Projects and Kevin update

This is a 238  skein of white Egyptian Cotton, 2 ply.   It took forever to spin, mainly because sitting still for hours at this time of year just doesn't happen.   It's a nice skein and will go into my stash of handspun cotton skeins for a future project.   I only spun 1 bobbin full, then I wound about half onto another bobbin for plying.
The cotton is a commercial sliver.  When I first started spinning cotton, I had to card this sliver into punis before I could spin it.  I realized half way through this bobbin, that I had started spinning from the sliver, with no thought about it.  Really, it's all about practice, practice, practice..

I had a bit of an idea pop into my head and decided that I would weave up some inkle bands.  My inkle loom is very pretty, and is beautifully hand crafted.  Unfortunately, it has a little bit of an issue with the placement of the pegs, making for a very small shed.  It made the whole project take much longer than I'd expected and it was frustrating at times.  I used 4/8 cotton, so it should have been pretty nice to weave with, but it seemed like I was wrestling with the warp the whole length, and it wasn't horribly fun.    However, I need to weave off another 6 or so lengths, so I'm going to have to figure something out to make this work better.   I had suggested my sweetie might want to make me a new inkle loom, with some small adjustments to the pattern, but the roof needs reshingling first and apparently that comes before fibery activities.  ;)

I did make this little narrow wares width guide for my next project.  It's just a strip of plastic, folded in half.  I used the plastic from a 10 litre water jug that I found in a recycling bin.   I think a juice or milk jug,  would be easier to work with.  This was pretty tough cutting.   It may still be too long as I put on both 2 inch and 2.5 inch markings.

My sweetie woke me up this morning at 6 am, to tell me that a chair had tipped over and there was a pile of green yarn on the floor.   Sitting nearby was Kevin, just looking around as if nothing was wrong.   While he normally isn't a playful kitty, when he does play, he goes all out.   This was a freshly dyed skein of 4/8 cotton.   While I can see some of the figure 8 ties, the rest of it is so tangled up that I'm not sure I'll be able to use it.    And my husband wonders why I call Kevin the" Bad Kitty".

Small project progress

The first twill and basketweave scarf is off the loom.  The fringes were twisted, and I tossed it in the washing machine to wet finish.  After it came out, I gave it a good hard press to make it nice and flat and it brought back the shine from the silk.
I really disliked the pattern or the colour or both.  The scarf is soft and drapes nicely, but it is boring.   I knew this when I cut it off, having decided to re-thread in a pattern that I think I will enjoy more.

 I am almost finished spinning the second bobbin of the sage green cotton.  The funny thing is that no one believes that the icky beige colour is actually green.   So I tossed the first skein in a pot of water and simmered it for about an hour.    What an amazing colour change.   It seems that it really is sage green! 

I tossed a few more handfuls of alpaca fibre into the wash basin yesterday.   It is dry enough to put away, but it feels so nice that I'm leaving it out for a bit so that I can run my hands through it everytime I walk past it.

Other than that, I've been working on my cloak project.  There is nothing to show though because I made a mistake and had to undo it all - so I'm right back where I was.   I hate when that happens.

More cotton spinning

It's been a busy week.  I finished up the cinnamon brown cotton.  I simmered it, although it did boil a bit in there when I got distracted making lunch, for about an hour.  The water was a golden brown, but nicely clear, so free of any nasty gunk.   It took a bit to dry, in this cold, dreary weather though.
I love that feeling when you take your sad looking wet skein and snap it between your hands, and everything comes together.  The threads align.  The twist seems to even out.  The whole skein suddenly looks glorious.   This is 100 g, 490 yards of 2 ply cotton.  It is so pretty and was so enjoyable to spin.

I've started on some sage green cotton now.  There is a little less than 100 g here because I used a bit for some of my master spinner homework or homework practice.   I'm working on the second bobbin.   I know this will go greener after it is wet finished.  Right now it is a rather sad, pale beige/greenish colour.   

