robknits

Progress

So after several false starts, I am making progress on the Fay shawl. 

Most shawls are started at the neck and worked down, or are started at the bottom and worked up -- that is, they are knit horizontally.  This pattern starts at the leftmost point of the shawl and is worked by increasing til you have the widest point of the shawl, and then decreasing back down to the rightmost point.  There are several new patterns that do that, including this one, the Westport Shawl,  in the latest Knitscene magazine.  As you can see from that link, knitting a shawl that way does nice things to variations in the color.

So why the false starts?  After so many years of knitting, I know various ways of casting on and their benefits and weaknesses, and I know how to produce various edges... I just tend not to plan.  I decide what to knit and dive in.  So first I started this with a different yarn, but decided I would rather use this lovely silk and seacell blend.  Then I realized that I had used a cable cast on, but that creates a firm edge.  Not the best for a light lacey shawl or scarf.  So I ripped out the 10 or 15 rows I had knit, and cast on with a long-tail cast on, which is more elastic.  But then, after I had about 20 rows knit, I realized something was really wonky about the outer edge.  So I frogged it one more time, and started it AGAIN.  This time, fortunately, all is going well.  I am through the first repeat of the chart, and as you can see am about halfway through the second repeat.  5 repeats gets you to the halfway point, and then you do another 5 repeats as you decrease in the stockinette area.  When I finish the second repeat, I am going to put in a lifeline, so that if I screw up I do not have to start again all the way at the beginning.

In the spinning class I took on "Spinning Old and New Rayons,"  we started with samples like these:

We spun singles and then plied them to see what the yarn would be like.  I got small samples like these:

I don't have my notes with me, but I am pretty sure this was an old-style viscose rayon.  It was very very slippery to spin, and while the results are nice, it is an environmentally costly fiber to produce.  So I won't be spinning with this stuff.

I also produced this:

I believe the lightest one on the left was pure tencel, and the stripey one was a tencel and merino blend.  Or was it the other way around?  I will check my notes tonight and confirm.  I liked spinning this stuff, and the tencel is produced via a more environmentally responsible procedure.  I already have more tencel blends to spin, and I bought that braid of pure tencel after taking the class. (That really shiny one in the last post.)

So I am both knitting and spinning at the moment.  I am spinning the lovely merino on spindles, and eyeing the other fibers waiting to play. 

 

Yellow Rose Fiber Festival

This past weekend I drove east about about 45 miles to the small town of Seguin, TX.  (Pronounced Say-GEEN, with a hard G) This is the second year that Seguin has been the location of the Yellow Rose Fiber Festival.  Like the Kid n Ewe festival in the fall, the motivation for the event is to encourage sales of fibers produced by the alpaca and mohair farms/ranches in Texas, as well as the various knitting shops, independent yarn sellers, spindle makers, etc etc.  I went out on Saturday to shop, and again on Sunday to take a spinning class with Patsy Zawistoski, the "handspinning guru."  She lives up to that.  But first, the swag.

First, I went telling myself that I did not need to buy another spindle.  Three of my drop spindles are holding more and more of this fiber as I spin it:

This was my spinning in front of the tv project, and I am really enjoying spinning it.  I am spinning a fine thread, and working toward producing a 3-ply yarn.  So at the moment it is using three spindles.  But I certainly have several others.  But of course, that decision challenged the spending-money gods, and soon after I entered the hall where the event was taking place I found KCL Woodworking, and his unusual spindles.  I bought this one:

The center piece is actually a button dating from the 1920s or '30s.  I ended up spinning with this one during the class I took on Sunday.  It weights .7 oz, which makes it fairly light.  He did something very interesting with the shafts, as well.  He provides 3 shafts with the spindles, and they screw into the whorl using metal fittings.  His idea is that instead of my using 3 of my spindles to work on that lovely merino above, I could use this one spindle, fill up one shaft, unscrew it (along with its single-ply yarn) and put on the next shaft.  That means you are able to use one spindle to spin all the fiber, which is nice, since each spindle is a bit different.

