Strawberry Season yarn - mostly done

Here's the Strawberry Season braid, mostly spun up and Navajo plied. I divided the braid into three strips. What you see here is two-thirds of the braid - two out of the three strips. I still have one more strip to spin - and since I like the result of this - 206 yards/190 m of yarn, I'll be doing the same drill - spinning it fine, and putting a lot of twist into the ply.

In this photo below, it hasn't been washed yet.

And here it is after it's been washed, bashed, thwacked and dried and plumped up a bit. It is a lovely yarn and I can't wait to knit with it. But for the sake of "project completion" I will finish spinning the rest of the braid first.

That's what I will do today so I can start knitting up some socks.

Strawberry Season - July Fibre Club 2014

The July Fibre Club is a 4oz braid of 85% Superwash Merino wool and  15% nylon. The colours are intense and yet there is a lot of white in between the colours. For me, this is great because the red doesn't move into the green, it has a space of white, so you get a lovely pink, then white, then light green and then the intense green. It also means that you don't have complementary colours like red and green blending. It is an interesting result, but not for something that is to remind you of strawberry fields and freshly picked berries.

I am spinning it fine on my Ashford Joy and putting a lot of twist into it. The plan is to chain ply it so I can maintain the colour stretches. The final project goal is a pair of socks.

It's easy to spin a fine singles with Superwash Merino blended with Nylon. Part of the reason for that is that it isn't crazy slippery, nor is it sticky. It's just perfect. The twist doesn't run away on you and yet you can easily hang on to it long enough to give the amount of twist needed to give the chain ply character.

I'm on holidays this week and the following two, so I am planning on getting this spun up in my spare time.

Will post in progress.

Winter Thaw - Sweet Georgia Yarn fibre club March 2014

The March 2014 Sweet Georgia Yarn fibre club is a delicious 4 oz/100 g braid of Superwash BFL in greens, blues and browns. I spun it up on my Houndesign spindle, and plied on the spindle as well.

I divided the colour way into lengths that went from blue to brown to green. The plan was to further split them into pencil rovings and spin one spindle starting with the blue, and then fill a second spindle starting with the green. My thought was that when it was plied I would get a two-ply yarn that would have blue/green sections and full brown sections. 

Didn't quite work out as my pencil rovings were of dramatically varying thicknesses. But the finished yarn is lovely and I can't wait to find a project for it.

Here's what it looked like in progress. 

Taking a well deserved break. . . . .

 Two spindles full of just plied yarn waiting to be wound off on the niddy-noddy into skeins.

And here's the freshly plied yarn - total of 310 metres, or 286 yards of fingering/sport weight. Can't wait to see what's in store for this lovely yarn.

Love Letters completed

In my last blog post "Spinning on the Road" I had a good deal of the February Sweet Georgia Yarns fibre club spun up, ready for plying.

Well last weekend I plied it all, gave it the boiling water treatment to finish the silk, and now have 460 yards of fingering weight yarn in three lovely skeins.

This colour way has clear contrasting colours, in the sense of light sections and dark coloured sections. I didn't know how I wanted to spin it until I came across two azalea bushes- one pink the other purple - in Charleston, South Carolina. They were in full bloom and growing against a grey stone wall. I was smitten with the way the pinks, purples and greys all worked together. At that moment I decided that's the look I wanted for the end project. In my mind, that called for a stripped yarn - one singles of the light and one of the deeper colours.

This isn't an azalea - as I didn't take a photo of those bushes - but it  has a similar effect. It's an ornamental cherry in my neighbour's yard.

At the spinning stage. You can see the different colour ways in action here.

Here I am spinning up the last of the lighter colour way.

And here's the lot of it, plied and skeined. See how skinny these are? Remember this photo and compare it to the finished skeins. You see, fibre gets stretched out a lot during processing, spinning and plying. This yarn needs a good long soak in hot water to help it bloom and plump out again.

