What I did this weekend.....

I've been collecting all the leftover roving bits for ages now.  Some of the bits and pieces are leftover from my master spinner course.  Others have just accumulated over time.  Not all of them were really nice bits.  Even when properly stored, wool fibres can become somewhat compacted from time.  There can be temperature changes, humidity changes,  maybe some pressure from being stored in a bag or container and being squished a bit.   So some of the fibres were compacted, some were old, and there were a bunch that were in perfect condition.   I decided to dig out my blending board so that I had something to spin at the next spin in.   I will say that this is definitely a preparation where really nice, perfectly processed fibres work up so much nicer than a few of the compacted and neppy bits I ended up using

I had 3 shades of blue, 2 of which I'm pretty sure were dyed in an indigo vat and were probably leftover rovings that I tossed in to use up excess dye. There was some pale yellow, a rusty orange and a rusty red, some pinks, and purples, some green mohair locks which later became green roving when I realised I was sitting on it and some icicle nylon sparkly stuff.

I filled this basket full and forget to take a photo of the basket full of rolags.  It was quite impressive and very pretty.   It takes a lot longer than you'd think to fill a basket with blending board rolags.   I started just after lunch, took a 20 minute tea break to stretch, and then when I started running out of blue rovings, I realised it was 5 pm and time to start dinner. 

  I was getting 3 rolags from each loaded blending board.   I used to get 4, but decided to try one less.  The rolags were a bit larger and more substantial but not a single one broke or lost its structure.   I also didn't load quite so much on the board which made it a little easier to work with.

Since I'm running out of prepared roving in my stash, I was happy to have these to play with.   Spinning friends were quite complimentary about these.  I will say that the basket full was quite pretty.

Spinning the rolags was quite quick and pretty easy.   Except that this is where the quality of the fibre prep really shows.   Any of the areas of the rolags with the nicely prepared fibres were a dream to spin.   Hardly any effort was needed and they almost spun themselves.   The areas with the slightly compacted rovings, despite doing my best to loosen them up, require a bit of effort to get a reasonable bit of yarn.   In a few places, instead of being able to do the long draw, I had to do a short forward draw to get a consistent yarn.   There are a few bits that are uneven; even reversing the twist and trying to pull out the slub, didn't help.

Regardless, it was quite quick to spin.  I think because of the wide variety of fibres and the few that were compacted, it's a bit thicker than I'd planned.   It was just too difficult and not fun to spin any finer, so the plied yarn is about a worsted weight or maybe an aran weight yarn.  Not what I wanted, but it allowed me to chat with the girls while spinning the first bobbin- so there is that.

I'd been concerned that with the around of orange and rusty red in the mixture, that there was a high risk of getting a bit of undefined browns or greys in the finished yarn.   Not so though!  The yarn is manly dark blue, with smaller areas with the other colours showing through the barber pole effect of the plied yarn.   It's pretty enough, but after all that work, I really don't have that much yarn to work with for an end product.    If I'd made a finer yarn,  I was thinking about using it for a vertical stripe or stripes in a scarf.  It's really too thick for that I think, so maybe enough for a hat or save it for some rug hooking project.

 

Pretty colours and chooks

 It has been a very odd few weeks.   Weatherwise, we've had nothing but variable weather.  From the ridiculously mild, to cold and blustery, with rain, snow and winds inbetween.   What we've had little of is sunshine.   Day after day of grey weather.   Just so difficult to get motivated when it's getting dark at 4:30 pm and isn't light until after 7 am.   Then the wind storms, wifi outages and power failures just topped it off.   On the plus side, I did finally force myself to figure out how to use my phone to make a hot spot for my computer.  It wasn't difficult.  I just hadn't really been in a situation where I needed to do it.

In between, I did some fibre blending.  I made up a bunch of packets of rolags from some bits and pieces of fibre that needed to be used up.   These are merino, corriedale, silk, with a bit of angelina or sparkle, which is a local shops nylon, sparkly stuff, similar to firestar. I didn't use a lot of sparkly stuff, just a tad to make it interesting.