What I mostly did was go nuts buying fiber to spin.  I had contacted two vendors ahead of time.  I had bought fiber from them in November, at the Kid n Ewe festival, and wanted more.  So I got more of this from Butterfly Girl Designs:

Just gorgeous.  If you look back a couple of entries on the blog you will see my attempts to spin this stuff, which did not end well.  So, after talking to Patsy, I think I have an idea about how to improve my work on the spinning wheel and wanted to give it another try.

But Mary (of Butterfly Girl Designs) also had this batt of merino, bamboo and angelina sitting on the table:

Oops.  That one came home with me too.  As did 4 oz of this wonderful tencel/silk batt from Spinning Straw into Gold.  Spinning this stuff is like spinning air.  The actual color is a sort of sage green.

When I went back on Sunday, I found this batt for spinning sock yarn.  It is considered a sock batt because it is a blend of superwash wool and nylon.

If I spin this right, it should make nice stripes.  Patsy gave me some advice about that.

And finally, since I spent Sunday spinning various rayons under Patsy's guidance, I bought this gorgeous braid of tencel fiber:

The shine is amazing, and the colors are actually even more intense.

The rayon class was very interesting.  Patsy is an excellent teacher, very organized and prepared.  She included right up front a lot of information about the ecological costs of producing "old" and "new" rayons.  While the materials used in producing rayons are renewable: wood pulp, bamboo pulp, etc, the process is highly chemical and heavily polluting.  Uh oh.  Two relatively recent version of rayon though are produced in a less damaging process.  Tencel (actually lyocell, since tencel is the brand name) and seacell are produced using "closed loop" production processes in which the waste is recycled and reused, rather than dumped.  At least marginally better.  Both use wood pulp, though sea cell adds a small amount of processed sea weed to the mix. 

So we tried spinning traditional rayon (viscose, because it goes through a very viscous stage), tencel, seacell, bamboo rayon, bast bamboo and something largely synthetic called Black Diamond.  Bamboo rayon goes through the same chemical and manufacturing process that produces all rayon, while bast bamboo is produced more like linen, by degrading the stems until you can pull out fibers.  It feels very fibrous as well.  Black Diamond is the odd fiber that includes what they call "carbonized bamboo" --i.e., they burn it to ash, then add it to something they don't identify to produce fiber.  It feels very artificial, and Patsy showed us a sample she subjected to the burn test. For those of you who are neither chemists nor fiber junkies, a burn test helps identify fibers.  Wool for example is self-extinguishing.  Acrylic and polyester melt when burned, which makes them dangerous, by the way, for kids and babies.  That's why kids' pjs have to be treated to be flame proof.  Anyway, Black Diamond had melted into a nasty hard lump.  Acrylic. 

She has us spin and ply a bit from each sample.  I used drop spindles, while the other students used spinning wheels.  I really liked spinning tencel and seacell.  I have already spun tencel blended with wool, and one of those batts of tencel blended with silk.  And I am knitting now with a skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk yarn, which is 70% silk and 30% seacell.  Seacell by the way is a trademarked name for the rayon/seaweed combination. That project will result in this scarf.  No pictures yet since I have barely started it.  I think I am on row 8 of the pattern.

And finally, before the festival I sat down with a small sample of fiber I had to practice my spinning skills on my spinning wheel.  I was frustrated with what had happened with the Casanova batt.  Basically, what happened was that the single strand I produced looked good, but when I tried plying two strands together, the strands came apart.  That means I had spots in the thread that were underspun.  So I decided to practice a bit.  I took this sample:

Divided it into strips:

And spun it:

The test will come when I sit down and try plying it. 

Oh yeah.  I also bought these cute little stitch markers.  The rule now is that I must spin and knit from now until next November, which is when the next Kid n Ewe festival will be held.