And here it is in the hot water bath getting the "treatment."  What's the "treatment" you ask?

Fill a cauldron with water.  Add a bit of soap, I added shampoo, about a tablespoon. I slipped the skeins in and slowly brought it up to a boil. I lifted and moved them a bit to avoid hot spots. The second it started boiling, I lowered the heat enough to keep it on a simmer. I let it simmer for 30 minutes then took it off the heat and let it cool enough so I could handle it. Not the best photo, but it shows what's going on.

After the hot water treatment, I rinsed it, adding a squirt of vinegar to the rinse water. Then I towel dried them and hung them to dry.

And here are the lovelies. All plumped up and ready for some project. The yarn is soft and silky. It would make a wonderful shawl. All of this spinning was done on my drop spindles.

Spinning on the road

Over the last week and a half, my husband and I traveled to Georgia and the Carolinas. We landed in Atlanta, rented a car and drove north to the Appalachia mountains. I've always wanted to see the John C. Campbell Folk School and maybe even attend some workshops, so that was the first stop. We spent the morning there, touring around the workshops, grounds, History Centre and Craft Store. Then we drove to Asheville, North Carolina. A lovely, funky, totally accessible town/city situated in a valley in the Appalachia mountains. After a couple of days there we drove to Charleston, SC visiting the capital, Columbia NC along the way. Two days in Charleston and then we went onto (my new favourite spot) Savannah, GA. Two days there and then we made our way back to Atlanta, stopping for a day in the city of my birth, Augusta.

When you are on the road, site-seeing and touring around, you do a lot of sitting, reading and watching. While it's always good to have a break from the regular routine, my hands got itchy do something creative. Luckily I brought along my Houndesign lace weight spindle and some fibre from the Sweet Georgia Yarn's February Fibre Club, so every evening while hubby searched the channels for playoff hockey, I spun.

The fibre is a Merino 50%, Bamboo 25%, Silk 25% blend. The colourway is called Love Letters. From the insert: ". . . this sweet little colourway, Love Letters, reminds me of the innocent days before texting and snapchat. . . .Tiny packages of mild chocolate kisses and cinnamon hearts. Trepidatious steps into young love and new crushes."

Here's what the colourway looks like when you break it into the dyed sections. A grey that moves into white, onto pink and then a purple. It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to spin this up. When you are faced with a colourway that has serious light and dark spots, when making a 2-ply yarn you can easily get yarn that has two light singles and two dark singles and lots of barber-polling. I've made that kind of yarn before and while the skein looked nice, I didn't like the way it knit up. Besides, I really loved the pinks and purples and wanted them throughout my yarn. 

I decided to separate the pink/purple from the grey/white sections and spin them separately. Then I made pencil rovings from each of the sections and spun that up. With pencil rovings, I was making short sections of pink and sections of purple so these colours were fairly evenly distributed in the pink group. I did the same thing for the grey/white section.

When I filled the spindle with one colour group, I wound it into a tight ball and set it aside. Then I filled the spindle again with the second colour group. After that, I took the first ball and combined it with the singles on the spindle to make a two-stranded ball. Here's a photo of my make-shift lazy kate; a paper coffee cup with the spindle stabbed through it to hold it tight and provide a place to hold the other ball while I wound the final ball for plying.

 

And here is a photo of the pink/purple singles still on the spindle. To the left of it is a two-stranded ball ready for plying. Below that is a tightly wound ball of singles, waiting for the spindle to get full so it can be wound into a two strand ball for plying. 

I have a little more to spin and then I can get down to plying. Because I filled each spindle to capacity, I need to use a large spindle for plying - that's why I had to wait until I got home to do that stage.

Stay tuned.

Ombre Inspired Spinning

Sweet Georgia Yarns January 2014 Fibre Club is a BFL (75%) and Silk (25%) with a dramatic colourway called Night Owl. Having had success previously with making an ombre inspired yarn, I decided to do the same with this rather than risk the yellows and purples colliding to make mud.

