12 posts tagged “fibre”
I estimate that it took me about 10 hours to spin the first 100g, so it should be possible to finish up, especially since R is away for part of this week, so I won't have to choose between spinning and hanging out with him!
Since writing the last entry, I have spun this:
That's batch five of the red leaf fibre, and the last one for the time being. I'm now at about 1,000m, so I'm going to stop spinning the red leaf and start spinning some of this:
I've also started spinning the red leaf fibre my parents gave me for my birthday. I took some photos of this a week or so ago, but the colours were off so I'd been holding off posting about it until I'd taken some better photos, which I now have!
So, it's not my birthday for another couple of weeks, but today my parents paid their birthday visit, so I opened my present from them under the guise of allowing them to see it (since I ordered and paid for it and they, like me, had only seen a photo of the finished thing).
I ordered this fibre as a custom job from Freyalynn, with this photo as inspiration. I may have mentioned before that I'm planning to weave this with some plain-dyed burgundy merino, to make an autumn-coloured wrap. I'm only resisting starting to spin this by reminding myself that I need to learn about weaving to ensure I spin the right yarn for the project. Until I start using the loom, and understand something about what kind of yarn works best for weaving in general and my loom in particular, I will save this fibre and resist its siren call. But it's incredibly beautiful, and I have to keep getting it out to stroke it :-)
More spinning closeups! This is the fibre and spindling-in-progress for the purple ball on the ball winder in the previous post. There's still some variegation visible, although nothing like as much as in the pre-carding fibre. But my main excitement on these pics is that even in the ordinary macro mode (as opposed to super macro), the first photo was taken a couple of centimetres away from the subject, and every individual fibre is clearly visible :-)
I bought a drum carder. I also bought several little bags of pretty fibre in amounts too small to be anything on their own. An appropriate justification for both of these facts is carding different fibres together to design the composition of the yarn as well as its colour and shape.
Left to right: carded and uncarded fibres next to each other; four different uncarded fibres; carded batts; spinning in progress.
At the last minute, I decided to go to the Knitting and Stitching Show with J, and to save myself from an unbridled orgy of stash enhancement, I set some rules. Fibre was my prime target, but only interesting hand-dyed fibre. It is of course possible to buy hand-dyed fibre on the internet, but it's hard to choose - so much depends on things which aren't obvious from a computer screen, so I much prefer to buy it in person. The only yarn I was allowing myself to buy was sock yarn, and even then it had to be either reduced or unavailable online.
Final acquisitions were 3.25mm Addi turbos for knitting Henry, and an Onya bag to replace my current spare bag which is wearing out. A good day!
This is my lovely new drum carder, which arrived yesterday, and which has already got through hours and hours worth of hand carding in a very short time indeed :-) I've now carded all of the lilac alpaca which is destined to be my MiL's Christmas present, and spun the first lot of it; I'm intending to spin most if not all of the rest of it this evening, and then it will be ready for washing and plying, hoorah. I've also made a start on carding the black alpaca, which will end up carded again, with the purple merino, to make goth-coloured yarn.
I was intending to make this into a wrap for me, and had originally thought of one of the beautiful spiky lace shawls I keep seeing on Ravelry, but in the same delivery from Fibrecrafts as the carder was another package, which I'm not entitled to enjoy for about six weeks: the loom R is giving me for my birthday. I've got two projects planned for this, and one of them is the gothmerino-alpaca - a nice simple rectangle of plain weaving to make the kind of wrap I like best. The other weaving project I'm planning is one I've already talked about: the autumn coloured wrap, with one ply of burgundy merino and one of variegated autumn-leaves colours. For a while I looked around for fibre in the colours I want, and then when I gave up on that, I looked around for undyed fibre and dyes to produce it myself, but then I remembered that Freyalynn (who dyed my Wisteria and Caribbean fibre) also does custom dye jobs, so my autumn leaves fibre has now been commissioned! This will be a birthday present from my parents. I believe in planning ahead in such matters :-)
And Clessidra is coming along nicely. The heel is turned, and I'm into the ankle, and am just about to take measurements and make calculations for the calf increases.
Ages ago now, I went to Hay-on-Wye with friend-R. I bought second hand books, as you do in Hay (it's a small village in Wales with dozens of second hand book shops), including some vintage knitting books. I bought them for various combinations of because they're funny and because they're useful - one has marvellous mini-stories about Little Johnny and Little Susie* and how they feel about each other, their clothes, and their mother who knit them. Another, while having deeply humourous seventies-ish fashion photography also contains what looks like good and useful advice about designing and adapting patterns, although I confess I haven't read it yet.
What I didn't expect to buy was yarn or fibre, but buy them I did!
The fibre is undyed grey alpaca, the ball of yarn is Trekking XXL sock yarn in a colourway that reminds me of starlings, and the skein is Opal Handpainted sock yarn, bought by R, and intended for socks for her (I think she wants Coriolis socks, but I'm not ready to knit them again yet). I want to use the Trekking for something for me, but I now have serious amounts of sock yarn in the stash, so I should probably get on with knitting some of it. Counting on Ravelry just now, I think I have about twelve pairsworth of sock yarn in my stash, and that's not counting the leftovers which are probably enough for at least another pair. Although I've made good progress on the purple cable cardigan recently, I'm stalled on it again, so maybe I should cast on for some socks in the meantime. The question is which...
The alpaca fibre is still somewhat in limbo, too. I dyed it with two different shades of purple cold water dye, which may have been a mistake because the colour didn't take very well, hence the pastelly shades it's turned out. I like it though, and it feels lovely. I've also supplemented it with a big bag of natural black alpaca from my local alpaca farm! Yes, I have a local alpaca farm. It's in Great Milton, about eight miles away, and their natural black actually mostly is black, unlike the natural black shetland I've spun before. I've been making various sample cards of the two alpacas, which will be the subject of another blog post soon.
*Names may be misremembered.
