Felting and spinning and spinning and spinning

 It was Textile Day at Westfield yesterday.  I ran an activity for making wet felted beads.   These are the samples I made up ahead of time.  I have another container full, but it's in that super safe place and really, I didn't have the energy to dig it up.  It was easier to just make new ones.  I started decorating a couple of them just because.   Most of the kids and adults who made a bead, had a great time and were very successful. We made necklaces and bracelets with a little bit of embroidery floss.   Once people started coming in, it was non-stop beadmaking.    I haven't been that tired at the end of a Westfield day in a while.   Silly me though.  I'd brought my wheel and some cotton to spin during the down times.   I probably got 4 or 5 yards of cotton spun as there was no down time during the whole afternoon. 

Just a heads up that if you come to Westfield on Sept. 2nd, I'm currently planning to churn ice cream!   Yay!   That's a good way to end the summer. 

 When I got home, we had a campfire.  I picked some of the drying Tigerlily (those orange ditch lilies) leaves and turned them into cordage.   My sweetie thought it was a lot of work, but really, I was sitting around the campfire doing nothing otherwise.  Now I have 2 metres of cordage suitable for basketry.   I'm drying some of the still green leaves to see if they make a difference in workability.   I wonder if bull rush leaves would work as well?   There are a bunch in the ditch, up the road!

 This is some ramie I dyed when I was first playing with Fibre Reactive dyes.   It is definitely a bold colour.   The ramie sliver was pretty compacted when I was done dyeing.  I tried shaking it out,  spreading the fibres manually, carding the fibres and then finally just stripping the sliver into thin bits.   The carding worked reasonably well, but of course was extra work.  The stripping into thin bits of sliver worked the best though and was quite fast.   There was a fair bit of short bits and neps in this fibre, but it looks pretty decent despite that.

This is more ramie.  The right skein I spun up in the past two days.   It was a bit of roving which was perfect.  All long staple lengths, with no short bit or neps.  It flew out of my hands and onto the wheel.  It was a joy to spin.  The skein on the left is from a previous batch of this same colourway.  What a difference in dye lots!   Just a reminder to get enough of one dye lot if you need it for a particular project.   I didn't believe they were the same colourway at first, but I'd been storing the skeins in their original packets, and sure enough - same colourway, just a different colour.   It won't really matter for what I have in mind though, so I'm happy enough with it.

I've two projects to put on the loom, which I'd planned to do over the summer.  I guess since summer is almost over, I should get started on those.   :)