I'm just going to spin up cotton as I find it in my stash and hopefully I will have enough for a decent project.   I'm thinking maybe yardage for a shirt, just because I can :)

Look!  Look!  The floor is down and I love, love, love it.  What a pain though.   In order to put it down, the guys had to move everything out of the kitchen.   It took a couple of days, which was really quite a nuisance.   However, they got the floor laid and the appliances moved back in on Sunday night.  On Monday, my oldest son visited, so my man had help for moving the base cupboards back in.   They  have most of them permanently installed.  The sink cupboard is only half made.  It still needs the face frame and the doors.  The old sink and counter has been set on top, so really, the kitchen is useable at the moment.  I certainly can't complain about that.  Since we are still trying to decide on what to do for the counter tops, having at least the old ones to use, gives me lots of work space.

The Purpleish Cotton

It started with this dye vat, using up the leftover fibre reactive dye.   I'd found this bag of Acala cotton roving that I'd put on the back of the cellulose fibre shelf.   I know I bought it for a level 3 or 4 homework session, because it was specifically labelled Acala cotton.  It is shorter than Pima or Egyptian cotton, so a tad harder to spin.   I have a bag of Acala cotton lint, which is easy to card into punis and quite easy to spin.

I was pretty happy with the dye results, although it was definitely a tad uneven.  The roving came out fairly unscathed and hardly compacted at all.   That made me very happy was well.   Once it was dry, I started to spin it.   Then I remembered why it had been shoved to the back of the shelf.    The roving is full of neps, little balls and clumps of fibre that just didn't want to spin and were the devil to pick out.   Then I remembered that I didn't even bother with this roving for my homework, because it was  awful to work with.

Since I'd dyed just over 50 g of fibre, I wasn't going to waste it.  I haphazardly divided it into 2 sort of equal pieces.   I carded it up into punis.  Lots and lots of punis.  I carded 6 or so at a time and then spun it up, switching to a different bobbin for the second half of the fibre.

It was quite easy to spin but really difficult to maintain any kind of consistency, with all those neps.  I tried really hard to pick them out, or attenuate them some how, or just smooth them out and pack them in, to create at least an illusion of consistency.    However, in the end, it was obvious that my efforts were being wasted, so I just spun it up quickly, to get it over with.

All things considered, the yarn turned out quite nicely.  It is definitely not my best yarn every made, but it is much more consistent in grist that looks than I'd anticipated.   So, I'm happy.  It is soft, pretty and useable.  The colour and grist will go nicely with the blues I spun and dyed this summer at Olds during the level 6 class.

I so lost the bet!

It's a good thing I didn't actually bet on it. I thought I could live with the slight over ply in the wool skeins I had for dyeing.  I mean, it is a nice yarn.  The only way I could make that yarn soft enough was to under spin it and then ply it to make a nice yarn, which meant that stupid over ply twist.   I even already had the wheel in use for that cotton exercise.    But I couldn't live with it.  I had to try to spin another 200 yards of plied yarn before I left.  

I will say that I'm not a horribly fast spinner.  I opt for slower spinning to increase chances for consistency.  It's also a bit more relaxing, although I will admit that I don't easily get the yardages for big projects quite as easily.  However, I just finished tying up and labelling the last skein for the dye exercise.  It was a bit too close for my comfort zone though.  I leave the day after tomorrow!

 I ended up deciding to try to spin enough cotton to use for the indigo.   I wanted to use it for warp stripes in a towel.   I realized that carding all those punis would take up way too much time though.   I knew I had a package of Egyptian cotton top in my stash.   The thing about Egyptian cotton though is that it is longer than regular cotton.  Also, because it is processed into top, it is slippery fibre processed to be even more slippery.  But you know, I have found that the best way to learn to do spin something is to just grab some fibre and start spinning. 

