The fun stuff and not so fun

 

At our last Weavers Guild meeting we had a guest speaker.  Cat Haggert came to speak to us about processing flax.  After a brief introduction on how to grow flax, she showed us how to use her processing tools.  These were modern tools that were made by a fairly local gentleman who makes and repairs spinning wheels.   Cat also showed us how to process flax using easily available tools - an ice scraper and a dollar store pocket comb.  Of course these are only useful for small amounts but they did the trick.   These are some of our guilds results.   The top 2 small stricks of flax were processed by me and the bottom two were Iva's and Ashley's, who gave them to me to spin up.   It was a fun program.  Cat is incredibly knowledgeable and an excellent speaker.   

These are a few of the socks I've made this month.   I finally found the right tension for this yarn.   I've one more pair to make and I have all the Xmas socks done for my kids and their spouses. I was having issues with sizing in that they were coming out too small or odd.  One pair was even different sizes between socks, which were done in one shot.

  One day I read an online post from one of the prolific sock makers/teachers.  He said the weights should be changed up for different weights of yarn.  His thoughts were 1 weight for super fine or laceweight yarn, 2 for normal sock yarn and 3 for bulky sock yarn.  A single weight is 580g.   Adding the second is 1159g, and with the third weight it weights 1589g. The next piece of information he gave was that the spaces between stitches while you're knitting on the sock machine should be about the size of the yarn.  

I removed a weight while knitting up my regular sized sock yarn and all of a sudden, everything was good.  My sizing was spot on and as a bonus, there were also fewer dropped stitches.  The dropped stitches though could also be me reminding myself to pay more attention to needle latches and toe V hook weight placement too.

I asked for some info before trying out my ribber.  I was directed to search for videos.  I've been watching SockTV - yes it really is a thing, which was one of the suggestions.  However while this summer has been the summer of ribbing, it's all about different ribbing patterns.  As a hand knitter of socks, I already know I can do any ribbing patter that my stitch count will allow -and subsequently, how many stitch combos the ribber will accommodate.   What I didn't have information for was how to set up the ribber to get started.  Luckily there is a gal out in Vancouver who has put together a whole bunch of very beginner videos on sock machines. She had one on how to get the ribber set up her machine.   Happily I have the same machine that she used for her demo, so I don't have to work it out on a different machine.

Blackberry update -  2 kg of berries are in the freezer, waiting for me to make jam!   There are more on the brambles, but the weather has cooled dramatically and now they're starting to get smaller and seedier.  I may call it done for harvesting them.  

Tomato update -  The tomatoes in the garden are finally ripening.   I've managed to can 5 jars of the plum tomatoes.  They are really nice fruit, but ack, having them ripen this late and slowly is frustrating. I've no idea how many more will ripen in time to be used.

Threes - the oil light on the truck came on...  The lawn tractor will only run for 10 minutes at a time and periodically, the new battery dies...  The sole of my only pair of running shoes has detached from the shoe...  I hope that's it for now.   While I'm sure we can replace the shoes, a new truck and lawn tractor aren't in this year's budget :(

 

Ash Forests no more

The natural forest cover in this area is deciduous trees.  Plus we're on the edge of the Carolinian Forest area, which runs south, east and west of our area.   For a heavily rural farming area, there are a lot of bush lots, small conservation areas and tree lines, which have a great diversity of flora.  It is unexpectedly beautiful in it's own way.  

But the Emerald Ash Borer has caused huge amounts of devastation.   There are were a lot of Ash trees in our area.  For years now, we've been getting downed Ash trees for firewood.    This year though, our hikes have shown us the reality of the Ash wood lots in our area.   Acre after acre of ash trees, cut down.   You could tell here that some of the dying or dead ash trees were left standing because in places, there would be nothing left.  

Big or small, the Emerald Ash Borer didn't discriminate over which trees it attacked.   It looks like it went from tree, to tree, to tree, eating it's way though whole forests.   

I've been careful about where I've been snapping pictures on our hikes, choosing more uplifting, happier, photos, with little damage and few downed trees.   Pretty much all of the trails have some Ash trees cut down for safety reasons.

