Spinning for a Project - Really??

 I very rarely spin especially with a project in mind.  Usually I spin for the pleasure of it and then put the yarn away until I find something to do with it.

Recently though, my sister bought a pattern for a knitted shawl plus the recommended yarn, enough to complete the project.  She was slightly disappointed when she'd finished in that the shawl was not as big as she'd envisaged.  The length was OK, but the depth made it quite a small shawl.  I have to admit that when I looked at the pattern and the yarn she'd used, I was a bit shocked that the yarn had cost £68!  Now, I know I'm probably a bit out of date with the price of yarns because I rarely buy any, I usually spin what I need, but this sounded quite a lot for a shawl.

She wants to knit another one but make it deeper so it covers her shoulders a bit better.  I said I'd search my stash and see if I had something she could use (I couldn't imagine her spending that amount on a shawl again, especially as she'd have had to buy an extra ball in order to make it bigger).  The problem with my stash is that it's mostly single balls of each colour, and she needed 2 balls for the main colour, 1 ball for the 2nd colour and a mini skein for the edge.  I couldn't find enough of one colour in 4-ply that she could use for the main colour.  So I offered to spin some for the project.

After spinning and knitting a couple of baby blankets using Falkland superwash, I had what I thought would be enough for this project, so I set to and started spinning.  I soon had 3 finished skeins, but when I measured them I realised that although there was probably enough yardage, there may not be!  I couldn't risk dyeing it, sending it to her and then she doesn't have enough.

I decided the best thing would be to choose one ball from my stash for the 2nd colour and then dye the Falkland to complement it.  

This is something I spun a while ago.  There's a bit of sparkle in there, but it doesn't show up in this photo.  I Facetimed my sister with various options, but she chose this green.  Then we had a dilemma - what colours do we dye the rest of the yarn?  I don't think either of us are very good with colours, but my big sis is definitely better than me!  We ummed and ahhed for a while and didn't really come up with anything, and then I had a "lightbulb moment" . . . I'd forgotten about the merino I spun during the Tour de Fleece in July. 

I had 4 balls of 4 ply, dyed with onion skins, just waiting for a project.  Two of them would be enough for the main colour.  We thought they complemented each other nicely.  So, I just had to dye a mini skein of the Falkland for the edging colour.  She decided on dark green for that.

When I rooted out my acid dyes, I only had a pale green, so I added in a bit of dark grey and hoped for the best.  I think it turned out OK.

So, after getting all excited about finally spinning something especially for a project, I ended up only using 35g of it!!

This is the final line-up for the shawl :

Hopefully she'll send a photo when it's finished and I'll put it on here.

Now, what am I going to do with 692 yards of 4-ply superwash Falkland?  I suppose it will go into the cupboard and wait for a project!

2018 Harvest

Don't you just love harvest time?  Especially when it's olive harvest time.  Every year we have to cover the tree with netting because otherwise the birds eat the lot in a very short time.  I've no problem with wildlife having its share, but when they eat my olives before they're ripe, and I don't get any, then it's war!!

We bought this tree as a little sapling 15 years ago when we first moved here.  I remember being told "you'll never get fruit on that!", but I'm pleased to say they were wrong.  Each year my harvest is getting bigger.

This year I picked just over 3 kg of olives, which filled 21 small jars!

The most I've ever had previously was 12 jars, last year.  They take about 10 or 11 days to "cure" in a salt water solution that has to be changed daily, but the final result is definitely worth it.

Can't wait to start eating them.  Oh, and I did manage to leave one on the tree for the birds :-

A couple of days ago our neighbours harvested their pomegranates.  They can't normally eat them because they live in the UK and only come over here 5 or 6 times a year, so guess what they do with them?

And there was a slightly smaller box of damaged ones, which will be used for dyeing.  Pomegranates are full of tannin so don't need a mordant.  These will just be chopped up, boiled, strained and the dye liquor is ready!  The perfect fruit (above) will be squeezed and added to my morning fruit and vegetable juice for extra vitamins and nutrients, and the shell which is left can be used as a mordant for other dyes.  I may just dry them and keep them until I need some.

Now, I just need to find something to dye!!!

Mara's Blanket

Early August (2nd) brought the arrival of my new step-grand daughter, Mara Valentina. She was a bit impatient to get here as she was supposed to be born two weeks later. Nevertheless, I was still way behind with this project for her.