 

 

Knitting and spinning

I have been talking to myself about fiber projects again, which is a sign I need to continue blogging.  I finished that pair of socks last night, though I don't yet have a picture of the finished product.  It is the pair pictured in my last post.  I was glad to get them done -- by the time I finished I was finding the yarn felt harsh against my hands, though they felt fine when I tried them on.  The next pair will be made out of some of the expensive, squishy sock yarn in the stash.

I am trying to decide what to knit next.  Another pair of socks, maybe the Nanner pattern. Or a pattern I like for a scarf, that takes one skein of sock yarn.  It is called Fay, and it is knit starting at one end, working side-to-side including the lace border.  It should be fun and quick.

Fun and quick would be good, but I have fallen in love with a big project from the latest Twist Collective. It is a sweater called Brookline, in a lightweight yarn.  Most important, it is knit from the top down, so you can try it on and adjust the fit as you need to, instead of finishing the sweater and then discovering it doesn't fit.  If the moths haven't gotten to it, I have some yarn that has been in the stash for something like 20 years that would work very well.  I am going to check on the condition of the yarn tonight. 

Other things I like about this pattern: the v-neck, the fact that it is shaped at the waist and has the gores near the bottom to add even more shape.  And the stitch pattern should add some interest to the knitting.  I will have to think about how to make the buttonholes.  There are myriad ways to do it, from the simplest (bind off a stitch or two on one row, cast those stitches back on the next), which tends to stretch, to ones that have enough steps to be annoying.  I will have to do some research and then experiment a little to see which results in a look I like.  If I decide to tackle a big project.

This is another pattern I am considering. It is called Fameuse, and is knit in one piece, from one cuff, up the arm, adding stitches for the front and back, and back down the other arm to the second cuff.  I like the look of it, and it is the first pattern I have seen that makes interesting use on an unusual yarn.  Most of the patterns that use this yarn are a bit too out-there for me.

 

I bought the yarn a long time ago. It is made by a Japanese company called Habu.  It is called paper linen, and does in fact feel like a strip of paper.  It softens when you wash it, apparently.  This pattern uses a similar Habu yarn called Shosenshi, knit along with a laceweight strand of merino.  Actually the pattern calls for two strands of cobweb-weight, which is even light than lace, but I think I will try it with one strand of laceweight.  I am not sure what differences there are between the Linen Paper and the Shosenshi -- I bought my cone of LInen Paper so long ago that it is possible it was renamed Shosenshi.  So now I have to shop for a laceweight yarn that will go with this khaki color.  It should be a pretty wearable jacket for the San Antonio climate.

 

 

 

And then there is spinning.  I sat down to start spinning some new fiber yesterday.  I am taking a class on Sunday on spinning rayon, in all its many forms these days -- old rayon, and new rayons like bamboo, tencel, viscose and sea cell.  So I figured I should practice this week.  So I took this small bit of fiber, which was included as a tester when I ordered some silk fiber from this vendor.

The card says it is a combination of a wool called blue-faced leicester and silk.  BFL is a sturdy wool -- folks who spin their own sock yarn like it because it is durable -- and it has a long fiber length. I am finding it a bit rough and scratchy though.

The first thing I did was shake it out a bit, because it felt a bit conpressed.  Shaking it out helps open things up a bit.  It is not uncommon for roving to get compressed either during mailing, or even during dyeing. 

I decided to try to keep some control over how the colors would show up in the yarn.  Often I just start spinning and let the colors fall where they may.  This time I stripped the roving in narrower strips, so that I have several strips in which the colors line up in the same way.  See?

Then I pick up one of the strips and started spinning.  I am a bit frustrated.  My goal was to get a consistent strand -- consistent in size and consistent in spin.  So far no go, and I gave up when the strand drifted apart for the second time in a few minutes.  I do know what I am doing wrong -- I let too few fibers catch the twist.  So I spent some time blaming myself (I am really ready to start making progress in my spinning skills) but I am also, reasonably, blaming the fiber, which does not draft smoothly.  I may start with another fiber, to see if perhaps (part of) the problem is in fact with this sample and not entirely with my skills.  Yeah, that sounds good.  I will give another fiber from the stash a try tonight.

