Merino and Silk

You may have noticed in my last post that I had a little spinning on the wheel.

This is a white merino/silk blend from Knit Picks.

It starts out like this.

It unravels into a long strand of roving, which I seperate into pieces, like this:

Silk has a really long staple length and is pretty slippery, so I have been "spinning from the fold."  I started doing this accidentally before I knew it was a real thing.  But you basically fold your piece of fiber in half,

And let the fiber draft from the fold rather than from the end.  It seem less likely to draft too quickly/get too thin.

I've been practicing "long-draw" drafting where you control the amount of twist with your front hand while drawing the fiber out with your back hand.  This lady does a really good demonstration of what I'm trying to accomplish.

She is a lot better at it than I am, but I'm getting better.

I am also spinning this purple silk/merino I got from the MD Sheep and Wool Festival last year. 

I am sad I didn't get to go this year, so I am celebrating from afar.

I plan to ply the two together when I'm done.

New Arrivals

I've had several new arrivals lately.  This one is from my friend Pete at the DOT who takes a trip to Iceland each year to take amazing photos of the 24-hour daylight.  He picked me up some lovely Icelandic yarn.

Three skeins are Alafosslopi  a bulky weight.  The fourth is Lettilopi in what appears to be a light worsted (DK maybe?).

Also, I heart the bag it came in.  Viking Sheep.

It is a little scratchier than the yarn I usually tend towards, so I am not entirely sure what to make with it.  Something felted?  Mittens?  More sheep like I did with the last Icelandic wool I got?  Suggestions?

MD Sheep and Wool Festival

I am going to my first ever sheep and wool festival this Saturday, May 7th.  I could not be more excited.

The festival opens at 9am.  There will be vendors, food,  etc.  The shearing demonstrations are at 11...thrilled!!!  And I am taking a class with this woman: Charlene Schurch.   Lace is not something I think of as needing a class to learn (it's just some yarn overs and some k2tog's, right?) but I am sure there is oodles that I don't even know that I don't know.

I am going to resist buying a whole fleece (because, honestly, what the heck am I going to do with it?  I really hated hand-carding.  And my friends will look at me like I've gone wacko-banunu if I bring a trash bag full of wool home).  Unless I find a nice processor who can explain what I am looking for and will do the processing for me (for a fee, obviously).  Still don't know that I can spin that much wool with my crappy spindle....oh, wait!  I will be going to the vendor booths where I am SURE someone would be willing to let me take a brand new spindle off their hands!  Luckily my class is at the same time as the spinning equipment auction, so I won't be tempted to buy a wheel....

Any requests from folks for things I should bring home to you?  Anyone want to come with me?

Not Knitting

You are all so polite.  So polite, in fact, that even though there hasn't been an ounce of knitting on this blog all week (longer than that?!?!) no one has complained.  Actually, you have all been uber quiet lately.  Let's play a little game.  First three people to post a comment here who have never posted before (I know you're lurking out there....) will get a very special something for International Random Gift Giving Day, which I will celebrate....oh, I dunno....sometime later this month.  Double gifting if your comments are in poetry form.  Deal?

I will admit that I have not been knitting much the past two weeks.  Chalking this up to a suspected case of carpal tunnel I am trying to avoid and also to the fact that there is wool EVERYWHERE in my room, attaching itself to all my dark-colored yarns that I want to knit with (I swear I am going to make those black legwarmers for you someday Julie!).  Why is there wool EVERYWHERE, you ask?  Mainly because I don't have a vacuum cleaner.

But also because I made this:

80 yards super bulky weight from KnitPicks Bare Merino roving.  I'm have some dying plans for this one....purple, maybe?

And this:

fatter-than-fingering weight hand-dyed Superwash Merino from Lorna's Laces (I do not believe for  a second that this is actually superwash...for you non-wool-fetishists, superwash means that you could stick it in the washing machine and it wouldn't felt....I don't believe.)

And some of this:

the first ply of a two-ply something that I have planned...wool of some kind that I was given that is not as soft as Merino.  Boring, boring color.  All rolled up on a toilet paper roll for safe keeping until I do the second ply.

All spun on my spindle, which is now starting to fall apart (I am not entirely clear on the qualities of a good spindle yet, but I am pretty sure they include having a hook that stays screwed in).  I am not entirely sucking at this spinning thing anymore, even though I am still not super consistent with my width and might over spin it just a little bit (read: way too much).  Need to go back to the Art League to play with the wheel some more, though...perhaps after acquiring some additional roving.

Weekend Update: Work that Spindle

I am not entirely sure what I did this weekend; it just ended very abruptly without me actually accomplishing anything.  I went to try outs for the DC Vagina Monologues on Sunday.  The rest of the weekend I spent spinning all kinds of crazy.  I am most in love with this:

Hand spun on my spindle.  I am going to pretend that I MEANT it to be "thick-and-thin" instead of me just not being able to spin it very evenly.

The wool was 100% Merino from Abstract Fiber of Portland, OR in colorway "Snapdragon" (the prettiest thing I've ever seen, I think)

4 ounces as fat as I spun it only came out to 80 yards, so there aren't a ton of amazing things I can knit with it. Maybe more of these??

But I have this belief that maybe I could use handspun yarn to make something else.  I am trying to figure out how to combine it with the silver/glass jewelry work that I usually do.

Bad pictures (my camera hates night-time) and not quite what I was thinking, but it's a start...

Preparing Wool

Let's assume I've already found a sheep and sheared it. Let's also assume that the previous assumption was a reasonable one and made sense in Normal People Land.

