49 posts tagged “spinning”
I am now declaring the spinning for the red leaf wrap to be completed!
That's the red leaf singles for the weft on the left, and the two-ply merino for the warp on the right, finished just now. My next task is warping the loom, so I can take my weaving to a crafting date tomorrow :-)
And I've been making decent progress on the red cardigan too:
Notice that the arm holding the camera is clad in a finished sleeve, the other sleeve reaches the elbow, and the body is considerably longer than in the last photo I posted.
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!
So now I have a decision, I can get on with spinning the rest of it!
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 just done a brief re-organise of my stash, just moved some things around, and looked at some other things I'd forgotten. One of the things this has shown up is that there's a bigger reorganisation needed, where I get everything out and look at it and check my Rav cataloguing, and so on, which I might do tomorrow.
Looking at it has crystalised my intention to try and work through my stash, rather than buying more yarn and fibre. I have a good selection of yarn for various knitting and weaving purposes; plain-dyed, undyed and hand-dyed fibre; and base materials for several different dyeing and/or blending projects. This should be enough to keep me going for a while! (Exceptions are permitted for making baby things as gifts, because most of my stash is not washable enough for baby clothes. Although I do have enough bits and pieces of sock yarn that I can make quite a lot of baby socks from stash.)
So this seems like a good time to list the things I think I might do this year, some more settled than others...
- Red leaf wrap (red leaf fibre partially spun; plain burgundy fibre still to spin)
- Gothmerino alpaca wrap (need to finish carding the black alpaca with the purple merino, then spin, then weave)
- At least one hat (either a hood or a beret-like thing with space for hair)
- Another pair of long fingerless gloves, perhaps to match the hat
- Make more handspun oddballs (spin up bits of leftover fibre and make up third oddball)
- (Probably) a scarf with the handspun oddballs. Either garter stitch lengthwise, or possibly entrelac or something
- Finish the red cardigan!
- Harden myself to frogging the purple cable one
- Go back to the drawing board on what to do with five million balls of Debbie Bliss merino DK in a rather lovely solid purple
- Design and knit a cardigan for the purple slubby singles currently in swatch; think about writing the pattern up for publishing
- Publish the pattern for the push-me-pull-you socks
- Make socks from the grey shimmery yarn I carded and spun
- Finish spinning the undyed BFL; dye, ply, and sock.
- Learn patterned weaving
- Knit another hat for partner-R
- Finish Henry for large-male-friend-R
- Complete something in stranded knitting
- Spin and weave some silk
... I've also spun batches two and three of the red leaf fibre (wildly varying weights because I changed my mind about how fine I wanted it to be after batch one, but never mind), and begun Henry for large-male-friend-R: I've completed the cast on plus two rows! Since each row is approximately five million and six stitches, this is quite a lot of work. I know I've only just started the push-me-pull-you socks, but I thought I could do with a larger-needle project as well, to save my hands. No photos yet, for either the spinning or the knitting (in Henry's case, because all that's visible at the moment is the waste-yarn cast on, which is Lorna's Laces rainbow (my go-to waste yarn for most purposes, since I've got a fair amount of it left hanging around), so a picture wouldn't be very informative anyway).
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!
This is the next batch of black alpaca carded with purple merino. More than half of the fibre is carded now, and it's going much quicker with the drum carder than it did with hand carders :-) I've actually spun one batch of this, but I don't think I've taken any photos. It's about 5m/g, and will either stay as singles or end as two-ply, depending on what I decide to do with it. It's probably going to be another woven wrap, but at the moment everything looks like a weaving project to me, since the loom is spread across the library floor in pieces having been varnished at the weekend. I'm resisting the urge to assemble it for as long as possible, because I can't start using it for another week and a bit, so barriers are good ;-)
The grey-pink alpaca for my MiL's Christmas present is finally all spun and plied. The first picture is a closeup of two balls of singles ready for plying, and it's really just another excuse to show off the macro capabilities of my new camera! The second picture is of the finished yarn, about 500m of two-ply. I spent some time the other day swatching from my sample of this yarn, and I didn't come up with anything I liked, so this is starting to look like a weaving project as well. Of course, weaving it also means the finished item (a scarf) will be larger, since weaving uses less yarn than knitting, so this is solidifying into a plan.