Next weekend in the Yellow Rose Fiber Fiesta in the town of Seguin, not far out of San Antonio, where I will be taking that spinning class and spending too much money on more fiber.  Any maybe finding a laceweight yarn that will look good with the Paper Linen.

Talking to myself

OK, I find that I am talking to myself about the fiber arts.  That's what started this blog in the first place.  So I am going to make a concerted effort to keep posting here.  Yeah yeah, I know you have heard it before, but really... this time I mean it.

So what has been going on chez Rob since my last post?

I decided I wanted another very light spindle to use on the merino pictured on two spindles in my last post.  I went with another Greensleeves spindle, an Ethan Jakob.  It weighs only .5 oz, and is shaped like a cup, which puts the weight on the rim.  Wow, does this spindle spin -- incredibly quickly and for a good long time.  I have to say it spins much better than the new Cascade (the one on the left in the picture in the last post.)  I have had great experiences with Greensleeves spindles.

What I really got going on, though, was spinning on my Majacraft Suzie spinning wheel.

I bought this used just before I moved from PA to TX.  I finally sat down to figure it out and holy moly I love spinning on this thing.  One problem though is that it is so much fun to treadle this thing I overspun the beautiful fiber I was using.  Here is the original batt:

This beautiful thing is by Butterfly Girl Designs in a colorway called Casanova. I loved spinning it, but overspun it, so that the single strand is very curly.

This is what it looked like under tension, just off the wheel.

But taken off this device (which has the weird name of niddy noddy) and after its soaking in cool water, this is what it looks like:

 

All twisty.  I messed up attempts to ply other bits of this "single".  I think I will run this through the spinning wheel very quickly in the ply direction (the opposite direction of the spinning direction) to see if I can get the twist a bit more balanced.  But I love the batt, love the colors, love the spinning wheel.  The creator of the batt will have a booth at the Yellow Rose Fiber Producers festival in Seguin in April -- I may asked her to bring me another batt in this colorway.

I also got the urge to knit again.  I am taking a big trip soon, someplace much cooler than Texas, and so I decided to use some of the yarn I made the baby sweater out of to make myself a hat.  I miss knitting hats -- fun, quick, and I used to wear them all winter.  Not much use for them in south Texas.  But here is the result.  The (free) pattern is called the Buttoned Beret.  Here's the hat:

Here's the button, which I already had, waiting for another mythical project that never materialized.  I love using things from the stash.

And a final shot of my old friend The Head modeling the hat.  All in all, a very satisfying project.

Baby sweater

It is done.  Here is a bad picture of it.

It really came out pretty good.  I am less than thrilled with the button band, but I figure little Laura will outgrow it before her mom notices anything wonky.  If she hasn't outgrown it already.

Whew.  So glad that is done.  The sweater itself was so easy, and it was nice to be knitting with all wool yarn again.

What I have done is turn massively toward spinning, especially with drop spindles, so I have a lot to report there.  The last post showed the results of a spinning project that will combine plies of different yarn.  That project is still on track.

I also went back to another spinning project, one that lives in the tv room.  I have been spinning rather than knitting during the rare times I have found myself in front of the tv lately.  The fiber is merino in a lovely colorway called Morning glory.  This is what it looked like when I first started spinning it.

The problem was the thread kept breaking and my spindle kept hitting the floor.  I finally realized that the spindle must have been too heavy for the thin thread I was spinning.  So I tried a really light -- .05 oz spindle -- and things took off.  This is what I have now.

No more breaking threads with the lighter spindle (the one on the left).

But the spindling bug really bit, and I bought some more fiber.  I bought this stuff from FiberArtemis:

Isn't it gorgeous?  It is a blend of merino, silk, bamboo and a synthetic called angelina that adds some glitz.  As I spun it, i decided it was spinning up really brown.  Well, yeah Rob.  So I bought, and just got, some gorgeous tonal gold silk top, that I will spin separately and ply with this.