Then I blended up some rolags for a new hooked rug.  I didn't want to go out and buy wool yardage for this rug.  It's not an original design and is a guild challenge project.   The photo to the right shows the start of the rug yarn project.   I had to do a bit of concentrating for the first few yards to make sure that I had the grist suitable.   I need a bulky yarn for this project.  It's better if it's a bit uneven in grist (sigh, not my favourite) and has a nice mix of colours.   It spun up quickly because I used a long draw and forced myself to not pay a lot of attention while spinning   It worked though, I got the results I was looking for.

first skeins of rug hooking yarn

I swapped a couple of bags of the first rolags, for a similar amount of roving from a friend.   One bag was a super dark blue shetland/blue faced leicester crossbred fibre and the other was undyed shetland/bfl, and alpaca.    I wasn't too thrilled with the shetland/bfl cross.   From what I could tell, it didn't result in a better fibre.   BFL is long, and quite soft.   This was more shetland-like, in that had a medium crimp, wasn't quite as long, nor as soft.   However, I blended the two fibres together, hand-carded it into rolags and spun it up into a 2 ply worsted.   It's nice enough, mainly I think because it's 25% alpaca.    It's about to become mittens.  No photo right now because it's too dark for a decent photo right now.

Because of the rather scary rise in Covid numbers, my whole family opted to have a stay at home Christmas again.    In the end, I was okay with that, although I missed my kids, I'd just gotten my booster shot, and spent half of Christmas day sleeping!    I did manage to sand all these pieces of a rigid heddle loom though.

 Today, hubby set up a work station in the mud room and I taped up the rigid heddles and stained it all.   Tomorrow, I can put the first coat of finish on it.   Luckily, I still have enough tung oil on hand to put two coats on, which will hopefully be enough.  I can't get more, because I just found out that it was discontinued.  It's the finish I used for my spinning wheels.  I haven't needed to buy any in a while, which is a good thing since it was discontinued in 2010!  

Loom details - 32 in Ashford rigid heddle loom.  It's light weight - 10 lbs,  Available rigid heddle reeds from 5 dpi, 7.5 dpi, 10 dpi, 12.5 dpi, 15 dpi.   It can use 2 reeds at a time, too.  The 7.5 comes with it.  I added the 10 because it would fit in the box and no extra shipping.   At some point I'd like to add another 10, a 12.5 and 15.

I realized that lots of people use rigid heddle looms as a starting point to jump into weaving.  However, I figured that as more than a couple of people have asked me about them, I should learn how to use them.  Also, on days when arthritis means it hurts to weave on the floor loom, table looms work just fine.  They are fast to dress and weave off too, so good for demos!   32in gives a lot of leeway for project possiblities.

There were still some not snowy parts on the lawn, so I let the chooks out that day.   They are pretty wimpy and don't like to wander out of the barn when it snows.   The wild birds had picked through the food in the feeders and scattered a lot on the ground, so the girls headed out to clean it up.   I had leftovers for them too that day.   Later in the afternoon, I heard some insistent knocking at the back door.   This is what I saw!   They either wanted in or wanted me to go out, prolly with treats for them.  There were a couple of the chooks, pecking away at the door.  The rest were just in cahoots!

Colours of September

 I dressed the loom with the Kool-aid dyed warp using the Wall of Troy pattern from Margarite Davison's green book.  It's a fairly striking pattern but still an easy pattern to both thread and weave.   I'm done the first scarf and there is another left to weave.   Progress has been interrupted by helping my son-in-law build garage doors, canning, teaching a socially distanced rug hooking class at the park, hydro issues which mean the whole electrical panel needs to be replaced and a scary and irritating trip to the car dealer for a simple service on my cute little car, where they made all the motions of masking and social distancing, except for the part where they actually did it.  

The new hens have settled in nicely.  It only took them a couple of days to fully integrate.   After months of waiting for new birds, the feed store was able to get ready to lay hens delivered two weeks in a row.   Yay, to him finding independent breeders to supply us with hens!