I think there have been places we've been with more trees cut down, but here we were walking and walking through this.   It was difficult to see the differences in some places, as it all looked so much the same - trees cut down, left to decompose on the forest floor, a few other trees left standing.

Maybe it's just with the snow and lack of the canopy of leaves, it looks worse.   It seemed just a tad like apocalyptic  scenery from a sci-fi film when we went out on Saturday.  What is sadder yet, is this is the closest trail to home!    We had to cut the ash trees in our yard down two years ago :(

In happier news; flax singles!   I'm spinning flax tow, so it has a few slubby bits and maybe isn't quite as fine as I'd like it to be.  All in all though, I'm happy with it.     I'm wet spinning it, from the commercially prepared tow flax top - say that 10 times quickly, lol!  I'm using a z twist because it doesn't seem to spin any differently if I use s twist.  I figured I might as well just make it easy to spin by rote in that case, so z twist it is.   There are about 328 yards in this skein.

I was looking at lights for better photos and although a decent set up isn't horribly expensive, there are a couple of other major house renos/repairs still in the rotation.  So I got a piece of white bristol board, and two pieces of white foam core board.  I taped them together to make a reflector and put them in front of the window.   It's not perfect, but it's not bad either.   I think with some fiddling it could be better.    

Laundry and huge projects

 On April 1st, it was nice enough outside that I was able to hand the laundry out for the first time this year!  A bit of an April Fool's joke by Mother Nature though as it snowed on April 5th and left us a couple of inches of the white stuff, which is still melting off today. 

I do love hanging out the laundry though.  It smells so fresh when you bring it in.   I don't even mind that linens get a bit crunchy and stiff sometimes.  

 The grass is starting to green up.  The ground is still soft and mucky though, so there is much yard work yet to be done.  I did get the currants pruned, which is a good thing.  I should prune the raspberries as well.   I left the ancient gooseberry bush alone.  I couldn't tell which branches were old growth and which were new.  Only one looked like it might be newer growth.  I'm trying to decide whether it should be dug up and replaced, or if I should try to rejuvinate it.  It really doesn't produce well any more.  The fruit is also really sour, even for a gooseberry.

 Other than that, I've been pushing through my Master Spinner level 5 homework.   I think I have all the book work done and am ploughing through the 50 hour project.  This year we are required to use cellulose fibre.  I really should have used cotton as I think I could have done with that much cotton practice but the thought of making that many punis was a bit daunting.  Instead, I started spinning hemp.  I knew I didn't have enough fibre on hand and was pretty sure that I could get more.   Unfortunately, I didn't actually check before I started spinning.   As I was finishing up the 100 g bag of hemp fibre, I went to order more and there was none available.   Egads!

Luckily, I guess, I had some flax fibre left from last year.   As this is hopefully going to be a woven project, I am hoping I have enough hemp for the weft and can use the linen thread as the warp.   I really hope that Keven is over his linen thread chewing stage, since he ruined my last linen project, by chewing on the warp threads.


I'm not horribly happy with the flax.   It isn't a strick, but rather a processed flax top or sliver.  It is supposed to be longer fibres , but not as long a a strick.  Instead, what I am finding is that it is a mix of long and short fibres, mixed with lots and lots of tow cruddy bits, tangles and neps.   Some of the fibres spin smoothly until you get to the shorter bits.  Then it is stop and start, picking out the garbage.   Sometimes I get lazy and just try to spin some of the smaller bits in.   Once in a while it gets a bit slubby and I have to start picking it out again.  

Flax and Wool

 With spinning up what I'd hoped was enough linen thread for the warp, I decided that I'd better get around to scouring it.  It was dark, harsh and a rough feeling thread.  I used the recipe from Linen: From Flax Seed to Woven Cloth by Linda Heinrich, which uses Soda Ash and dish washing up soap.  It worked well the last time I tried it.   I weighed up what I needed, using about 3/4 the amount of soap and soda ash because I was going to do at least two scouring baths anyway.  My pot was only so big and I had my imagination run wild with visions of all that dish soap, bubbling up, over the pot and onto the floor.    I figured that was reason enough to do a 3/4 recipe the first time and do it a second time if needed.

