Spinzilla 2014 - Final Tally

Here is the final tally. 10 skeins - #10 is a wee 41 yard skein of organic cotton singles. The final measure is 6,576 yards - 830 grams.

There are many things I would do differently - and thus be able to spin faster and more efficiently. But that's for a later blog post and my own reflections for next year.

Spinzilla 2014: Day 4

Here are the results from day 4 of Spinzilla. From bottom to top we have the following:

• 64 grams and 367 yards of Bluebird Cafe - the second half of the braid that I spun on day 3. Superwash merino, spun fine for plying into a DK. I'll probably do all my plying on Sunday - as that's easy to do around making a Thanksgiving feast.

• 97 grams and 292 yards of Penny Lane - superwash merino. These two skeins were spun to make soft singles. The merino will bounce up once it is washed and will fill out. If it isn't as thick as I want, I'll ply the two and get a chunky weight.

• 96 grams and 280 yards - same as above

DISCLAIMER: I am carefully documenting my progress not to show off, but so I can have a good record of what I managed to spin each day.

Last night I went to the second spin-in hosted by Team Sweet Georgia. It was great to meet the rest of the team and to see old friends. General consensus is that plying is a good deal. You get to finish your yarn and you get credit for plying, which is way faster than spinning singles. So what's to lose in that.

I also bought a couple more braids because they were the new fall colours - Bourbon and Grouse. Will spin those up today - polwarth and silk, can't wait.

Over and out.

Spinzilla 2014: Day 3

Day 3 of Spinzilla proved much more productive because I booked the day off work. I had as much time to spin as I wanted. Talk about delicious.

So here's what I produced. I finished the second half of the blue polwarth/silk you see at the top. Then I spun up the pink polwarth/silk you see in middle. And in the evening, I spun half a braid of Bluebird Cafe from the Sweet Georgia Yarns fibre club, September. It's Superwash Merino and spins like a dream. All these fibres spin wonderfully.

Oh, and during my breaks from spinning, I tidied my studio. I reorganized all my tools and fibre from the Knit City workshops I did over the weekend.

The total yardage for day 3 is 973 yards. Not bad at all. This year you get credit for plying your yarn, so I may take a break from spinning singles and ply the Temptress skeins from day 1 and the Bluebird Cafe skeins. We'll see. Right now I am just having fun busting through my stash and making a dent in it.

Tonight's the second spin-in at the Sweet Georgia Yarns studio, and I'll get to see other members of the team, and see what they've been up to.

Spinzilla 2014: Day 2

Day two of Spinzilla was a bit more difficult because I had to go into the city to work. I brought my tahkli along to spin cotton because it is so portable, and I can also get a decent amount of yardage on it. Finally.

So this is the amount I spun over lunch. I haven't measured it yet. I plan to fill another spindle with cotton, wind them into a double-stranded ball and ply it. Then I'll measure it. 

I didn't have much time after work as I had an Executive meeting for the Langley Weavers and Spinners Guild. Despite that, I brought my Ashford Joy along to the meeting and spun half of this skein. I finished it up on the morning of Day 3. So the yardage for this has to bridge two days.

And that ends the day 2 show and tell.

Spinzilla 2014: Day 1

I've been silent for a long while and there are a variety of excuses for this, but they aren't half as interesting as this. Ever since Monday, October 6th at 12:00 am I've been involved in the second Spinzilla contest.

Spinzilla is a monster of a spinning week. It is a full week where spinners sign up in teams to work to spin as much yardage as they possibly can. I was a member of the Sweet Georgia Yarns team in 2013. I spun 630 grams of fibre resulting in 4496 yds. That's 2.5 miles of singles!

I am surprisingly competitive, so this year I joined again and have challenged myself to beat my last years yardage. I gave myself an advantage this year by booking off the last three days of the week so I could spend the entire days spinning.

In the next several blog posts I will show you the progression of my spinning.

Here is day one:

This is the first bobbin. It is Temptress a Superwash Merino 80%, Cashmere 10%, and Nylon 10% blend from Sweet Georgia Yarns Fibre Club. I managed to do all this spinning around a work day. One hour in the morning right after I woke up. A half-hour a lunch time. And then when I booked off at 4:30 I spun my heart out putting in another three and a half-hours. 

And here it is wound up on the Niddy Noddy. That's the way I have decided to measure my yardage. For me it is a more precise way to measure the singles and it also conditions them by allowing the twist to even out as it it wound into a skein. The twist doesn't leave the singles, it just gets evened out along the line.

And here are two of the lovelies. Almost equal. The top one is 293 yds and the bottom one is 294 yds. Imagine that.

More tomorrow.

Reflections on the month of August

Well August went fast. I was off work for the first 11 days of the month. In those wonderful days I spent my time doing a morning run nearly every day, some much needed garden work, lots of reading in the afternoons and of course, spinning and knitting. As I will be spending most the fall traveling around the province living out of a suitcase, I had no desire to leave my home.

My conviction to be a "picker" and knit continental style continues. It's going well. When I pick up my knitting, my hands automatically go into the picking mode, and for some stretches of plain knitting, I can knit without looking. Not sure if I am faster than I was before, but I am no longer slower. In fact I think I am about the same.

I've been merrily pounding out those lovely baby socks from Kate Atherley's free Ravelry pattern - I wrote about these in my last monthly reflection, that seemed to be only yesterday. I'm onto pair number 6.

