Pirate-Husband and I have been in our mountain house for two and a half years now, and yet, only two of the rooms are really what I’d call “finished” – the living room, and the library. There is so much yet that I want to do! As we’ve settled in, we’ve each found our spots and niches. The upstairs room, with the loft bed and slanted ceiling, has become my office. Pirate-Husband works from home and has claimed the library as his office, and he’s also got a workbench in the garage where he tinkers, makes steampunky things out of leather and metal and wood, takes stuff apart and puts it together again.
So if he’s got a work space and a craft space, I’d like one too – for fairness, of course. The back room in the basement is almost exactly perfect for what I’m thinking of, too. It’s our laundry room, and our storage closet for our SCA gear is there. There’s an inset space in which we’d like to put a second freezer for food storage, but for the most part the room is going completely unused.
There’s already water to the room for the laundry, so it shouldn’t be too hard to split off the line and install a slop sink. Drainage might be a little more complicated, but I bet it could be done. With a sink, I could wash fleece and mix dyes, though I’d still have to bring dyed fibre or yarn upstairs to simmer on the stove. Hrrm, unless I got a little propane-powered burner. That’s a possibility, and would keep dyes out of our food-prep kitchen.
I’d like to run a workbench down the entire back wall of the room, attaching it into the wall so that it wouldn’t wobble. It wouldn’t be too high, because I’m shortish. There I would be able to keep my drum carder and sewing machine. I’ve even been thinking about getting a wool picker, perhaps bench-style rather than the torture-chamber-esque cradle picker style. I don’t think I could support myself on a fibre-y business income, but I bet I could make some reasonable pocket change selling carded batts and handspun yarn on Etsy.
Underneath the workbench, I would have shelves and drawers for storage space, except at the end I’d leave a bit of an overhang so that I’d have a place to sit and use the sewing machine. I don’t sew very often, but I’m drawn to the idea more and more – if only I had a good workspace! The first things I’d sew would be quilted covers for the carder, picker, and sewing machine, to keep them safe and dust-free.
The room itself needs some work. The laundry closet is in desperate need of new doors, and the walls could use a coat of paint. I’d install good lighting in the ceiling and scissor-arm lights along the walls, so that I’d always have enough light – that room has but one small window and doesn’t get much sun. Then I’d hang inspirational artwork everywhere!
After a weekend of spinning whenever I got the chance to sit down, I’m about two-thirds of the way through the Rambouillet. It’s not my most even spinning ever, but it’s certainly even enough to make sock yarn – that is, if I can get the hang of chain-plying. I’ve been watching tutorial videos and I think I know what to do, but doing is always different than watching. I’m looking forward to having the long colour progression that’ll be kept by chain-plying, rather than doing a standard three-ply yarn. Not only that, but I’m looking forward to having yellow and orange socks. It’s a colour that I really can’t wear close to my face, because it makes me look ghastly and sick, but that won’t be a problem with socks.
Because the Tour de Fleece is a parallel of the Tour de France, I thought it might be nice to watch a little bit of the bicycling. I’ve never actually seen any of it before… and now I know why; it’s actually kind of boring. But it made good background noise for my spinning. While I listened, I thought that perhaps “spin one pound of fibre into yarn” would be a reasonable goal for my first Tour de Fleece, and made a deal with myself: if I spin up one pound of fibre, I will treat myself to a new four ounce braid. I have a double dozen shops in my list of favourites on Etsy, but I’d love suggestions – who are your favourite dyers? What’s your favourite fibre? What would you recommend?
Today is one of two Tour de Fleece/France “rest days” so I plan to knit, rather than spin, when I get home this evening.
I really enjoyed this video that’s been making the rounds, in which Renate Hiller of the Fiber Craft Studio at the Threefold Educational Center discusses the value of handwork, on what it means to create and to be part of the Divine. It might be getting a little woo, but I believe that we are all a part of the Divine, and that by creating, we are expressing our own internal divinity. That’s all I’ll say about it here; I’m not trying to talk about religion but about the spiritual aspect that’s inherent in the act of creating. Regardless of one’s religion, beliefs, or lack thereof, I feel that there is a something that connects all of us artists and creators together.
In the video, Mrs. Hiller says that “there is a loss of understanding of the value of things, of the meaning of things,” when we don’t engage in the activity of creation, and I couldn’t agree more. When I spin – especially with the drop spindle – I think about the generations of spinners before me. I think about how the sails on ships were all woven from threads spun on a simple drop spindle. How much more does a piece of fabric mean when you’ve put in the long hours to spin the yarn and then to weave or knit or crochet it into something functional? How much less does it mean when you can just go buy it at the store?
Everything she says in the brief video rings true for me, but this particular quote really resonated: [Spinning]… is an activity that brings us closer to the cosmos; at the same time, we create something that is useful & beautiful.
I apologize for the quality of today’s pictures; Pirate-Husband has the camera and I took these shots with my phone. Better than nothing, but not that great.