When the two step-grandsons were born I made them both a blanket, the first one had blue elephants, and the second one had a celtic knot design, so I promised I'd make one for this wee one too.

I used super wash Falkland fibre (from Wingham Wool Work) for this so it can be washed more easily without felting, and spun it into a 2-ply.  One of the skeins was divided into three, and two of them were dyed in green and lilac.

Then came the job of devising a pattern.  The good thing with being so behind with this project is that by the time I started drawing something out, she had a name - Mara Valentina.  I decided to keep it simple and chose green for the "Mara" and lilac for the inside of the heart, which is going to be edged with bobbles.  I may add a little colour at the edge when I've finished, but not sure yet.  I avoided pink as I know that Mum doesn't like it, but she does like green so hopefully this will be OK.

I'm wondering whether to add a little accent of something in the top right hand corner.  I thought about a spider on a thread, but I don't want to give the poor girl a phobia! Thinking cap is still on for this one!

I've pinned the edge of this down to take the photograph because it's curling up otherwise. I'm hoping that if I crochet an edge all round it may lie flat.  Also, not sure whether to define the edges of the letters afterwards with a running stitch in green.  Hubby thinks I should edge it in the lilac, but I think that may be a bit too much.

We're going over to Scotland next month, October, for our first visit, so I need to get my skates on with this.  I was going to post it, but think I'd prefer to hand deliver.  I'll keep you posted on the progress.

TdF Weeks 2 and 3

Just in case you thought I'd given up part way through, here are my final contributions to this year's Tour de Fleece.  I must admit life got very busy during the second week and I didn't get as much spinning time as I'd planned.  I only managed one skein during week 2, and one and a half in week 3.

For this week's challenge, I chose "tonal yarn" where the yarn is dyed in different shades of the same colour.  As you'll see at the end, this didn't actually work that well, but never mind, I like it as it is anyway.  I went rummaging in my fleece store and came up with some of this :-

I have no clue what this fleece is - it was stuffed in an old pillowcase and I couldn't find a label in there.  I'm pretty sure this will have been gifted to me by someone in the past, so maybe it isn't labelled because I never knew what it was in the first place!  It's pretty good fleece though, quite fine.

I carded up about 100g of it and spun it as finely as I could.  The fleece helped there because it really needed to be spun finely.

After filling the bobbin I transferred it off and made a plying ball.

By this time I was pretty tired of seeing natural coloured fleece.  I really needed some colour in my life!  So I quickly got it plied and skeined off

and probably went a bit mad with the hot pink dye I chose.  I washed and rinsed it, then lay it in a bowl and applied the dye in different strengths around the skein.  When it came out though, the stronger colour seemed to have seeped into the lighter areas!  You can just see a few lighter bits on the next photo, but it really just looked badly dyed!

So at the end of week 2, this was my "Non-Tonal Yarn" :-

As I said, it may not be tonal yarn, but it is pink!!!

For week 3's challenge I picked out some more of my lovely super-kid mohair fleece and dyed it in the team colours again (grey, teal and violet).  I used the same dye batch as I had some left from week 1, but I think I maybe put more dye on this time because it definitely looks stronger in colour.

I separated it into the three different colours again and started carding.

Finished rolags :-

The challenge I chose this week was "Accidental Boucle" which is actually an opposing ply yarn, i.e. one ply is spun clockwise, one ply anti-clockwise, and then ply anti-clockwise. So one ply loses twist (the clockwise) and one ply gains twist (the anti-clockwise).  First bobbin finished and looking good :-

Second bobbin was spun anti-clockwise.  Here it is alongside the first bobbin :-

After plying and taking it off the bobbin, I was a bit disappointed.  It was supposed to have loops and kinks, but mine just looked a bit wavy.

In the next photo I put it alongside the skein I spun during the first week, so you can see that not only is there a difference in colour, there's definitely a difference in texture.

After throwing it into hot water though, my loops and kinks suddenly arrived.  Magic!

Final photo shows it off quite well I think.  So from "Accidental Non-Boucle" before washing, I think I can now call it "Accidental Boucle" after washing!

I finished this one with 2 days left to fill before the Tour de Fleece ended so I needed a quick project to use up those 2 days.  I chose some alpaca (from Cadbury, my neighbour's animal) which was in pretty good shape and I knew it wouldn't need much preparation before I could start spinning.