So like before, I separated all the colours into piles and with my hand carders made these luxurious rolags. With 25% silk, they are easy to card and the colours blend perfectly. After I finished all the carding, I put them into an order that I think slowly moved from one colour to the next.

The plan is to spin these very fine and Navajo (chain ply) them, making a three-ply yarn. I started spinning these yesterday and am well over third of the way through it. Will hopefully get the rest of it done this weekend.

Will certainly share the results.

The Candygram Socks

Sometime back in March 2013 (was it really that long ago?) I spun up the February Fibre club yarn called Candygram. It is lovely stuff with just a wee bit of sparkle - not enough to make it tacky, but enough to make it special. Recovering from a spinning-inspired knee injury, I spun this 100 grams on my drop spindles. You can find all the info about this fibre and the spinning in this blog post.

Once it was spun up I stared at the yarn for a long time. I just didn't like it. I didn't like the purples and lime greens together and thought they'd look muddy when knit up.

Well I was wrong. Really wrong. This was a case of ugly yarn, lovely result. The yarn actually striped up when it was knit, and even those rare times when the greens and purples collided, it was actually okay.

So here they are, a pair of socks. Just my basic "mindless-knitting" sock pattern. They aren't exactly the same, but they surely are a pair.

Flash off.

 Flash on.

Just to make sure I didn't get SSS (second-sock syndrome) I knit them mostly together. Cuff on #1, cuff on #2. heel flap on #1, heel flap on #2, and so on right down to the decreases at the toe. I recommend doing socks this way -- it's easy to remember the pattern when you are doing on piece following another. And for me, I know that once I saw the result of the yarn, the mystery was over and I could easy be left with just one sock. Nope, not now. I now have a lovely pair of socks to show off at the next fibre event!

Story of a shawl - Part 1

This incomplete story is the tale of a shawl -- from fibre to yarn to shawl. The shawl itself is not complete as is this blog post. But stay tuned. I'll find my camera and take pictures of the next phase of this art object.

This shawl started out as a lovely roving from the Sweet Georgia Yarns fibre club. The colourway is called Waterfall.  In the notes that accompanied the roving, Felicia suggested we try an Ombre approach. Separating all the colours, spinning them in the single colour sequence and then chain plying. So that's what I did.

This was the first thing I spun  for the Spinzilla contest. And here are all the rolags nicely carded into the colourways and put into some kind of Ombre order.

After an hour of spinning, I was mostly finished with the blue.

After a couple of hours, the green was done too.

[Not sure why this photo is the size of a postage stamp.]

Here is the final yarn, chain plied to preserve the colour ways. You can see the silk shining through.

And here's the first attempt at a shawl. It's the Adhara Rainbow Shawl -- pattern was from Elann.com but I can't find it anymore. It's essentially a feather and fan pattern that grows.

I kept getting lost in the pattern and ended up un-knitting more than I was knitting. So decided that the yarn/pattern were telling me something.

So I tried another one.

Photos of that one tomorrow.

Wellspring 1/2 mitts - working with the fibre club yarn

The yarn for these mitts came from Sweet Georgia Yarns Fibre Club - this was the March installment. The fibre is English Shetland, a lovely wool to work with. I spun this yarn up on my spindle. After working with the slippery fibres from the January and February installments, it was a relief to work with fibre that has a bit of stick to it.

While they don't look exactly the same, they are definitely a pair. The pattern for these mitts is my own, it's a coin lace with a lovely thumb gusset that grows gracefully out of the coin lace. Knit on 3mm needles with 48 stitches, they knit up really fast. It's become my standby mitt pattern. It's all in my head and I can easily make minor variations to mix it up a bit.

I'll post it on Ravelry soon.