 The first thing I realized is that I had to change the whorl to a much higher ratio.   Then it was just a matter of practice.  400 yards is a good amount to start getting a bit of proficiency though.  While I was winding my skeins up today, I realized you could tell which yarn I spun near the beginning of this exercise and which yarn was spun up later, when I was more comfortable with spinning the cotton top.   It's not brilliant yarn.  It's not as nice looking at first glance as the wool yarn was, but I am so much happier with this yarn.  Not only is it balanced, but despite it's inconsistencies, I learned a lot from spinning the cotton and it is generally a nice yarn. It  will definitely weave up nicely, although I will need to spin more for the weft.  I really hope that I will be much more proficient when I get finished spinning the cotton for this project.


Lots of shrill trills and croaks coming from the pond this year.   I found this little guy sunning himself a couple of weeks ago.  He's twice the size now!  His warm, sunny ledge is gone too as we've had so much rain, the pond is full again.  Now he hangs out on or near the lily pads.  So far he seems to be alone in his little paradise.  We had two a few years back, which meant lots of baby frogs.     Even the one is a nice addition to the sound scape around the house.  Now, if the weather will get warm enough to see the lightning bugs or fire flies, it will really feel like summer.

Yarn and more yarn and strawberries

My yarn for the level 6 dye day is finished.  I hadn't realized how grey the grey yarn actually is.  When on it's own, it looks quite pale and silvery.  However, when side by side with the very white Merino, it looks quite grey and dark.  I'm a little ticked off at myself because a few bits of the grey are under plied.   The full skeins hung straight, but when divided into 20 yard skeins, a couple have a slight twist.   I'm trying to ignore it as running a 20 yard skein through the wheel to add a tiny bit of twist, is just a total pain.  We'll see if I can actually ignore it and use a not as perfect as I can get it product to take with me.   I'm not sure I'd bet on my accomplishing it though as it took me 3 tries to get 200 yards of yarn I was truly happy with.

The white yarn is a 3 ply Merino/nylon blend.  I had planned to use it for socks but it's just a tad thicker than I'd wanted.  I'm used to using Blue Faced Leicester for sock yarn, and had totally neglected to take the sproing factor of Merino fibre into account.

 I've figured out how I'm going to transport my wheel to Olds.  I will need to purchase a new suitcase, which kind of sucks, as it's really not going to be used for much else.  I'll have to also be dinged for oversized luggage, sigh.   One of the reasons that the Kromski Sonata is a good all purpose wheel, not just a travel wheel, is that it has a 19 in.  drive wheel.   This makes the finished wheel 19.5 in wide, which means I need a 20 in. internal measurement in a suitcase.  My current suitcase is only 19 in inside.   So, a new, hardsided suitcase will have to be purchased.

While I was taking a break from the garden, I looked at the Sonata and realized that I'd not spun cotton on it, like ever!  That is definitely something that we'll be asked to produce, is a cotton yarn.  So I dragged out the ginned cotton fluff and carded up some punis.   It turns out that it really isn't any different to spin cotton on the Sonata as it is on the Minstrel.  The ratios are different on the Sonata though and that makes me have to think twice about some of the math.

The strawberry patch is about 4' x 8' this year.   I got the bird netting on before they started eating the fruit!  Being able to walk really does allow one to accomplish things :).   Anyway, I harvested the first strawberry yesterday.  It was small but very sweet.   I know this because after showing it off, I ate it.  I mean, you can't really share a strawberry which is smaller than a quarter, right?

My sweetie has been having fun with a rototiller.   Both gardens were tilled up.  The 1st one is half planted with beans.  We'll plant a second crop in a few weeks.   The newer garden has the strawberries and garlic, salad greens, onions, beets, asian radishes which I'm hoping are like a daikon, cucumbers, zucchini.  I also found some old woad seed and some Dyer's Knotweed from a couple of years ago.  I've planted the seed which will hopefully be viable.    When I wouldn't let my sweetie till up the flower bed, you know the one with all the daffodil and hyacinths in it, he moved up the the sunny side yard and put in a whole new garden bed.  He then informed me that we needed to go out to get corn seed.  With a 20' x 20', a 20' x 30', a 10' x 20' garden beds and a 4'x4' raised bed, I think my entire summer will be spent weeding!

