An early spring hike

 It snowed again.  I woke up to low, lead grey, snow clouds and a wintery sky.   There was a light dusting of snow on the ground.   It doesn't feel like spring today!   Yesterday was another cool day, however we had a short reprieve from the incessant wind.   We took advantage of that and went for a hike.  The trails were in pretty decent shape all things considered, with only a few muddy and slippery spots.   That made it a rather nice day out.  I was worried I was over dressed, with my parka and a hoody on underneath, instead of the liner jacket, my double wool toque and thick wool mittens.   However, it was cool enough outside, just above freezing that I was comfortable the whole trail!   

It wasn't sunny, although the forecast suggested we should get some sun.  It was however, brightish out, which was nice enough.   The dark, foreboding skies we've had most of the winter do get a little bit much sometimes. 

The river was flowing fairly quickly.  With all the snow melting over a few days and some rain in there, and now more snow, I was amazed that it wasn't higher than it actually was.  It's usually this brown, silty looking water.  The difference with the view in the springtime is that you can easily see the water.   Once it warms up a bit, the foliage from the trees and the ground plants will obscure the view because they are so lush and full.

This white birch and a yellow bird house were the real spots of  brightness on the trail today.  Even the new growth of the pine trees didn't show brightly enough on this dull day.   However, the walk was pleasant enough and the terrain wasn't difficult due to icy or slippery, muddy conditions, so that has to be considered a win.   It was great getting outside for a bit too, without being scolded by birds.   Also, I saw a robin!   I haven't seen one at home yet, and they are another sign of spring.  

This is a true sign of spring.   A small patch of crocuses started blooming a couple of days ago.  They made me very happy.

The daffodils and tulips are just starting to grow, with their green leaves pushing up from the ground just a few inches.  The hyacinths are still under a small patch of leaves and snow - snow that I'd missed, along with the snow on the other side of our fence line!   Please go away snow!

After a lot of rain and wind, which gave us all sorts of weather warnings, we've had a couple of nice days.  Today was so nice, I went outside on the deck to read for a bit.  It was still quite windy so eventually I had to put on a sweater.  I don't think I got that much reading done, because the birds were continuously berating me for being outside instead of leaving them to the buffet of bird feeders.  Lots of chirps, clucks and shrill warnings while I was sitting quietly reading, lol.

While many of the birds which visit us during the winter have gone back to wherever they spend the good weather, our bluejays, mourning doves, cardinals are still with us.  The grackles are at a reasonable level this year, but I think only because I missed filling the feeders the day they returned.  We have red winged blackbirds who only eat at the feeders until there is other food available.  There were a couple of cowbirds, some finches or sparrows and the woodpeckers, who don't care if I'm on the deck or not.  

I also spent time watching the trees.  We've missed maple syrup season all together this year because of the odd spring weather.  The maple trees are starting to flower, so syrup season is pretty much over.   We've got a few bottles set aside for a situation like this, so we won't do without.

The snow seems to have finally melted.  Yesterday there was still some snow at the edges of the fields around us.   The frost is gone and moisture is draining aways.  It was bad there for a while as there was no place for the snow melt to go and we had water over good parts of the land around the house.  That was a pain to deal with for sure.  Not just puddles, but massive puddles flooding the barn and making for muddy, squidgy, slippery walking.  It wasn't bad outside today!

I took a break from making the little comfort dolls.  I dug up a skein of bamboo/wool blend sock yarn.

 It's a tad heavier than some yarns, but not by much.   I can make 2 pair of shorty socks with them as long as only one pair has heel tabs and the other just has a cuff.  I love the colours of these.  In discussions with a friend, apparently some people don't like the cuffs to show.   I really don't care as comfort is more important to me.   I'm still undecided on the tabs vs the little cuff.  Last summer I don't think I noticed a difference between the two.

I made these on my Circular Sock Machine, a Legare 400, which is over 100 years old.  While I'd love a new machine, maybe a NZAK - New Zealand Auto Knitter, I don't have the $ saved up right now.   However, my old girl, while sometimes being a little fussy, still works a treat.