 These ones are laying little pullet eggs.  Pullets are young layers.  They should start off laying tiny eggs like these, and gradually their eggs should increase in size.   Sadly, some of the hybrids we've had start off laying huge eggs and it can't be healthy for them.

I found prune plums in the stores, although not at the market. They were wonderfully ripe and two containers came home with me.   They make a wonderful jam or preserve.  I didn't chop them up, so my jam has chunks of peel and fruit in it.  Normally I chop the plum halves up a bit, and then the skins seem to just dissolve completely.  Still, the jam this year is pretty awesome.  It finished to a deep reddish purple colour, from the skins.  It's so pretty.

I dragged out the blending board.  I played with some colours of commercial corriedale.   They're not quite felted and they look fine, but they were just not quite easy enough to pull off the rolags, so slightly compacted perhaps, from sitting in a drawer for however long it's been.  Still it was fun to do.  

Blogger has been switched over to the new version, which I didn't want to use whenver they first introduced it.  I liked the old Blogger format and it was easy to use.  Now I'm finding a new learning curve and having to figure out new glitches.  It doesn't seem as easy to drop photos where I want them amongst a few other things I need to figure out.   This means that my layouts and formatting may be a little off until I muddle through it all.  I'm sure it will all come together at some point.

Blending project update

That blending board spree ended up using almost all of my leftover commercially dyed Corriedale top from the level 4 and 5, Master Spinner programs.  I have an 1880's chest of drawers which I use for fibre and equipment storage and the coloured bits of roving were taking up the bottom drawer.   My aim in doing this was to use up the rovings, free up some space and have a bit of a break from spinning the project fleece.  These are just a few of the blending board rolags that I made.  The orange is a bit misleading as it is much more orange than in actuality.   It was my least favourite of all the colour combinations, although I'd hoped I'd used up all that Chili Pepper Red and I think it was Cheese Cake yellow, in a way which didn't end up looking like clown hair.   I was trying for something autumnal and pumpkiny.

I spun it all using the traditional longdraw.   There are 5 different colour combinations there and while I thought my favourite would be the blue - lower left, I ended up liking it the least.  However the orange turned out to be one of my favourites because it really did remind me of pumpkins.   There are 65g - 75 g of worsted weight yarn for each colour, so enough for mittens at least, or maybe a hat.  

more accurate colour of the orange blend

 I spun and plied more white project fleece yarn.   I did a rough check on yards per weight of the yarn. I counted the wraps on the niddy noddy, did the math and then weighed the skein.  I divided the yardage into the weight and got 1.9 y per gram.  By then weighing the rest of the skeins and multiplying by 1.9, I got a rough estimate of 1398 yards.   While by no means truly accurate, I have enough spun to start looking at sweater patterns.   Hmmmm, leave it white or dye it?

I started with the Raspberry/blue rolags.  They had the most yardage but I should have probably started with the smaller yardage lots.   I will have leftovers from these mitts.  Not enough for a decent project and if I'd made larger mittens, I could have used them as a present for someone with bigger hands than mine.  But since I have small hands and a habit of losing mittens, maybe I shouldn't worry too much.  Of course I usually make my pairs of mittens of similar colours, so I can mix and match.  I wonder if odd mittens are a trend yet?

I'm knitting these on brand new bamboo needles.   The first time I tried bamboo needles, I really liked how light they were but I wasn't sure I liked the feel of them.  However, I received a couple of pair free with a yarn purchase one time and since they were the only knitting needles I had of those sizes, I ended up using them several times.  The first time, they were a bit rough but by the third project, they had been sanded incredibly smooth, by the fibre and were getting a glossy finish, I presume the oils in my hands.  They ended up being lovely to work with.  Hopefully these will turn out the same.  Otherwise, the local store has just stocked Knit Picks wooden needles and they are really nice to work with.  I may pick up a pair just so I can put a second project on the needles, stuff it in to go project bag and drag it along with me.