girlfriend has been busy – go check it out!!
spinning,
vests in the round are making my head spin!
Swatching all night with nothing to show for it. ergh. Not all that long ago, I spun up jacob fleece and plyed it with some black cashmere resulting in 716 yards. You may remember this because someone came up with the great idea of making Boar a vest, using the handspun for the front and something else for the back. So after lots and lots of Internet searching and computers acting quite touchy I came up with the Greystones Vest pattern.
I begin a gauge swatch and suspect that the yarn isn’t doing the pattern justice or vice versa. I also discover that the pattern is written in the round, and I really need to knit this flat since I don’t have enough of the handspun to do anything but the front. I spend a considerable amount of time trying to mathematically divide this pattern, since I suspect just splitting it in half won’t work. I come to the conclusion that it truly won’t work, but don’t trust that conclusion and spend another hour or two proving it all over again. I spend a bit of time tossing around the idea that maybe I could crunch the numbers and make it work — but who am I kidding? I am not that bright.
Back to the drawing board ……. I hit my magazine stash. I decide to start with my Knitter’s magazines, get to the third to last one and find out it is devoted to vests! I find a pattern called moss stitch rib and start a swatch. It doesn’t seem to be showing up all that well. Maybe I knit it wrong how can a rib stitch not show up?? Rip it out, try again. argh!
you know you are barking up the wrong tree when you are making your swatch all the while thinking about all the other yarn that this pattern would look good in.
I do believe all this swatching has led to the conclusion that this handspun will sit in the stash for a better opportunity.
playing with samples….
After a full weekend of playing with fibers, the bobbin is full and needs to be emptied. It seems that spinners are a very organized bunch. They make and keep sample cards – a large card is made to hold all the fiber info – what it is, how it was prepared, method used to spin it, all the various plyings along with a little piece of the unspun fiber. I suppose this is to go in some sort of album or something.
I cannot imagine ever referencing the album again, but nonetheless I spent part of today making samples from my bobbin. Of course, this is all hindered by the fact that I neglected to keep snippets of the unspun fiber …. but I did what I could.
The first order of business is to become familiar with Andean Plying. This is an organized way of getting the yarn off of the bobbin to access both ends for plying.
The thrill of being an Andean Plying natural was quickly diminished by my first f-up. We were supposed to spin a bit of colored fiber in between each sample fiber so that we could distinguish one from the other later on. I misunderstood the direction and spun the colored fiber in between the spinning groups.
Thus my Combed Man-Made fiber samples look like this:
Within that heap, lies ingeo which is a corn fiber, soy silk, tencel, nylon, polyester, acrylic and rayon. The only one I know for sure is the Ingeo because that is dyed. oh well, spin and learn.
Moving on, here are my Thrown Silk Waste Samples [degummed dyed bombyx waste, undegummed bombyx]Carded Silk Samples[bombyx, tussah, tussah noil] and Combed Silk Blends Samples [wool/bombyx, camel down/tussah, cashmere/tussah]. Hard to believe that all of that is in there!
so there you have four of the twenty four groups we did – I have a lot more cataloging ahead.
in other news, I am rejoining WW tonight. It’s about time – the year of quitting smoking is behind me and the time has come to pull my shit together.
I hate pulling my shit together. As most of you know, I have been very successful on the WW program and worked for many years as a leader. This is both a blessing and a curse – I know it is a good program and that it works as long as you work it. I can’t believe that I have to do this again and I just wish it were easy.
Why can’t I have my cake and eat it too? In large quantities, with lots of icing???
The Celia Quinn Spinning Workshop
was fantastic! When I first signed up, I couldn’t imagine how we would fill 8 hours a day for 3 days with learning, but we did and I think we have only scratched the surface. We spun with so many different fibers and different fiber preparations – buffalo, yak, camel, horse (!), silk, quivot ….. and that is just what I can remember as I am typing this – my notes from the weekend are not handy. Anyway, here are some pictures …….
Celia Quinn
right: a hook spindle
left: combing & diz demo
right: spinning flax demo
left: spinning cotton with a takli supported spindle & distaff
right: my takli results!
left: charka demo
dyed silk cocoon and the surprise inside
I think my head is still spinning. I haven’t unpacked my wheel from the travel bag, so I don’t have any sample pictures to show you ….. I could spend the entire week blogging about the past three days and if nothing exciting happens, I think I will!
purlingswine 