So I am spinning the green stuff on a small Turkish spindle, and the Morning glory merino and the small drop spindle, and the brown and gold stuff on a heavier drop spindle.  That's really enough spinning projects.  But then I saw this at All the Pretty Fibers:

Merino silk batts in cobalt blue.  There was no possible way to resist.  But there is a new rule that I have to finish at least one of my current spinning projects before I can start another.  I am already almost finished with the first brown and gold batt.  The morning glory merino -- well, let's just say I will be spinning that for some time to come.

 

Mea culpa

I slipped off the blogging schedule very soon after establishing it.  I have some excuses, but they are truly excuses.

• I have not finished the damn button band on the baby cardigan. 

When I stop on a project it is always because of a change in the process.  I have to just get a grip and do this or the baby will outgrow the sweater before she gets it.  Avoidance, however, creates more avoidance.

• I killed the keyboard on my laptop.

I was drinking peppermint tea while at my laptop, reached for two different things while not paying attention and drowned the keyboard.  So I put together a Frankenputer, with an external USB keyboard.  That worked well for a day or two, and then other functions on the computer began to die.  I grumbled for a few days, then bought myself a new laptop.  I actually like it very much but all this distracted me from the buttonband and from blogging.  Yup, that's what didi it.

• I had a recurrence of a trigger finger on my left hand. 

Having my fingers curled toward my palm did lead to a delay in typing, knitting and spinning.  Getting an injection into the palm of my hand to release the trigger finger left me whimpering all that weekend, though now the finger is almost back to normal.

• I procrastinate on everything.

I did however get some procrastination knitting done.  Procastination knitting is when you knit something to avoid knitting something else.  As usual, for me, the procrastination knitting is a sock.  Not, of course, from the shoebag full of sock yarn stash.  Not from either of the two new skeins of sock wool I bought at the Kid n Ewe festival.  Instead, I started knitting a skein of yarn I found at Michaels.  Turns out they carry the Patons Kroy sock yarn and had a very nice version they call FX.  The sock is knitting up extremely quickly and so far fits very well. 

 

One of othe reasons socks are good procrastination knitting for me is that I start with a generic sock, and thus no thinking or planning is required.  I did my favorite super-easy turkish cast on, which I now can do using only one circular needle, knit really quickly to the point where I start my increases, and then did the Fleegle heel.  I love Fleegle's heel, which does short rows without any wrapping or picking up.  The sock is now past the ankle and I have chosen a simple pattern stitch for the calf.  I am left though with a mystery that happens whenever I do the Fleegle heel -- even though I think I have used up all the increased stitches, I obviously don't and always end up with more stitches at the ankle than I had at the foot.  Not a problem, since I keep trying on the sock and it fits, but one of these days when my brain is functioning at full speed I will have to sit down and figure out how it is that I do not work off all the increased stitches.  Anyway, then I found a stitch I liked for the calf, and I am still picking it up and working a few rows at a time.  But mostly I have been spinning.

 For some reason I am running into beginner problems with the yarn I showed off in my last post, so I gave up in some frustration a couple of times.  Somehow I wasn't getting enough twist into it (after all this time successfully spinning this stuff) and so the yarn kept drifting apart.   It's funny that I am having trouble with basic wool spinning on the wheel, since the silk spinning on the drop spindle is going very well.

I finished one ounce of it, and spinning it on a Turkish spindle, on which you wind the yarn around the arms, means when it is done you have a nice center-pull ball of yarn.

So I put away the other ounce I have of this stuff, and started spinning an ounce's worth of this:

This is a batt of alpaca, silk and bamboo.  Spinning it is a joy in a tactile sense -- it just feels amazing.  The change in fiber sometimes causes a bit of a bump or knot in the yarn I am spinning, but in general it is going well.  See:

 

The goal is to ply together the silk from the first picture with this yarn.  I think it is going to be gorgeous.

