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.

Flash Freeze: the next day

 Yesterday was the monthly spin in.   A bunch of us spinners gather to spin together for a couple of hours.  It's a fun, social gathering.  We've had weeks of windy, very cold weather and snow squalls.   Yesterday however, there was a break in the weather and instead of stupid cold, it was above freezing.  The roads were great, but it was raining.  More of a drizzle really but enough that I needed my wipers on and not quite enough to make them work efficiently.   It was a nice drive regardless, because there was no snow and you could see the roads!

We headed home about 1pm and by 2:30ish, the temperatures started dropping and the rain was now huge, huge flakes of snow.  They were falling straight down and within just a few minutes the road was covered over.   It kept snowing.   This morning though, the sun was shining and the sky a blue we rarely see in the winter around here. It was however, a crystallised winter wonderland outside.  It wasn't really an ice storm, although it sort of looks like it outside.  It was more of a flash freeze.  It was plus 2 in the morning and -11 by bedtime!

We went into town this morning and the trip in was interesting.   The ice and snow bound trees were far more intense and noticeable on the way, especially in areas not getting quite enough of today's sunshine, or in sheltered places.  However, there was a lot of icy areas still on the roads, and despite the shoulders being plowed, there wasn't a safe place to pull over to take photos.   I still haven't figured out how to quickly adjust the exposure on my phone for snapshots, so the sky really wasn't quite this blue, although it was pretty close.

We ended up not doing all the errands we'd planned.   The part for the kitchen tap turns out to be specialised and not labelled,  so we will have to go back with the part for comparisons.  It still works without it, so no urgency there.  The parking lot at the antique mall was overly full, so we passed on visiting today.   There is a business at the other side of the parking lot, with very clear NO PARKING signs on their workshop garage doors.   People still parked there.   Someone from the shop has parked very closely behind them, only slowing down a bit of access in the parking lot, but making sure the entitled parkers can't get out unless they get the big truck behind them moved.   That will put a bit of a damper on their day, for sure.

I filled the bird feeders when we got home.  Because of the rain, I didn't do it yesterday.   The food in the tray and around the little feeding  holes just gets wet and then freezes when the temperatures drop, making it impossible for the birds to get the food out.  But today, the old plastic feeder, may have just  finally gotten a bit too brittle in the cold and the lid closure snapped.  It's pretty old and is outside all year round so it doesn't surprise me too much.  I'm a bit sad though as  I'll have to go shopping for a new one next nice day.

The blue jays love the peanut feeder.  I'm not so happy about it.  Mainly it's because peanuts are expensive and the blue jays will empty the feeder in 30 minutes or less.  I've only been filling the feeder every other day because otherwise we'd go through way more peanuts than I'm willing to purchase as $43 a bag.   Second, I'm going to have to check to see that these are locally grown peanuts and not imported.  That's easy enough to do but I may still just replace it with a sunflower seed feeder as I know that the black oil sunflower seeds are grown locally, they are a whole lot cheaper, and more variety of birds will eat them.