I did indeed do a second scouring bath.  After cooking it for a couple of hours, it was lighter, but I wondered how much lighter it would get with a second bath.  Really, the scouring time is minimal, since I really can't justify adding the time I spent doing other things while the pot simmered.  It is just the time to measure the chemicals, set up the bath and check on it periodically.    The second bath made a huge difference.  Not only was the linen lighter, but it was much softer.  If I'd taken the time to whack it while drying, it would have been softer still. 
The threads were all curly and kinky though, since they are singles.  Heinrich says in her book, to give the skeins a good snap after scouring.  It was an amazing transformation.  The skeins went from curly and impossibly messing looking, to smooth, flat and lovely.  It was the a wonderful moment when this happened.  I'm sure that was when I went from enjoying spinning flax to loving spinning flax.  It was pure magic!  I love fibre moments like that.  It makes all the effort so very worthwhile.

After drying, I wound some of the skeins into cakes so that I could wind the warp.  Today I did a bit more research and changed my mind about sizing the warp.  I wasn't going to bother with it as the warp threads are plenty strong.  However, a perusal over some old documents suggested that sizing would keep the singles from getting hairy, keeping them smoother.  It's another short time project so I decided to mix up some double strength gelatin and bite the bullet on drying time.  I'd wanted to start dressing the loom today because tomorrow is planned to be another Maple sap boiling day.  None the less, the warp has been soaked in sizing and is now drying.

I also finished up spinning a skein of the brown wool for the weft.   There are 530 yards of yarn in this skein.  Combined with the tan wool singles, there should theoretically be enough.  I know there won't be though as a) wool stretches on the niddy noddy, making counts overly generous sometimes and b) I'll weave as much as the loom waste as I can, so as waste as little of the handspun weft as possible, since I didn't put a dummy warp on the loom for this project.

For fun, I tossed off a dye vat of a sunny yellow-orange colour and dyed up a skein of 2 ply sock yarn.  I'm pretty sure this is Blue Faced Leicester and nylon, that I spun up a couple of years ago.  It's been sitting here, waiting, because, well, I'm a much better spinner now and my 3 ply sock yarns are nicer.  But I didn't want to waste it, so it's now dyed and into the sock yarn stash.   

Getting Dizzy!

Getting dizzy from all that spinning you know.  I'd say miles and miles, but first we measure in kilometers here and secondly, it's not quite a mile.  There are 1760 yards in a mile and only 1413 yards of linen singles in these skeins.    It's more than a kilometer of thread though.   I've learned an awful lot about spinning flax with this exercise, that's for sure.  You know, things like longer drafting length and more twist.   I'll need to spin up another couple of hundred yards just to be sure that I have enough for it's intended purpose.    Lots of hours of spinning in this lot of thread too!

different photo, same subject of flax

  It will be a nice change when I get to see something other than the lovely tan colour on my wheel.   Apparently water retted flax is supposed to have a "strong and unpleasant odor".  However I've never found that.  It does smell like winter, barn stored hay.  Not that heady, sweet smell of fresh cut hay, but not unpleasant, all the same.   I'll be spinning some wool though soon enough and that will be quite a change from the long drafting length of the flax.


It's the Maple Syrup festival at Westfield Heritage Village!   The whole village is alive with maple activities.  There are sap collection buckets hanging around the site.  The sap is boiled down at the sugar shack and in the Inn, where historical pioneer methods are demonstrated.  As well, the interpreters are in action.  Last weekend they were cooking griddle cake scones and maple cookies.   I was demonstrating as well, but wearing civies since I was parked just outside the gates.   My helper and I were making maple taffy.   How great is it when your job for the day is to make candy and hand out free samples?  It's a totally awesome way to spend a day! 