Assuming I have sheared my sheep, I would have a big (probably pretty dirty) fleece. At my Art League Class, the instructure showed me some of this (really dirty) fleece. It is all matted and gross. That’s because wool comes from sheep. Sheep eat food, and lay in things, and you know, behave like animals. When you shear the wool, it is known as a fleece. A fleece has to be cleaned before you can use it to make yarn.

According to Wiki Answers, ultimate authority on all things answer-ful says that:

Most "all-wool" sweaters weigh between about 3/4 lb. and 1.5 lbs., again, depending on the sweater's size and thickness.  The most numerous sheep breed in the U.S. is probably the Rambouillet, which typically will yield around 12 to 15 lbs. of "grease" wool (that is, unwashed). After washing the wool, you may have about 5 to 7 lbs. left, of which 4 to 5 lbs. will end up in the yarn for the sweater. For those breeds you can likely get 3 to 4 sweaters--more if they're loosely knit and/or of small size. 

Woah, folks. That means that I am going to be washing 7 to 10 pounds of nasty out of this wool before I can do anything else.

According to the folks at Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill you next have to skirt the fleece. Skirting the fleece means removing the wool from the legs and belly that is too full of manure to use. Then you much wash the grease out of the wool. If it is being done commercially, they may use an acid bath to dissolve the vegetable matter and then “pick” the wool by opening the locks and essentially fluffing the wool. If you are hand-preparing the wool, you might skip straight to carding. According to Blackberry Ridge again:

The wool fibers are then put through a series of combing steps called carding. This can be done with small hand cards that look much like brushes you would use on a dog. It can also be done on a larger scale with machine driven drums covered with "card cloth" which combs the wool many times by transfering it back and forth from one drum to the other as it is passed down the series of drums. We have "woolen" cards which produce a wool web with the fibers coming off in random alignment. This is in contrast to "worsted" combing that lines up all the fibers (as you would see in thread).

After carding, I could then use the wool for spinning.

Let me tell you: I had every intention of doing this whole sheep to sweater thing from scratch. But after playing with fleece and a carder (even a drum carder, which is faster than hand-carding), I realize that it would take me an eternity to clean and card enough wool to make a sweater. Sooooo not worth it when I can just head over to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival this spring and score a bag of prepare stuff myself.

My theory: know how something is done, but be smart enough to know when to accept help. I’m accepting help on this one.

Yarn Factories

Awesomeness abounds when you find a link to a Dirty Jobs episode where the lovable Mike Rowe heads to a woolen mill to figure out how fleece is made into yarn.  This doesn't seem all that dirty to me, but maybe I have low/high/weird standards.

Heads up: I am headed to The Art League this weekend to learn how to do this, too (in a class called, terrifyingly, The Crash Course to Spinning), but my experience is going to be a lot more frustrating as I will be skipping the machines and doing it by hand.  Also, I just checked in with the school and they tell me that I am the only person who signed up for the class and that the teacher is still willing to hold the class....which means I get a two-day private intensive lesson.  It thrills me that I will be able to learn my own pace and ask as many questions as I want without annoying the crap out of other people.  But it also makes me super sad for this poor lady when she finds out that her only student knows ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about spinning (and is a horrible student...I hate being not-good at things and taking instructions from other people, two skills required for learning...)  I promise to report back on that endeavor.

Anyhoo!  For more about factory yarn making see the Fingerlakes Woolen Mill's cool explanation of the process as well as the Thrifty Knitter's visit to the Midstates Wool Growers Warehouse.

Gauntlet's Gone Wrong

Folks!  There is a new knitting store in DC.  It's called Looped Yarn Works, and it is in Dupont Circle.  That's right, I have a yarn store dangerously close to where I live and work.  They have a Thursday knit-night that I hope to attend regularly.  And I may have been there (*cough*several times*cough*) already to check out their selection and (shamefacedly) buy some yard for a new project I am making called the EZ 100th Anniversary Camping Half Circle.  We all know mine is not going to turn out like the picture (and we all know it is going to take me a year to do...much bigger than the last piece of lace I knit and with much smaller yarn, too), but we can pretend, right?

In other news: FML.  I finished the gauntlets I was making my sister just in time for her birthday, but was that a chore or what!

My little sister Janey claims she loves them.  So did her roommate, so I might have to make another pair so there is no roommie jealousy going on out there

I actually ended up making the first one (with a couple of mistakes that I am trying hard to ignore despite my OCDishness since no one but an avid where's waldo player would notice the mistakes), making the second one, tinking** it back after making half of it because I did the cables wrong, reknitting the second one, realizing (after I had already cast off while working on the gauntlet in the car from Iowa back to Chicago last weekend) that I had knit the pattern COMPLETELY and utterly wrong, knitting a third one perfectly, and then tinking the second one backto make a pair of short gauntlets. 

Short gauntlets.  Mildly ugly in this picture, but much better when they are actually on the hands.  I gave them to my friend at work who comes from Las Vegas and has no cold weather gear. 

Realizing (again, after almost completely done) that it wasn't going to work, and then tinking it back it again and reknitting it again with slight alterations since I didn't have enough yarn.  Woah.  After all that I have a pair of long gauntlets and a pair of short ones. 

Long one.  You can see the cable detailing a little better.

Short one.  Same as the long one only with two repeats instead of four.  And no mistakes (despite the ripping out a bunch of times, I really only messed up on the first one I made)

And have memorized the pattern.  And hope to never make one of these thing ever again (that's a lie...with a memorized pattern, everyone is getting these for Christmas....watch out).


**  "tink" is the word "knit" backwards. So when I "tink something back" that means I am knitting backwards, or unknitting.  Also known as "driving JoAnna absolutely bonkers."