I tried to postpone blogging so that I would be compelled to finish the buttonband, but that sort of negative pressure never works for me.  So I am blogging even though the sweater is not complete.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making yarn

Spinning

The spinning bug re-bit hard, and I have been spending a lot of time trying to improve my spinning skills.  If you put too much twist in the yarn, it looks like, well, technically it's called yarn barf. 

But too little twist in the yarn and the fiber drifts apart.  When I sat down with this fiber that I had started spinning years ago, I ended up with a considerable amount that I can't ply -- it is underspun in spots and so it comes apart in my hands.  So I began paying more attention, and sure enough, I now have a sizable hank of two-ply yarn:

 

Still a little thick and thin, but usable. 

I plied another bobbin's worth and have a lot more of the fiber to spin too.   

I also started spinning the silk and tencel fiber on the new Turkish spindle, both purchased, as I mentioned in my last post, at the Kid n Ewe fiber festival last weekend.  This fiber, instead of being combed "top," that looks like this,

 

is a "carded batt" and looks like this:

 

They are produced differently.  Top is produced by combing the fibers so that they lay parallel to each other.  A bat is produced on a carding machine and is lighter and full of air.  The fibers are not all lined up either.  This batt, made of silk and tencel, is so airy.  I grab a handful to spin and it is truly like grabbing air.  The only difficulty I am having is with the joins.  When you join one handfull of fluff to the end of the yarn on your spindle or wheel, the unspun fibers at both ends grab each other as you draft them together.  This stuff is so slippery that the joins are a bit trickier.  I am really enjoying this and am sorry I didn't buy a lot more of it.  I bought 2 1-oz packages -- and I will learn soon how much yarn I managed to make from it.  That is always hard to estimate, especially if you do not do a lot of spinning.  It depends of course on how thick you make the yarn.  You can see that I am going for a thin single, and will double it (ply it). 

 

This spindle, a Turkish style spindle, is neat because if you wind the new yarn around it properly as you spin it (under one arm and over two) when you are done you can pull the arms out and have a ready-made center-pull ball of yarn.   Sorry about the dark pictures of the silk and tencel -- we are having one of San Antonio's few gray days.

I discovered that my right hand got tired using the Turkish spindle.  You have to spin it like a top from the top of the shaft.  So yesterday I pulled out another spinning project which uses a top whorl spindle.  I get that spinning but using a thigh spin -- rolling the spindle up my right thigh.  Much less tiring, and I got a lot done last night.  The fiber is merino wool, in a color called Morning Glory from Spinnerette.

The spindle is one I bought at last year's Kid n Ewe.  Unfortunately the maker is no longer making spindles, because I would have bought another this year.

 

Knitting

I am still hung up on the button bands on Laura's baby cardigan, but I did buy buttons yesterday.  I am going to try to finish the button bands today. 

 So the next knitting project for me has to be chosen.  It might be the Quercus cardigan, because that is also top down, though more complicated than the baby sweater.  The baby sweater is top down with raglan sleeves, which is very easy to do top down.  Quercus is top down with set in sleeves, which doesn't appear to be difficult but I think will take a bit of attention. Plus, I will have to follow charts for the cables.  So it will be a mindful, not a mindless, knitting project.  But I sure do want to wear it.  Of course, I might also turn to finish the knit kimono I put aside last winter and finish that up fast.  That'd feel good.  That and the alpaca shawl, assuming the moths haven't gotten to them.  I am afraid to look.

Reboot

I have returned... full-speed, to knitting and spinning.  The change in temperature could be a factor, but it started when it was still warm.  Now of course I am sorry I haven't finished all those cardis, because even here in south Texas it has gotten cool

Blog as log

I am going back to my original idea of this blog as a log of my creative project.  It is also a way of organizing all of that as well.  So I am putting myself on a blogging schedule, and a blogging format with subject headings (spinning, knitting, art).  New posts will go up each weekend.