March Fibre club: Wellspring colourway in English Shetland

Here's a photo of the March Fibre club yarn, nearly complete. It's English Shetland wool that is a delight to spin, especially after spinning the slippery silky/merino/nylon Candygram last week. I am spinning this yarn to be a worsted weight and it spun up fast. All of it has been spun it all on my Houndesign Henry's Dervish spindle.

I just have two more sets of singles to ply and then I'll finish them off by boiling and bashing them around. That way they'll get slightly felted and it also may even out the colours a bit.  The dark colours may lose a bit of dye and the lighter ones may pick it up. At least that's what I hope will happen.

Two days later:

I finished up the yarn. And then I put all the skeins well tied up with figure eights, into a pasta pot with hot water and a bit of shampoo. I brought it to a boil and then held it at a simmer for 15 minutes. In that time the twist relaxed, the yarn evened out and the colours became a bit more even. The dark sections lost some of their dye and the lighter sections picked it up. I like this yarn a lot better now.

Not sure what it will be. There's 100+grams of it. Enough to make a set of half-mitts and a hat. Or it could just go into my yarn collection.  I seem to be much more prolific making yarn than I am knitting these days.

Candygram yarn complete

The yarn is all done. Here it is right after being made into skeins.

and here it is all washed and bashed up, ready for knitting.You can see how the yarn softens up and gets its bounce back after a good hot soak. In some sections it's a sock yarn, and in others is a sport weight.

Not entirely sure how it's going to knit up, in terms of how the colours will behave with each other. The yarn itself is lovely and soft and strong, so it could be a pair of socks. But the colours and patterning are really asking for it to be some kind of small shawl scarf.  

Then again I could just put it into my yarn collection with all the other stuff that I make. I simply love making yarn. This fibre club is a great way to satisfy my need to constantly explore fibres and colours and get out of my regular rhythms.  

I'm onto the March fibre now. I'm determined to have the Jan/Feb/March fibre spun up before the next cycle begins. January fibre is a merino/silk blend that will take a lot of discipline. That's why I've jumped to the March fibre.  It's a nice Shetland wool with greens and blues. Easy spinning, worsted weight. Will go fast, I type hopefully.

Will keep you posted.

February Fibre Club: Candygram

Sweet Georgia Yarns Fibre Club is a fun way to experiment with fibres and colours. It's also a great way to boot you out of any kind of a fibre/spinning rut you may be in.  You sign up for three months at a time. Once a month you get a 100g bag of unspun fibre with a description of the content of the yarn along with some spinning suggestions.

The fibre for February is called Candygram. According to Felicia Lo, "All these saccharine pinks, lilacs, light lime greens and pale blues remind me of those little candy hearts that you get at Valentine's Day." And boy, she's right. These are not colours that would have every chosen for myself. But that's the fun thing about the Fibre Club. Once you have them, you have to work with them. And it ended up being really fun. I love these intense bold colours and the splash of silver glitter that ekes out one in a while. 

It is made of 63% Superwash Merino Wool, 20% Silk, 15% Nylon, 2% "Silver." And it was prepared as a pencil roving.  A sleek amount of fibre, about the thickness of a . . . pencil.  

I've been off spinning with my wheel due to a spinning injury, and since the spinning workshop last week, I've been full on with my spindles. So this is being done entirely with my lace-weight spindles for the singles, and my heavier, Henry's Dervish for plying.

I actually have crafted a detailed plan for spinning this yarn.  But I won't explain my thinking until I am sure it worked.  Why bother otherwise?  But here it is nearly done - all the fibre is spun up and I am at the plying stage now.  

From left to right you will see, a larger spindle that I am using for plying with about a third of the plying done.  Next to that you will see two sets of purple balls next to lace-weight spindles full of singles. These are waiting to be wound into two-ply balls which make plying so much easier. The wee green ball at the bottom is the left over from winding a double-ply ball.  I am sure there will be others so this one will get incorporated into the final plan.  The mini skein at the very bottom is one of the sample I did as I tried to figure out how to get the best out of all these colours.