I've been doing a lot of spinning lately.   Having a group of gals who meet once a month to spin together has really helped get the spinning mojo boing again.   While I've been spinning off and on since my Master Spinner program, I've been mainly spinning cotton and other oddly technique specific fibres.   Getting back to spinning real wool took a bit of time to reconnect with my skills.   

This is Finn sheep wool.  It's a good staple length to spin easily and is relatively soft.  I only have just under half a kilo of it, so maybe I should have spun it a little finer.   The bottom skein is what I was working towards.  It took a bit of time and practice to get to how I wanted to be spinning.  Mostly though, the slight differences in the skeins won't make a difference to its use.   If I can get more fibre, I'd like to make a sweater.   Otherwise, maybe I'll find a local shepherd and pick up a fleece to play with.

Hints of spring

Finally, we've had some weather which has allowed for the snow to start melting.   This leaves the snow, especially the snow banks dirty and grey.   I love this because I see it as a symbol of hope of the incoming spring.   

The ground is still frozen though, so the melting snow is running off into the lowest areas.  Luckily we have some drainage in the farm land around here which helps those areas.  It hasn't been warm enough for the frozen water in the ditches to melt though, so the snow melt is running over the frozen ground, making for a very muddy top inch of soil and grass.   It won't last though, because a few more mild days are forecast which should help a lot.  Right now though, much of this water is running right into the barn, making parts of it a frozen mess.

I've made some more of the comfort dolls.  A friend and I took a field trip to a yarn store in a nearby town, which was highly discounting sock yarn.  It was $.97 a 100 g skein!  There were limited colours available but I still purchased a good few skeins.  What there weren't though were solid colours.   My friend dug down and found some of this pink, which she passed one skein on to me to make more comfort dolls.  I thought it might be good skin tone, but it's very pink.  Instead I managed to make a pig girl.   I didn't have a crochet hook small enough, so making the hair was not fun at all.  Still, I'm hoping someone will love her.

I've almost finished spinning up the cashmere merino singles.  There is only a handful of roving left, but my bobbins were full.  Not having access to the deck and table where I usually do my dyeing, I tried a different technique in a roasting pan.   It was not a huge success.   I managed to label my black dye as brown.  I wanted brown.  I also should have diluted the dye a lot more.

I soaked the yarn for several hours.   I chose not to add vinegar to acidify the water, which I would do next time.   I lay the skeins in a roasting pan, and squirted and dabbed dye on the yarn, in what should have been short runs of colour.   I then added the vinegar and water to do a low water dye on what I hoped to be similar to a painted skein.

Nope, the dye ran, and the black which should have been brown, dyed all the white spaces I left.   Because I didn't dilute the dye enough, it's much darker than I'd anticipated or hoped for.

Look at the lovely blue sky though! And the snow is melting.  You can see the grass in spots!   I don't feel bad about the dye experiment because there are hints of spring today and it is glorious!

 

Winterlude ...

 

A break in the storm systems and a few moments of sunshine.  We've had so much wind thought that it still felt like it was snowing.

This is our pond, although it took a few minutes for me to identify the photo under all that snow.

Hard to tell this is a large pine tree!  

We've had a couple of days of mild weather though, so we've had some melting and the snow has compacted a bit.  This means the gigantic snow bank that the snowplow made, is no longer blocking the view of oncoming traffic, which is nice.  After a couple of fairly mild winters with minimal snow, this winter has been a bit of a surprise.   The longer days are nice though.  Sunset isn't until about 6:30 pm,  and I don't have to put my car lights on when I leave the house at 7:45 am, so yay for that!   It gives hope that spring is on its way.  I do believe though that the local prognosticating rodent, Willie, a groundhog from the Bruce Peninsula, is laughing away in his burrow, with his call for an early spring.  We're still waiting for suitable weather changes to tap our maple trees.  

A stormy week of projects

 We've had 3 major snow storms in the past week.  While I know other areas of the province have loads more snow, we've had more snow than we've had in years.   We've had so much wind this year, which keeps the Great Lakes from freezing.  This in turn causes lake effect snow, on top of whatever system works its way up or across to us.   Then with the wind, even when we don't have snow, we get blowing snow, like today with blowing snow warnings because it's affecting  roads and visibility.   I'm really looking forward to spring and getting back to some sort of routine that includes something other than staying home because hubby took my car to work since it's better on the icky roads.