To really change things up a bit, I retrieved this languishing laceweight spindle project for an afternoon. It’s just half an ounce of merino, a fibre sample from Sheepish Creations, that I decided to spin as finely as possible to get the most yardage out of it. Perhaps that wasn’t my wisest idea ever, but there’s no turning back now. Besides, it’s a good chance to use the 14g spindle, which I could not resist getting from the Spanish Peacock at an SCA event a few years ago.
The other reason for me to spindle today was that I had the opportunity to teach my friend Erika to spin! I started her on my Cascade Little Si, a 1.5 ounce spindle, and some green wool top that came with my first wheel. I think we have a new spinning addict in the fold. She caught on quickly – so quickly, in fact, that she didn’t even ask what to do when she came to the end of her first chunk of fibre. She just got the next piece, thinned it out, laid it over the end of the first piece, and kept right on going. When I had to head off to bed, I left her with the rest of the green top – probably about an ounce – and a cardboard roll to wind off the singles if the cop got to be too heavy. I’m interested to see what she does with it today, and will probably teach her about plying tonight or tomorrow.
I can’t spindle for too long before my shoulder begins aching, so after a while I moved back to the wheel and spun up some more of the Rambouillet. It was lots of fun to spin with company! Tonight we’re going out to dinner with friends, but I ought to be able to get at least twenty minutes at the wheel to meet the challenge of the Tour de Fleece.
The three Jacob colours have been skeined up, though not washed yet. I’m starting to see more of a difference between the dark and medium now that they’re off the bobbin. Whew! The white and medium gray came to 92 yards each, and the dark is 104 yards. That will be more than enough to knit a hat with yarn left over to braid onto the ends of the earflaps for an extra-adorable pigtails look. I’ve been thinking about cutting my hair short when it starts to get cold again, so I won’t be able to make any pigtails of my own.
As long as I had the skeiner out, I wound up this three-ply corriedale that I’d finished just before the Tour de Fleece began. It came to a total of 218 yards from six ounces of fiber, and I’m really pleased with the subtlety of the colours. There are two knots in the skein, which I can spit-splice when I come to them, but it was easier to make one big skein than three little ones. It’s not washed yet either, which is why it’s still so curly at the ends. I expect it to come out of the bath with lots of bounce and squoosh (that’s a technical term). Right now I have no idea what to knit with this yarn, unfortunately. Into the stash basket it will go, to await the next brilliant idea!
I’ve moved on to spinning up some Rambouillet that I purchased in a destash. It’s incredibly soft and much finer than I imagined it would be. The plan is to spin it all this fine and then chain-ply it to keep the colour progression. It looks a little bit like a tequila sunrise at the moment, don’t you think? Rambouillet on its own seems like it would be too soft and fine for socks, so I might have to come up with another type of project for it. Armwarmers? A hat? A pillow, maybe? Or I could just knit up the socks and then treat them very, very gently. That is, assuming my first effort at chain-plying isn’t a horrific failure…
I did indeed spin the white bobbin as part of my Day 1 efforts, and got a picture of all three together first thing this morning. I’m quite pleased with it, though I do wish there was a little bit more difference between the dark and medium grays to show off the colourwork better. I doubt that it will look more obvious once it’s knit up, but I’ll try anyway and see what I get. How bad could it really be, right? It’ll still be a warm hat that I knit myself of yarn that I spun myself, and that’s pretty awesome no matter how subtle the colours are.
The plan was to make a plying ball and not lose a yard of the singles. I used my trusty ball-winder to make a cake of the singles, then attempted to use it again to wind both ends together. That was a terrible mistake on my part, since the yarn unwinds from the outside of the ball faster than the inside, and then twists back on itself and makes tangles. A third hand might have come in useful at this point; I ended up awkwardly using the side of my leg to hold the ball-winder’s handle steady while I did some of the untangling.
The double-stranded yarn cake does look neat and tidy, but it was such a pain to produce because of all the stopping and untangling. So I decided to wind the second plying ball around a cardboard roll. It really wasn’t as bad as this looks, honest. This picture is from the very end of the process when my cake of singles collapsed in on itself. I was able to untangle it fairly easily, and then plying from the roll was an absolute breeze. It might be the most even plying I’ve ever managed.
Tomorrow I’ll ply the third bobbin, skein the yarn, and give it all a wash and a whack – and then my first Tour de Fleece yarn will be finished! It’s already soft and squishy, so I can’t wait to see what it’s like when it’s been abused a little bit, and what it will be like to knit with – but that won’t be for a while, yet. Not until the Tour is over, anyway.
Pirate-Husband and I had some of the usual chores to do this morning, but as soon as we got back from the grocery store I excitedly brought my wheel downstairs to the living room, set up in front of the big windows, and got started on the Tour de Fleece!
I’ve tagged a few fibres in my stash on Ravelry with “tdf10″, but the only real plan I made was to begin with this Jacob roving sampler from Firefly Farm. With this hat (pdf link) in mind, I began spinning a low-twist woolen yarn that’s considerably heavier than my usual sock-weight singles. It was difficult to spin thicker yarn at first, but by the end of the second bobbin I’d gotten the hang of it and was even beginning to understand the very basics of the long draw. I will probably spin the white roving up later tonight, but I wanted to take these pictures while there was still natural light. The dark and medium colours are fairly close to one another, so the hat might have subtle patterning rather than vivid, but that will be just fine. Depending on what the yarn feels like when it’s knit up, I might line the hat with polar fleece.
