)

After the airplane and the 3 hour layover in Minneapolis (during which we waved to Ellen and regretted not having looked at our schedule sooner), it looks not much different than it did before:

I’m almost done with the back panel, and the arm decreases really are the same on both sides regardless of the picture.

Now that we’re back, I’ve been working on this:

See that spectacularly ugly bobbin winding? That’s a sign that I like what I’m spinning. I get into the rhythm and just forget to change hooks. Whoops!

This is one of the dyed tops from the February Cardinal series that I dyed a while back.

As always, I am amazed and amused at the change that happens when colors mix in the spinning. All those patches of red and green and gray have evened out into some very muted, long color repeats.

I almost hate to say it, but commercial BFL top is my favorite thing to spin. I love, love, love the yarn that I get from a lightly processed local fleece, and it can make for fun spinning in its own way, but there’s nothing quite like the smoothness of a commercially prepared longwool for mindless spinning. It will give me a more compact, almost heavy yarn that will have nothing on the loft of a locally milled roving. For the yarn, I choose lightly processed roving, but for the spinning I love a commercial top. This batch has been a nice break from the ornery Shetland I’ve been working with lately, which has required a lot more active management.

I do have a few bobbins of that ornery Shetland left to ply (maybe today?), so I’m sure you’ll get to hear me wax poetic about the yarn spun from a locally processed fleece in due time. There really is a place for everything in this fibery world, isn’t there?

For the moment, I’m fully enjoying my very commercial, highly processed fiber. We’ll call it dessert, and what else should you use to end a vacation?

(Oh, and there will be trip photos posted, just as soon as we manage to sort through the hundreds of photos that we took!)