Scouring and Bleaching Linen

The costuming department at the heritage village requires all interpreters to have their hair covered.   While by the late 1900's day caps weren't really worn in a lot of places, it does keep costuming consistent and hides the modern hairstyles.  I don't mind at all, though it does mean some sewing.  While there are quite acceptable day caps available in the costume department, it's a trip to one end of the park to another and another 15 or 20 minutes of time.  Since I already drive almost an hour, I decided that I
need to make my own day caps.  I've not been able to find the types of fine cottons that many of the extant day and morning caps were made from, nor any acceptable substitutes locally.  I do have a soft, white cotton  that I can use but I only bought a half yard and I think the pattern I was given takes a little more than that.  It's not really an economical use of the fabric, so is probably a modern pattern which makes up to look like a period pattern, rather than a true 19th c. pattern.  However, it looks nice enough, so I'm using it for now.  I do have a good deal of natural linen gauze in the stash though.  This could be perfect if I could get it to bleach out light enough.

  I decided now was the perfect time to do a bit of an experiment in linen scouring and bleaching.   I'd
tried bleaching this particular linen gauze before but got really yellow results.  I didn't however scour the linen first.  According the the book Linen, From Flax Seed to Woven Cloth, all natural linen handspun threads should be scoured before using.  It's supposed to remove those yellow particles, lighten up the linen threads as well as soften them.  I just happened to have the ingredients on hand, soap and sodium carbonate.   I mixed up a triple batch and put it in a scrupulously clean dye pot. I simmered it for over an hour and let it cool.  There was a noticeable lighter in colour.  The water was a horrible, murky, chocolate brown colour.

 There were suggestions for a number of different methods to keep whitening the linen.  These included laying the fabric over fresh snow to bleach, keeping it moist and on the grass - not happening in January, in this part of the world, and finally more modern chemical methods using hydrogen peroxide, chlorine bleach etc.   I put water in the washer, added a bit of oxygen pre-soak and let the linen gauze sit for an hour, agitating once in a while in order to keep the fabric from having too many fold lines.  Then I added about 1/2 cup of house hold bleach and kept the same soaking routine for another hour and a half.  After running the fabric through the entire wash cycle with 2 rinses, I'm quite happy with the results.   This time, no yellow at all!.  The yardage is a bit lighter than the photo shows.  It's almost a half-white colour and will work just fine.    I just wish I'd used a little more yardarge as there was a good bit of shrinkage

Victoria Day Weekend activities

The May long weekend is a busy one.   I spend the months before hand organizing a 3 day medieval educational conference - boy that sounds awfully posh.  Really, we dress up in clothes of various degrees of accuracy, spend the days teaching and learning mainly hands on skills in all sorts of various areas.  We've done brewing, calligraphy, illumination, sewing, print making, paper making, spinning, dyeing, heraldry, embroidery, glass bead making and everything in between.  This weekend, I wanted to do an Indigo vat.   The last time I did it, most people decided that they just wanted to watch and I found it a rather dull class as there was no interaction from the participants.  Indigo is a dye which deserves a hands on approach.   So, I did Shibori techniques in an indigo vat.  Shibori is very hands on as it's essential medieval period, Japanese tie-dyeing.   The class participants were fabulous, the weather was perfect and the dye vat exceeded my expectations.  I am only sorry that I didn't get photos of all the items which came out of the vat.    We had cotton, silk and even tencel yarn which all dyed up beautifully.

I'd been working on spinning up 12 oz of North Country Cheviot roving that I'd picked up last summer at the gift shop in Upper Canada Village.  It's black, except in the sunlight, when it has a distinct mahogany cast to it.  Sooooo very pretty!  Anyway, I was practicing the longdraw as it's fairly short fibre and had to quickly finish up the bobbin before I left for the weekend.  I brought the roving with me in case I had time to spin, but while I did have time to spin, it wasn't enough to get to finishing up the black Cheviot.  I started a new bobbin yesterday while I figure out what sort of distaff I want.

The spinning I did do on the weekend was a fun bit of one on one instruction, on spinning flax.  Once flax is spun, it is renamed linen.  It's a very different beast from wool, which is my comfort zone.  I've spun flax before but I like to get as many different points of view on spinning techniques, especially one so specific as flax.   Wendy showed me a different way to dress a distaff - she loaned me one of hers to try out - which was in some ways, a lot easier than the way that I'd learned before.  There were a few smoothing hints and spinning hints which I can see coming in handy.   The best part of course, was sitting and spinning together.  It was a lovely, relaxing break on a hectic, busy and somewhat stressful weekend.