Tag Archives: Spinning

Flower are coming

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Julie | Comments Off

Despite the crazy warm winter, it looks like my daffodils are right on time for a mid-March bloom. The honeysuckle is all set to take over the world and other garden beauties are not far behind. Meanwhile I have that lovely red braid from SPA already on the wheel. It’s a merino/nylon blend probably meant for socks but I am undecided if I will use it that way since it’ll need to be a two-ply judging by the thickness of my singles. I have yet to spin fine enough for a 3 or 4 ply sock yarn but I’m sure I”ll get there. Perhaps I need to try out that lace flyer sitting patiently in my spinning bag.

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Tagged daffodils, garden, gardening, honeysuckle, Mad Color Fiber Arts, merino, nylon, Spinning, spring, yarn

Flight of Fancy

Posted on March 6, 2012 by sheeri | Comments Off

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

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Tagged Knitting, Spinning

Rambouillet yarn: Done!

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Julie | Comments Off

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Tagged 3-ply, Fiber, handspun, Rambouillet, Spinning, wool, yarn

Spinning is My Superpower

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Cindy Telisak | Comments Off

Second grade boys can spin up some wool. They've got the power.

Today I was honored to participate for about the fifth or sixth year at Fine Arts Day at Hedgecoxe Elementary School in Plano. I get to show the second grade classes where wool and fiber comes from, and what to do with it, once it's grown.

I take sheep shears, drop spindles, hand cards, raw and clean wool, dyed fiber, finished items, sheep and alpaca photos, and a spinning wheel and walk them through the whole twisted story of yarn.

After all these years, I've learned to keep the jabber to a minimum because the real excitement of the day is the part where the kids actually spin some yarn themselves.

Try this with kids - they actually do an excellent job. With just a little bit of instruction, and some encouragement that even adults struggle with spinning at first, they take off and sometimes make some really good looking yarn.

First, everyone gets a partner. Then, a small handful of wool and an unbent paperclip is all it takes. Hook the paperclip into the puff of wool and start twisting. The pair has to work together, one twisting and one drafting, to make this work.

The parent helpers got into the act as well. It IS fascinating, no matter what age you are.

Some of the kids really blow me away - this pair had enough yarn spun in a matter of minutes to knit a pair of mittens. So don't be intimidated or anything.

The boys love it just as much as the girls - they were convinced that their wool bracelets (one strand plied back on itself) contain superpowers, and that all cool guys have them. Yessssss.

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Tagged Fine Arts Day, Hedgecoxe, Second Grade, Spinning, wool, yarn

Rambouillet

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Julie | Comments Off

At the Big E last fall I bought some floofy Rambouillet roving to spin. I have a stripey shawl in mind for the rainbow yarn and I thought this would make a nice compliment.

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Tagged Fiber, Rambouillet, Spinning, yarn

A Great February Spin

Posted on February 29, 2012 by sheeri | Comments Off

This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, I have only been spinning a year, but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

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Tagged Spinning

Rainbow bright

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Julie | Comments Off

This is not exactly a roy g. biv yarn since pink doesn’t exactly fall in the rainbow but it sure is bright and cheery and fun to spin. I had to finish it up as soon as I got home. I navajo-plied it to maintain the color progression.

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Tagged Fiber, handspun, rainbow, Spinning, superwash, wool, yarn

SPA

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Julie | Comments Off

I had a really lovely weekend at SPA in Freeport, Maine. I hung out with friends, shopped for fiber, spun a rainbow braid, had some really excellent meals and even went shopping at LLBean at midnight. I was lucky to have a friend to carpool with and we left early enough that we arrived well in advance of the brief spurt of nasty weather Friday night. Another friend spotted someone carrying her Lendrum wheel in a giant LLBean bag and suddenly we were on a mission to each get one of our own. We didn’t manage to find a green one for her but we did score the last two giant bags in the store. If the weather is nice I think this will be an easier method to tote the wheel around and there’s plenty of room in the bag for fiber and assorted extras.

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Tagged Fiber, Friends, Spinning

In my crafty world, Feb 26th edition

Posted on February 26, 2012 by sheeri | Comments Off

As a first post, I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!

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Tagged Designs, Knitting, Spinning

Putting our Heads and Hearts Together

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Cindy Telisak | Comments Off

That happy cooing sound coming from the Denton, Texas area is a group of about 80 ladies cocooned into the plush accommodations of Camp Copass on Lake Lewisville, with their knitting yarns and spinning fibers. And each other.

We've been taking classes, working on projects, swapping stories, enjoying other people's cooking, adding new skills, and enjoying some rest from our everyday routines.