Knitting

Top priority:  A friend of mine suddenly has a new baby.  It was not sudden for her, but I learned about it suddenly.  So  I found a top down raglan baby cardigan with a hood.   This has been a very efficient pattern.  I downloaded the pattern from Patternfish.  I found machine washable yarn (the gorgeous Dream in Color Classy) in my stash.  The first day I knit down from the neck past the armholes.  The second day I finished the body.  The third day a sleeve was finished.  The fourth day the second sleeve was finished.  This weekend I will pick up stitches at the neckband and knit the hood. ( Voila! Hood almost completed.)  A baby sweater that will need buttons and a button band.  I cannot let that stop me.  This baby is growing rapidly in Buffalo NY.

This color is actually Deep Sea Flower, from Dream in Color, a gorgeous color that my camera refuses to capture correctly.  Here is a professional picture of it on the right.

 

This project helped me rediscover my love of knitting sweaters from the top down.  All in one piece with no seaming is good.  Top down is even better.  Unfortunately most top-down sweaters have raglan sleeves, which is not a good look for me.  But not all of them, and I am collecting how-tos and patterns for top-down set-in sleeves.  One new pattern (for which I have already purchased yarn) is Quercus, in the first fall Knitty online magazine. (First fall always sounds like the hobbits' first breakfast.)  This sweater is knit from the neck down, and the stitches for the sleeves are picked up and knit down as well.  I do have to figure out how to modify the front, since I want to add a way to close this cardi with something other than a shawl pin, and I think lengthen the sleeves.

Other knitting: The knitted kimono jacket. I put this project away last spring when I had already finished the back and both fronts.  My goal is to finish this as soon as I get baby Laura's sweater done.

Spinning

I was suddenly thinking about spinning again, so finally, 3 and a half years after moving to San Antonio, I sat down at my Columbine spinning wheel and went back to spinning this fiber.  Now I can't stop.  I have filled a bobbin and started on a second.   The fiber, bought years ago from the Copper Moose, is a combed wool top with bits of different colored thread in it.  Here it is before it is spun,   and in a spun single.  My final goal is a two-ply yarn. 

 

 

 

Still unable to stop thinking about spinning, I sat down with the lovely spindle I bought last year at the Kid n Ewe festival in Boerne TX, and some gorgeous merino top, and began spinning that as well.  Just in time for this year's Kid n Ewe festival to be held in two weeks.

Art

I am taking another beginning drawing class at the Southwest School of Art.  This is the third time, so at some point I am going to have to decide to move on to another course.  Most of the other courses in the drawing/painting tracks move on to other media, like pastels or painting, so I might move on too.  I am finally seeing a change in my drawing but of course the most important part of developing that change is also the most difficult -- drawing a lot, every day.

Weaving

I have a design for a tapestry that I did as a collage.  It involves a lot of sky, and that is tricky, since you have to decide what is going to make up that sky, in terms of color and weaving techniques.  The first idea I had is based on circles but circles in tapestry are very very difficult.  So I may have to come up with another idea.  And "sample" it -- weave a little bit of it to test the technique and the colors before actually trying to use it on the tapestry itself.  More to come.

Back in the city

First, this is what the patio looks like when you have old pecan trees and wind.  I hate those pecan trees.  There are two of them in the back yard, just behind the house.  They are the last trees in San Antonio to leaf in the spring.  They do not produce pecans.  What they do produce is a constant rain of twigs and branches.  We had a pretty serious wind storm last night and this morning, and I looked out the kitchen window as I took my first sip of coffee to see this.  The only aspect of this I appreciate is that when I got home from work on Friday, a notice was on my door that the spring brush pickup is next week.  So most of this is now at the curb, but I do have to figure out how to get branches off the (NEW) roof.

Then, spinning.  As Fleegle pointed out in her comment to my last entry, 2 oz of silk roving is actually a lot of silk.  Here is some proof.

  I keep spinning this roving (see how full the spindle is, lying next to some of those damn pecan branches) but that small plastic bag, like a bag in a fairy tale, seems to have almost as much roving in it as when I started.