Will post the final results.

At the Ballet: Sample one

While I did promise that I was only going to spin yarn for my 100-Mile skirt this weekend, the January fibre club fibre kept calling me. I justified it by convincing myself I only needed to spin and ply one small nest so I could do a sample. Sampling is good.

Here it is wound directly from the spindle to a toilet paper roll using my ball winder. I attached both ends to the spindle and plied from this centre-pull ball.

I put a lot of twist into the plying and it shows. This is what it looked like when it came off the niddy-noddy. It's 54 metres of yarn.

A warm water bath relaxed the twist and it settled into the yarn making for a soft , yet highly twisted yarn. The fibre is 50% merino and 50% cultivated silk. Fine fibres like these can take a lot of twist and still remain quite soft. I love the way the subtle variations of pinks come through.  Now I'm looking forward to spinning up the darker nests.

January fibre club: At the Ballet

As a Christmas present to myself, I joined Sweet Georgia Yarns fibre club.  I've joined it before and thoroughly enjoyed the surprise and challenge each month.  Last week we got our January fibre. It's called At the Ballet. This is how Felicia Lo describes it:

At the Ballet is blush, cream and pinks, but not the younger girly kind.  It's more wisened and more graceful. 

It's 50% fine merino blended with 50% cultivated silk.  You can see the sheen from the silk in this photo that was taken with the flash on.

The colourway is cream, white and light pinks moving into deeper pink hues. A quicky sample on the drop spindle helped me decide how to spin it.  I wasn't all that interested in barber poling -- that's when one ply is the lighter section and the other ply is the darker one -- see photo below. With long stretches of each extreme, the light and the dark pinks, there would be a good chance that it would happen.

It's a lovely fibre and spins up fine with little effort -- just a heck of a lot of twist. So my colleague and I (who is also a member of the fibre club) decided to separate -- as well as we could, the light and dark sections. What you see below are the nests of light stuff and nests of the darker stuff.  The plan is to spin all the light stuff lace weight and double-ply it. Spin all the darker stuff lace weight and double-ply that.  Then knit a lace shawl with the darker yarn and use the lighter yarn for the edging.

You can see the subtle gradations of white to pinks in the singles on the spindle above. When it is double-plied the yarn will have some depth, but not the dramatic barber poling you can see in the bottom mini-skein in the photo below.

So that's our plan. This won't get in the way of finishing up the 100-mile skirt because this is being spun at work over lunch hour. At least for now.

Waterfall Scarf in Vintage Postcard yarn

Over the weekend I made a very simple scarf. The results are so fun I had to share it with you.  The pattern is Waterfall, by Linda O’Leary.  It’s in 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders.  It is a great resource to help you use up your stock of single skeins. Because of my short attention span, I have a lot of those hanging around the studio. 

The yarn I used was a loosely spun single from Sweet Georgia Yarns fibre club.  The colour way is Vintage Postcards and the fibre is Falklands.  I’ve been wondering what to do with this yarn for a while, and when I saw the Waterfall pattern, I knew it had a chance. The colours in the yarn would cause horizontal striping and the dropped stitches would cause vertical striping.  Could be a nice result.

The knitting was simple, straight garter stitch knitted in the back loop.  It’s a minor variation but you get used to it quickly.  The magic comes after the bind-off.  You leave a few live stitches on and then let them run down the length of the scarf – as controlled drop stitches.  The twisted stitches on either side of the dropped stitch keep the stitches tight so the dropped stitch doesn’t make the others around it loose. 

Because the yarn is a loosely spun single, the fibres often caught.  So it wasn't a simple dropped stitch that ran down the scarf like wildfire.  It was a bit of a tug-o-war and I had to snip fibres occasionally to get it to drop.  Once dropped, the yarn released from the stitch makes a wide space, about three stitches wide.  So the narrow scarf widens.

Still working on the last column of dropped stitches.  But it's a good result, no?