But while stuck at home, I've started spinning the merino/cashmere/silk rovings.   It's easier to spin the rovings processed and dizzed off the drum card thicker than the commercially processed rovings which are much easier to spin very thin.   

It' been interesting because I'd been spinning cotton for demos and to finish up my stash for ages now, and have had to rethink my spinning technique to slow down and be more mindful of not over-spinning the wool blends and wools.    I have one bobbin full and started on the second one.  I plied a sample, and didn't like the results.  I think instead I'll spin it all as singles.  I'll dye it as singles and then weave a scarf with it.   Otherwise I'll end up making mittens and it's almost spring and unless I manage to lose all 3 pairs that I still haven't lost yet, I won't need another pair of mittens this year, no matter how soft and yummy they'd be.

I've been busy using up some scrap sock and fingering weight yarn on the CSM.   There is a spring
crank-in which gathers up requested items for donations.  Last year it was comfort dolls that went to the Provincial Police to give out to children in trauma situations.   The group donated 80 of them and they had given almost all of them out during the next 6 months and have asked for more.   So I started making a couple for my donation.   I'm running out of sock yarn scraps though.  I thought I had more, because I'd saved up a bunch from many of the years when I'd knit socks by hand, but having used a lot last year, there aren't many left.   I'll make what I can even if it's not as many as last year.  

 Last year I had a skein of  generic browny fleshtone which worked well for people dolls of no specific race.  This year, I've not found any skin tones, and only had a bit of leftover greys.  I've used the greys to make a couple of bears or cats, because I can't tell what they actually are.  I had a couple of leftovers in a bit larger amount so have made some very colourful bunnies.  They seem to work better in crazy colours than the bear/cats.

I made a bear snake today which had 3 bears in it.   It's called a snake because it's a long tube of projects.  You can make sock snakes too, which are socks knit one after another and not separated until you are finishing them.  There are 3 bear project in between a double section of waster yarn, with a ravel cord in between each bear, so it's waste yarn, ravel cord, waste yarn, bear legs, shirt, head, waste yarn ravel cord - and so on..  It means you only have to set up the CSM once for multiple projects.

 That is the last of the grey in my stash, which I'd been using for fur colours.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do next.  There is no cheap yarn locally, and what yarn there is, if it's remotely affordable for charity work, it's in vivid, bright colour mixtures, which I don't think I can turn into bears.

Please note- that ginormous bag of stuffing I bought last year, is almost empty.  There is a good chance I'll need to buy more!  Yikes!

   

Spinning the last of my Cotton

I've been spinning up the last of the coloured cotton that I'd picked up out in Alberta, when I was doing my master spinner course.   I really only had odds and ends left, rather than some of the larger packets.   I'm a bit sad because this was lovely to spin.   I had enough of the green to divide the roving in two and spin up about 3/4 of a bobbin of plied cotton yarn.  I forgot to take a before photo, but it was a beige colour raw.   Once it was plied I soaked it in water for a few minutes and then brought the water to a boil.  This brings out the colour of the coloured cotton.  It's a tad darker than this but I didn't want to play around with colour processing because I took the photo too close to a large window with indirect light bouncing off a lot of snow!

The second skein was really spun with whatever leftovers I had in a willy nilly fashion.   I just grabbed whatever bit I got when I reached for it and spun.  It's a mix of white, green and brown.   It also shows why maybe heat setting colour of white cotton isn't a good idea.  White cotton when boiled can turn beige! It's definitely an odd looking skein of yarn, but at least there was minimal waste.  I have less than a metre left on the 2nd bobbin of singles!  Yay me!

Cotton Clouds cotton roving is a dream to work with and comes in several hard to find and interesting colours.   Not available around here sadly.

A Rare but little rant

 I went over my friend's to try out her new huge electric carder.  It's double width at least of a home carder and has dual speed adjustments for the licker-in and the main drum.   She's worked out a spiffy way to draft off roving instead of batts, using a little bead as a diz.   It works amazingly well and the resulting roving is very professionally done.   It's light, fluffy, and easy to spin.