Playing with wool

Last week, at the weaver's guild Christmas potluck, Kai brought a huge packet of fortune cookies.  We all had to take a cookie, open it and read out our fortune as it pertained to weaving.  Mine said something about starting a project with a bang, which pretty much suggested to me that for weaving, I should probably put a project on the loom.  I'd been dithering over a project for ages.  Being preoccupied with spinning, it was easy to not make a decision on what to weave.  I've been considering a fairly big project like some yardage or a blanket, but being that it was a week and a half before Christmas, I decided on a scarf project.  I dug up a bunch of handspun : small, sample balls which had been kicking around for ages and added two mill ends of wool/ silk blend which have also been kicking around for ages.   I wound off a warp for 5 scarves but ended up cutting off the last bit of warp before it was wound on as some of the handspun was getting a bit tangled and frayed in the process of dressing the loom.   I figured I had enough for 4 scarves, which was one more than I needed for gifts.

The first scarf was a sample.  I wasn't sure of my sett and doing a bit of twill, it made me a little more unsure.  I unwove the twill, and did the 1st scarf in tabby.  I didn't like the results - I just don't like most of the tabby weave that I've ever done and it didn't have a nice drape, so the next 3 were done in a 2/2 twill.  Scarves are a pretty easy weave.  Sometimes having a fast and fun project to just whip off is a way to get back to being productive.  Since that poor loom has been a cat climber for the past few months, weaving off the scarves felt really good.   The blue one is with a handspun, woad dyed weft.  the two grey ones, I'm not sure about.  The weft was an unlabelled ball of wool singles, which could have been handspun or a bit unevenly spun commercial yarn.  I lightly plied it before weaving with it.   I am going to have to get better about labeling!   All 3 of these will end up being Christmas presents.

Then I started a pair of mittens.  This is commercial yarn that I dyed with walnuts.  I think it's Patons Classic wool which is soft, thick and easy to work with.  It's a 3 ply and fairly chunky so it works up quickly.  Someone can always use a warm pair of mittens.

On the wheel? - commercially processed cotton sliver.  While I can spin the cotton fairly easily now, I'm still working on consistency.  It's awfully easy to get these micro thin spots in an otherwise decent yarn.


Lesson of the week - it's way easier to start and finish a project when you actually decide what to do!

More on the Cotton Experiment

 When I brought the cotton plants indoors at the end of the summer, they had both been in a small, south facing room.  It gets a lot of sunshine but it is hardly heated at all, so gets quite cold in the winter.  Cotton likes hot weather, so I had moved one plant to the warmer room, which gets a little less sunshine as a comparative experiment.  It was a short lived experiment as the kitten decided it was an exciting new toy.  I woke up one morning to find the poor cotton plant strewn around the living room.

  However, the two bolls had just started to open, so I let them dry out.   This is as far as they got.   Finally, I actually noticed that the outer husks were dry and hard. Last night I cracked them off and had this tiny handful of fibres.    I brought them to my spinning wheel and tried to spin them off the seed.  I've done that before and it's actually quite an easy way to spin cotton bolls.  You just set up the wheel with a really fast whorl and loosen the brake tension so it just draws in a bit.  This allows lots of twist into the cotton fibres.  The fact that they're attached to the seed slows down the whole process and it's really one of those miraculous "aha" sort of moments.

I wasn't sure how my  cotton was going to spin.  It was obviously not quite like what you see in the photos of fully developed bolls.  It was very soft, softer than the cotton I have been spinning.  However, a lot of it was shorter than short.  Despite lots of twist, there were places it would just fall apart when you looked at it.   Nothing worth saving from this bunch, just a rather huge volume of seeds for such a small amount of cotton.