Because I had no good way of dividing each colour in half before I started, I plan to wind up the singles into a center-pull ball, then I’ll make a plying ball with both ends held together, and then I will run those together through the wheel. Making a plying ball rather than just plying from the center-pull ball might seem tedious, but it will head off the tangles which are almost inevitable otherwise.
This has been a great start to the Tour de Fleece for me, and I’m so exited about the rest of the challenge!
Last night I was knitting on the Wibbly-Wobbly Jaywalker when I noticed my stitch count was off; I’d forgotten to make an increase two rounds back. Rather than unknit the three rounds to fix it, I took a deep breath, took up my crochet hook, and dropped down to the wrongness. It took a few moments for me to visualize the right way to pick up two stitches into one, but with some concentration I was able to figure it out. Hooray for intrepid knitting!
After a few more rounds of Jaywalking I decided to begin the second Stripey Striped Sock. It’s been a good six months, if not more, since I finished the first one; it’s probably time for me to grit my teeth, knit the second sock, and get it off my WIPs list. I don’t like the yarn at all, but I love how the colours play out, and I seem to remember that the first sock fit me perfectly. I’ll be very, very glad when it’s done, and I think the two matching/mismatched striped socks will look great together.
I’ve mastered the Figure-Eight toe, I think, since this is the fourth time in a row that I’ve gotten a good toe on the first try, without dropping a stitch or mis-counting. I knit the first two stripes last night, and the next two stripes will see the end of the toe and beginning of the foot, at which point the Second Stripey Sock will become my traveling companion. Whatever else I may think about the Kureyon Sock yarn, it travels much, much better than the softer Felici does!
The Tour de Fleece doesn’t start for four more days, but I’m getting excited about it – perhaps overexcited. I’ve been looking through my fibre stash and deciding on what to spin first, in what weight, with what technique, and wondering just how much of this fluff I’ll be able to get through in twenty-three days. I’m making plans, but of course those might totally fly out the window once I get started.
At the very least, I’m planning on starting with this six ounce sampler of Jacob roving from Firefly Farm. When I was in Canada in February, I admired the earflap hats with colourwork that so many people were wearing, and swore that I’d knit one for myself before next Winterlude. This pattern (link to .pdf) looks cute and interesting and would make use of the three colours of wool that I have to work with. It should be easy and quick enough to knit with only two colours per round. I also like the Norwegian Star pattern (Ravelry link), but that only calls for two colours. If the hat comes out too itchy, I could knit a lining out of a softer wool, or perhaps sew in a fleece lining. Lining the hat would make it extra-warm, which is always a bonus for me.
After that, I’m not sure what will come next. Perhaps some of the older fibre in the stash. I’d like to try chain-plying one of my yarns to keep the colour progression. There’s one that I will spin up thick and quick, and one that’s meant to be socks. I have more to choose from in the stash than I could possibly spin in a month, so I’m not running out to buy more fibre just yet…
Okay, I did it – I signed up for the Tour de Fleece. I joined three teams: Rookies, because it’s my first year; Kool Kromskis, because I’ll be doing most if not all of the spinning on Grace the Sonata; and Lantern Rouge… because with this mysterious ankle injury, I might not be able to spin every day. But I’m going to try my whole-hearted best, and if I don’t make it, at least I have a good excuse.
I haven’t yet decided what fibre I’m going to spin first. There’s so much to choose from – and that’s the main reason I signed up for this crazy thing, because I’m not letting myself buy any more fibre until I’ve used up some of what I’ve got. July’s challenge in Spinner Central is chain plying/navajo plying, so I think I’ll give that a shot. Other than that, I really have no plans past “spin, spin, spin, and spin some more.” I just want to use up some of the beautiful fibre I’ve got and try some new things in my spinning.
Most of what I produce will probably be sock- or DK-weight yarn, because that’s what I most like to knit with. If I finish up the sparkly blue stuff I have, that’ll be more of a worsted-weight – at least, if I want the second half to match the first. And the finn/mohair batts were never meant to be a fine yarn, not with how chunky they are. I’ve been joking for a while that I want to have a “Drunken Spinning Night” during which I have a glass or bottle of wine and spin completely without any perfectionism. Perhaps towards the end of the Tour de Fleece, I’ll be more than ready to do something like that.
Pirate-Husband and I have been in our mountain house for two and a half years now, and yet, only two of the rooms are really what I’d call “finished” – the living room, and the library. There is so much yet that I want to do! As we’ve settled in, we’ve each found our spots and niches. The upstairs room, with the loft bed and slanted ceiling, has become my office. Pirate-Husband works from home and has claimed the library as his office, and he’s also got a workbench in the garage where he tinkers, makes steampunky things out of leather and metal and wood, takes stuff apart and puts it together again.
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