I've finished spinning the 100 g of natural green cotton. I'd forgotten to divide it up in half before I started spinning, so part way through, I took 50 g off the end of the sliver and hoped it was good enough. Sometimes the labelled weight is a few grams off, or more than a few, which can make a difference in the spun yardage. In this case though, I had only a 3 yard or so difference in bobbin yardage, so all was good.
The light skein is 227 yards of 2 ply cotton before it was wet finished. The darker green is 345 yards of the same cotton after wet finishing. I simply tossed the skein in a pot of water and simmered it for about 40 minutes. I so love the colour changes with coloured cotton after wet finishing. Be aware though that white cotton can turn off white or tan after simmering.
I put some roving mill ends, which I'm pretty sure are superwash BFL with a bit of nylon on the Minstrel. I am doing some natural dyeing on the long weekend in May and thought maybe I could get enough spun for the dye pots. Just in case, I'm going to hunt down some commercial white wool yarn as well. I'm planning on having 4-6 dyes going, using several different mordants and maybe some after dips for colour changes. We'll need a bunch of yarn for all that.
Our weaving/spinning guild has to move. We've got almost everything packed up but decided to thin out a bunch of our stash. We had 8 stacking bins of stuff that no-one had touched in years, as well as a huge tote of donated bits. I was looking at a bag with a warp in in, wondering what I could do with it, when Judy gave me another bag and said here, this one says 2 warps. They came home with me, since I'd been complaining that there is a 4 x 8 sheet of formica on the floor in front of my warping board, so I can't wind any warps.
Only one warp was labelled and it was with an approximate end count. The other 2 had no labels at all. No wonder they sat in that bin for ever. How could anyone figure out what to do with them, with no info! This morning I counted ends and measured yardage. They are all different. One is probably 2/8 stark white cotton, is 11 yards long and would only be wide enough for mug rugs. 11 yards of mug rugs - eek. The next one is only 3 yards long but has 298 ends and finally a 6 yard warp with 208 ends, in what looks like mercerized cotton. It's not like I can even mix them together to make something wider because of the length differences. The 11 yard warp has a cross only at one end, or I could have easily cut it in half and doubled it up. Right now it's really only wide enough for mug rugs and really, who would want to do 11 yards of mug rugs.
The shades of natural cotton remind me of the eggs I used to buy from my neighbor. Half my joy in her eggs was just looking at them. I bet the 11 mug rug warp isn't woven is because reality hit the weaver who said - eek!
ReplyDeleteI still have my spun green cotton unused - I boiled it all to get the darker green, which I liked so much better than the lighter original - same for the brown tone. unfortunately I don't have enough of either for a usable project, so the intention has been to spin more white cotton and use it all together... good intentions - haha, the white stuff is still in its bag and is likely to remain there for another while:) I am just sorting through boxes and bags of skeins and fibres - and found several skeins of spun up teeswater that I didn't even know I'd done! and I know that there must be another big lot of dyed teeswater top... I should really give some of the stuff away, but I just can't bring myself to do that with lovingly handdyed and handspun skeins, no matter how many are languishing in their boxes:( the curse of the fibre bug?:)
ReplyDeleteand the mug rug warp - can't you add a similar fibre/yarn on both sides to use the original stuff in the middle, but get more weaving width? just an idiotic idea from a weaver with veeeery little experience:)