There is still one plant left.  It is green cotton.  I know that as there was only one white cotton seedling when I planted them.   The one boll on it that survived is getting huge.  It should be opening soon or I hope since it's been there for almost 4 months.  The plant has a bunch of new buds about to develop.   The current quest is to find out if they can be hand pollinated or do they have to have wind or bees?  From what I've read, cotton has a rather short window of opportunity for pollination.  I can try to simulate the wind with a fan, or use a little paint brush to pollinate but can't do the bee thing in late December or January  around here!
You'd think that this might be classified as a failure and I'd figure that growing cotton in the Great White North is not going to happen.  However, I've already got some ideas to try for next summer.  It will never be a big crop, but having enough cotton bolls of my own would be rather fun.

Rainy Day Activities..

It was a weirdly busy week.  It feels like we're having the second solid week of rain.  In the short time it wasn't raining, I got most of the garlic planted.  I say most as last minute, I decided to plant a 5th row.  I realized that I didn't have enough large heads of garlic to plant - larger cloves of garlic grow to be larger heads of garlic.  So I popped out to the market on Saturday but haven't planted it yet because it's too wet.  It looks like it will sitting on my counter as it's still raining, and then the remnants of Hurricane Sandy are supposed to hit us tonight, giving us more rain, which will apparently be followed by even more rain.  Already our ground is squidgy and mushy.   I've no idea where all this rain will go.

While the garlic and some flower bulbs languish in my home, I did manage to do a few other things.  I spun the most unworthy cabled yarn  ever.  I followed the exact instructions and got this over spun, twisted mess.  It's a pretty mess though, since I used some of the Indigo dyed yarn from my stash.  Not worthy of a photo though.

 Frustrated, I finally got around to processing the  cotton sample I'd spun from some of the naturally coloured cotton I'd purchased.  The colour is supposed to darken when the yarn is boiled.  There is a noticeable difference in the colours.  I took a piece of pipe - supposed to be PVC but I only had ABS around, so I tried it.  I had my sweetie cut it to size and then drill holes in it.  I wrapped the cotton around it and tossed it into a pot of boiling water.   It didn't melt or distort, so I called it good. 

I had a meeting to go to and remembered that I'd cast on a pair of socks at the beginning of the month and promptly forgot about them.  I'd only an inch done on the cuffs, and these were plain Jane, 3/1 ribbing so I could use them as a mindless knitting project.  I got over 3 inches knit at that meeting and then have made time to finish the one and get a start on the other.  I really think I should have chosen a more interesting pattern, although I do prefer wearing ribbed socks to any other - I'm just finding it hard to keep my momentum up for these particular ones - despite the lovely pink in the colourway.

I also dragged out the quilt blocks to work on.  This quilt was supposed to be done by October, so I'd have time to make a second one.   I counted each set of blocks, both dark and light, numerous times and always had 15 of each.  I cut them up into 4 as required by the pattern and as I was reassembling the blocks, I noticed that I have more of the dark blocks than of the light.  Did I just misplace them or did I really miscount each time I checked my block count number?  I've no idea, but it means either blindly making up a few more blocks, or sorting through the fabric shelf where I'd parked them.. neither of those options sounds like much fun.   It's a pretty block though, despite my manage to not match anything but the centre points.   I wonder if that could be because I've actually ended up using 3 machines to piece it together and perhaps they all have slightly different 1/ 4 inch measurements?

I also spun up some silk.  I'd been playing around with silk and I've finally gotten some that I'm quite happy with.  I'd been spinning some dyed Tussah and was getting horribly inconsistent results.  When I tried for more twist, it was harsh and unyielding, with little lustre that silk should have.  With too little twist it was soft, but obviously fuzzy and dull.   So I dug up a small sample of unbleached Tussah and tried it as a comparison!  Yay for that, because I think it's just the silk I'd been using and not me.  Phew!!!