For alpaca, it didn't have an awful lot of vegetable matter, but it did have a lot of dust!  I just pulled handfuls out of the bag, pulled it apart, removing vm and second cuts as I went, and literally threw it through the drum carder.  Each batt went through twice and I made little nests ready to spin from.

By the time Sunday came to an end, I'd managed to spin this much :-

but I still had more to spin.  I've since finished and plied it, but it still needs to be dyed :-

At the moment it's still on the bobbin, but I plan to dye it soon.  In fact, a couple of friends are really interested in natural dyeing so I'm hoping to invite them over for the day and we'll have a woad dyeing session.  I'll be interested to see how this colour fleece will take the dye.

Final round-up of yarns achieved during this year's TdF (except for the alpaca) :-

So, that's the end of the fun for another year.  Time for a rest?  No chance, I now have to spin and knit a baby blanket for my brand-new step-granddaughter who arrived 2 weeks early on 2nd August.  I'm going to have to be pretty quick with this one!

TdF Week 1

Well that's the end of the first week as far as my spinning goes.  I've managed to complete three challenges in the DIY and Dye Group on Ravelry.  The first was the tweed I showed you last week.  Here it is finished :-

The next challenge I chose was "spin your pet" and Jak (my cat) was happy to oblige!  I'd been saving his fur for a little while and, although there wasn't a huge amount, it would make a little sample.

I used my cotton carders for this and made "punis" which are like skinny rolags, rolled around a dowel.  The fibres were very short, but probably no shorter than cotton, so I thought it would probably work OK.

It was not like spinning cotton, it was much more difficult, but I got there in the end.

This was the yarn spun, but not plied.  I made it into a centre pull ball and plied from each end.  The result :-

Not even enough to make a sock for one paw, but never mind!!

The third challenge was mohair dyed in the team colours : teal, purple and grey.  I didn't have purple but the violet that I used works quite well.  This is super-kid mohair that I bought last summer at Le Lot et La Laine festival here in France and it's absolutely gorgeous.  Really soft, easy to card and easy to spin - dream fibre!!

I dyed the whole lot in one pot, just poured on each dye separately and hoped for the best.

I was in a bit of a quandary as to how to spin these.  Either a gradient, or just mix the colours up.  In the end I worked from one colour to the next, spinning one rolag each time and then plied from each end of a centre pull ball again.  I didn't want to Navajo ply it because I wasn't sure how this would poof up as a 3-ply, so 2-ply it was.

This still needs to be washed, but you'll see the finished yarn at the end of TdF when I summarize everything I've done.  I really love the way this has turned out and think I may just have to dye some more in these colours to spin after the Tour de Fleece has finished for this year.

So, now to go find out what week 2's challenges are!

Flowering Woad Blue

You may remember, four years ago, I blogged about my dyeing attempts with second year woad here.  At the time, the plants had not started putting up flowering spikes (except for one plant) so I was reasonably sure I would get some blue from the leaves.  Well this year, by the time I got around to dyeing again, ALL the plants had put up flowering spikes albeit they were only about 3 inches high, and the flowers hadn't opened.

All the dye books I have say it's not possible to get blue from 2nd year leaves, but I just wonder how far into the 2nd year you can go before the plant gives up the ghost.

Not one to waste resources, or opportunities to prove myself wrong (you really can't get blue from flowering woad plants, can you?) I harvested about 4 or 5 plants - i.e. pulled them up! - and took off all the original base leaves, leaving the flower spikes for the compost heap.  I must admit I wasn't very optimistic at this stage.

I had about 700g of leaves, so I was fairly certain it would cope with 80g of merino :-

and 65g of mohair :-

As you can see, the merino took the colour really well.  Maybe a bit too well really because the mohair didn't get as much blue at all.  It's possible that merino takes up the dye more quickly than mohair, so by the time the mohair was ready for a bit of blue, there wasn't much left.  This will be going back into my next woad dye pot, but next time it'll go in alone.

In the meantime, this is what my woad plants look like now :-

It's a little bit difficult to see, but the flower stalks are quite tall and will probably burst into flower very soon.  So, what do you think?  Would I still get blue if I used these plants?  I won't be able to try until next week now, but maybe I'll have a go - nothing ventured, nothing gained.  And I've never been one to accept "you can't do that!"  So, is it possible to dye from 2nd year, fully flowering woad plants?  Watch this space!