I brought the last of my bag of merino/cashmere/silk/nylon mill ends which were too hard to spin without processing.   I'd been hand carding them, but was frustrated enough to think about digging out my drum carder, when this play date came up.   It took a while, because it's still a fairly slow process, but what an amazing job.   I think we ran them through 3 times and we ended up processing just over 300g, into 3 huge bumps which filled 1/3 of a large plastic bin bag.   It was beautiful stuff.

I'd actually brought the mill ends in case we needed something else to card, as we were going to work on the black guild fleece.   The guild fleeces have turned into a rant worthy project.   I was away on holiday, so someone took my place on the field trip, to get the fleeces we were offered.  I'm hoping they didn't have a choice because that would make things much more acceptable.   We were supposed to get 5 fleeces, but the gal picking them up took one.  That's fine, because 4 fleeces is a lot of work so spreading the load is a good thing.    These are the fleeces that I was told weren't for me to work with during the summer and if they needed my help, they'd ask.   "Whatever"...still ticked me off, as I had the time and space to work with them then.  Anyway, in the fall, I got the rest of them as the person gatekeeping them decided she was tired of them and going to store them in a warm, dark spot - moth haven.   

The first fleece we had access to was washed by someone with little experience.   She was happy with her efforts, but there was still so much lanolin in it.  Plus with just a gentle tug, we found that a good part of the fleece had a break in it.  If you take a lock of the fleece with one end in each hand and give a tug on it, the fleece should hold together.  With a break in it, it will snap into two shorter pieces.  It's an unsound fleece and horrible to work with.  After you check the staple length, this is the next test to do, in several places. Not only that but parts of the fleece were felted.  A thinks that both issues are due to dunking and lifting a mesh bag of fleece during washing, instead of letting it soak openly.  So A took it home to rewash, and see what she could do with it.   She ended up trying to card it, then comb it and almost gave up.  With the new carder, she made something useable but only after running it through the electric carder 5 times!  It's a nice-ish knitting yarn, very rustic due to the ness, in a worsted/aran weight.   

The second fleece is also white but I washed some up with multiple washes and rinses.  I couldn't hand card it.  Literally was too compacted or felted to hand card.   It was a miserable mess on a small drum carder with coarse cloth.   I had to comb it and it was about 70% loss of fleece to useable fibre.  Not only that but it was hard on the hands, so not worth it at all.   I gave the washed fibre to A too see what her thoughts were and she couldn't get anything good out of it either.

The third fleece is a lamb's fleece with so much lanolin that 5 washings with soap and degreaser still left the fleece greasy.   I figured another wash would felt it up, just from overworking it, so I left it with A to see what she could do with it.  I'm sort of wondering if it should just be turned into compost because no fleece is worth that much time, effort and resources to process.

The  last fleece was the black one.  Of them all, it's by far the best.   Apparently someone washed it
before I got it, but that was the one that required 3 more washings and 3 rinses to actually get it clean.  We carded up just over 200g, into two bumps to see what our thoughts were for spinning this.   I'm half through my bit.  It spins up fairly easily.  There are many more neps than I'd like in it and not all can be picked out when spinning.  This means it's a lot thicker yarn than I'd normally spin with something like this.  It's full of vm, way more than I'd anticipated.   

If the guild was hoping we could spin up yarn for them to weave with it's going to be a non-event.  We've both already talked about how these fleeces are so bad that because of the number of hours required to turn them into useable yarns, that the people spinning them should have first dibs on them.  I'm not sure who would want to put that many frustrating hours into making a small amount of yarn, to give away to someone with no idea what went into making it.

Also, if someone gives you fleeces or you buy them, you have the right to check them to make sure they are worth the amount of work needed to make them into useable yarn.  I've gotten fleeces from the Canadian Wool Co-op and straight from the farm  which required only a couple of washes and rinses to bring up bright, easy to use fibre with almost no vm.  They can be a joy to work with.   Before you put your money down, you should be able to check the staple length and the integrity of the locks before you buy, or at least have an honest description from the seller.