I am a bit confused though.  I was raving about the wonders of plying as you go, but I now have an almost full spindle of singles.  Did I decide NOT to ply as I went?  I don't remember.  Did I start chain plying but then forgot and just kept spinning?  I don't know.  So now I am facing the same question: what do I do with the singles on the spindle?  Wind it off into a ball?  Silk singles tend to tangle.  I could wind a ball of this using a knitting needle as a core, and ply off that, inserting the needle into the holes in the side of my laundry basket, thus using the needle as a bobbin.  But all this is very confusing, because I am sure I was going to ply on the fly.  Oh well.  Even though this spindle looks pretty full, I am still comfortable spinning on it.  When I really need to wind off, I will have to make a decision about how to do it.

Last week, the latest 3-weekend tapestry weaving workshop started again at the Southwest School of Art.  This time, I decided to just sample and just play, and I took a weaving cartoon from one of the classic tapestry textbooks, Nancy Harvey's Tapestry Weaving: A Comprehensive Study Guide.  For some reason, I chose the simplest, most basic, most beginning-est cartoon.  It looks like a child's drawing of hills.

The weaving was going very quickly, and I discovered that certain basic techniques of tapestry weaving now truly reside in my brain and my fingers.  Finally!   

And as I went along, I discovered that this looks like hills to everyone. I also realized it looked pretty, but, as usual, well, sorry, pretty just doesn't do it for me.  I was bored with it. 

So I sat and stared at it, and continued to weave the green hill on the right, trying to find ways to subvert, or deconstruct, or somehow make it more interesting than pretty.  I had some good ideas, well, ok, i had some ideas, none of which really grabbed me.  Then I had an idea -- which I did not follow up on -- of doing the rest of the tapestry in black and while.

Then I couldn't help.  I added a city skyline.  Apparently everything I weave turns into a cityscape.

 
At the moment, it is just two little buildings sitting on the leftmost hill.  Tomorrow a bridge in going in, stretching to the green hill on the right.  I still have to figure out how to subvert the sky.

 

Spinning

My attention tends to wander until wham! all of a sudden I glom on to something and have a hard time thinking about anything else.

(Sorry, I just distracted myself.  "Glom" is an awfully strange word. I just looked it up on dictionary.com and it means, of course, to snatch at, and is apparently related to a Scots word for a vise grip.

glom
1907, from glahm  "grab, snatch, steal," Amer.Eng. underworld slang, from Scot. glaum  (1715), from Gael. glam  "to handle awkwardly, grab voraciously, devour." Sense of "look at, watch" (1945) is apparently derived from the same word.

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper)

What was I saying?  Oh yeah.  Glomming on to things.  What I have glommed onto is spinning the reds and black silk roving on that cute little spindle I bought at Kid n Ewe.  I knit a few rows on the Arwen wrap (and here's a picture to prove it, a lousy one, but it is a gray and dreary day)

 

 and then I pick up the spindle and the roving and get spinning again.  I still struggle with consistency in the thickness of the yarn, but the only thing that will cure that is more spinning.

 

What I am finding odd is that while I am just dying to try spinning some of the other fiber I have waiting, and to get back to spinning on my spinning wheels, I appear to have become a monogamous spinner.  Apparently I have to continue to spin this red and black silk til it is done.  How strange.  It's like waking up and finding your eyes are a different color than before.  I have been spinning the fuschia silk for years without any compulsion to be faithful to it.  It might be because I don't have much of this red and black silk.  I bought a 2 oz package of it during one, probably the last, Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival I attended.  That is not much.  And it is very possible that after spinning it up, and plying it, I will not have all that much yardage.  Especially since the plan is to make it a 3-ply using the chain plying technique I just learned.  New rule:  always buy at least 4 oz.

Anyway, so I am sticking to spinning this silk, eyeing all the naked spindles hanging from their display.  I am not sure why I am so driven to finish this batch of roving, but will take advantage of the unusual focus and get it done.