Silk Challenge

February 1st saw the start of DIY and Dye's silk prep along and spin along where we were encouraged to spin from silk - either pre-prepared, or prepared by ourselves.  That included reeling silk from whole cocoons, making silk hankies, dyeing them and spinning from them, or (one of my favourites because it's easy!) degum cocoons and then pull them into a cloud and spin from that.  Commercially prepped silk top or silk hankies was allowed.

Not to be left out on this one, I ordered some cut silk cocoons (these are cocoons which have been cut at one end and the pupa removed) on Etsy in January.  These were being sent from Thailand so I knew they wouldn't be here in time for February 1st, but I did hope they would be here soon after.  When the acknowledgement of my order came through they gave a delivery date of between 1 and 5 weeks!  At the end of the first week of February I caved in and ordered some more cocoons (whole ones this time - they still contain the pupa and the skin from its last skin shedding) from the UK with the intention of trying my hand at reeling the silk off the cocoons.  Each one consists of about a mile in length of one single strand of silk, very very fine.  It's pretty difficult to see just one strand, it's so thin.

100g of cocoons gives quite a lot - I think at least 150, so there's a bit of room for error!

I put about 40 pre-soaked cocoons (I soaked them overnight) into a pan of water and heated them slowly.  I then spent at least two hours trying to find "the one true end", not an easy task!  Each cocoon is surrounded by separate strands which were the framework that held the cocoon in place.  The silkworm then spins inside of that, gradually surrounding itself in silk.  The "framework" silk has to be removed before the "one true end" can be found!

To cut a very long story short, I really wasn't very good at this but did manage to reel off some of the silk.  Unfortunately, I lost the end on the skein winder that I was reeling it onto, and ended up having to cut the silk off the winder.  The following weekend I wasted spent another whole afternoon repeating the exercise which ultimately resulted in me cutting the silk off the skein winder again!  Here's what I achieved in about 7 or 8 hours, pathetic I know :-

The reason it looks a bit "stiff" is that it still contains the sericin (gum) which the silkworm used to bind all the strands together.  That's what makes the cocoon a stiff, solid lump.  It also looks quite coarse, but that's because I reeled off several strands of silk together and they've stuck into what looks like one strand.

I was so disenchanted with my efforts, I decided my silk reeling days are over, and I'll use the remaining silk cocoons to make silk hankies* - another first for me as I've never tried making them before.  Let's see what sort of a mess I can make of that!

*If you don't know what silk hankies are, each hankie is actually one cocoon which has been degummed and then stretched over a square frame.  One hankie is put over the last one until there's a nice thickness there.  These can then be washed and dyed.

In the meantime, I'd also ordered 100g of silk hankies and thought I might do a bit better with those!  Again, I've never spun with silk hankies, so it was another first for me.  I split the pile into two and soaked them in water for 2-3 days so I could dye them.  Silk doesn't absorb water very easily and I wanted them really wet through before I started to dye them.

The dyed hankies looked rather gaudy when I'd finished and I was a bit worried that I'd overdone it!  I'd used some of my favourite colours though so the worst that could happen would be I'd created clown barf!

When they were dry, I peeled off one or two hankies at a time, made a hole in the centre and pulled into an oval shape, a bit like a skein of yarn.  You then pull that apart at one point so you have a long piece of silk ready to spin.  I drafted some of these out before starting and wound them onto an empty toilet roll inner ready to spin.  The colours all mixed together and lost their brightness.  At this point I worried that the resulting yarn would be a bit wishy-washy.

Not a chance!  The spun yarn was beautiful (in my eyes anyway) and all the brightness came back.

For the second ply, I dyed the rest of the silk hankies in violet, leaving some areas undyed.  This is not a very good photo as it was taken at night, and the violet came out blue on my camera.  I've fiddled around with it on I-Photo to make it violet again, but still, not the best photo I've ever taken.

This one shows the colour a bit better :-

and here they are plied together.

I just love the way this silk yarn has turned out.  This is the first 100% silk yarn I've ever spun, so yet another first for me!

The skein hasn't been washed and measured yet, but I'm hoping I'll have at least 400 yards here so I can make something decent.

Congratulations if you managed to read all the way to here, but if not, I hope you enjoyed looking at the pictures!

By the way, look what turned up in the post the day after I'd ordered the whole cocoons :-

Another incidence of "sod's law"!!