While I was off work I  also did some much needed tidying up. After each of my spinning workshops I have a lot of little bits of fibre from the demonstrations and such. I gathered them all up, put them into colour groups and using the blue/green pile, carded up a couple of batts along with some angelina. I spun that up and that's what you see in the bobbin on the left. The bobbin on the right is local romney, dyed with indigo and carded on my drum carder. It was a left over from the Aldergrove Fair days sheep-to-shawl demo in 2013.

Each one wasn't really enough to do much more than making a pair of baby socks. . . and while there's nothing wrong with that, I wanted more yarn. So I plied them together. The result is below - 105y/96m of worsted weight yarn. Just enough to make a nice pair of half mitts. The yarn has depth from all the colours, sheen from the romney and surprise sparkle from the angelina. All this from left overs.

The really important thing I did was I cleaned and tidied my studio. It had really gotten out of control so I took a strong hand to it and rid myself of stuff I won't be using, and putting all the other things away. A place for everything and everything in its place. And if it doesn't have a place, that's a good moment to pause and think - do I want this? Do I have a place for it?

The unfortunate part of the studio tidy-up was that I did it on my very last day of holidays. Right after I cleaned, purged and reorganized, I went back to work the next day. And then was busy the next two full weekends. The result, I have a tidy studio. But I am also having some difficulty remembering where I put some things. Oh sure, it's a great idea to come up with new organization schemes, but it's also a good idea to live them for a few days to make sure it goes into long-term memory.

For example, I spend a week looking for my wee box of DPNs only to find them in a most logical spot - in the very box where I keep all my other knitting needles. The upside of that week of searching is that I am intimately familiar with every, and I mean every nook and cranny of this household. And found several things I had thought long lost.

And on the very last day of the month, I visited a woman who very generously gave me the freshly shorn fleeces of her two lovely llamas - milk chocolate and dark chocolate. First glance looks promising. I am going to ask my friend M from the guild who raises llamas to go over the fleeces with me so I can learn more about llama.

And finally, I have news about my cotton plants, but this blog post is already too long, so stay tuned.

100-mile wear revisited: reclaiming Cormo

It's been a while since I wrote a post about locally sourced fibres. Since this blog is called 100-mile wear, I thought it high time I remedied that.

I dug through my dwindling unprocessed fibre stash and found a modest bag of locally sourced Cormo - about 12 ounces. Strikingly white with fat, bouncy locks 3 - 4 inch locks, it was just the thing to have some fun with. It had been washed, but that was ages ago. The fibre felt dry, like it had had all the moisture sucked out of it, and it felt sticky at the base.

I tossed the entire bag full into the kitchen sink that was filled with hot tap water and a quirt of shampoo. I covered the sink with a Rubbermaid lid and let it sit for about half an hour. Then I carefully lifted it out of the soap water, drained the sink and filled it again with hot water and a quirt of vinegar. Covered it again and then after half an hour, drained the sink. I towel dried the fibre and then put it outside in the bright sunshine with just a wee bit of a breeze. By the end of the day it was dry.

A few days later I sampled a few locks with my wool combs. I did this all on the back porch and when I did the first batch, it was in full sunshine. The first batch, in full-on sunshine, combed up beautifully and came off the combs like a dream. It was too hot so I abandoned the activity until later. It was much cooler when I returned to it hours later, and the next two samples were sticky and I could barely pull the fibre off the comb. And it caused a lot of waste. This wouldn't do.

I figured that the problem was some kind of wax or oxidized lanolin in the fibre. It hadn't been thoroughly scoured the first time and then after sitting for several (yes several) years, it oxidized and hardened. The heat of the sun warmed it up and melted it a bit. But I wasn't prepared to get heat stroke just to process this fibre.

Believing that I needed to soften up the wax and oxidized lanolin, I tossed the entire fleece into a bucket of warm water. Covered it with a tea towel and let it sit for nine days outside. Why nine days? Because I am on holiday and that's when I figured I needed to deal with it before I returned to work. I am glad that I did deal with it that day because it was starting to smell. Not quite as bad as my retting flax last summer, but decidedly disturbing. Fortunately the smell was just in the water and didn't affect the fibre.

I divided it into three large pots, filled each one with hot tap water and about a 1/4 cup of shampoo. The water felt really soapy. Then I put the pots on the stove to come to a boil. Once they reached boil I let them simmer for about 15 minutes, turning them from time to time to avoid hot spots.

To rinse them I filled the kitchen sink half-way with hot tap water and the rest with boiling water. I lowered the soapy fibre into it and gently pushed it further into the water with the insert for my pasta pot. You know, the thing that is almost as large as the pasta pot but has holes like a colander. That allowed me to push the soapy and buoyant fibre into the rinse water without having to manhandle it too much. I let it soak for about ten minutes. Drained the water and filled the neighbouring sink with hot tap and boiling water. This time I added a 1/4 cup of vinegar. Did the same thing with the pasta pot to get it all submerged.

After ten minutes I drained the sink and filled it again with hot tap and boiling water. This time I only put a small squirt of vinegar into the water. After ten minutes I drained it completely, put it into the pasta colander and put that into a bucket. Let that drain for about 15 minutes and then put it outside to dry.

It was early in the day when I did this so had a good chunk of time for it to dry. Because I didn't squeeze the water out of it, it took a while. I checked it regularly and flipped it every time I went past it. I covered it overnight and by mid-morning on the following day it was dry.

And it is beautiful. Not a spot of wax or any stickiness at all. I did a sample with the wool combs, in the house out of the heat, and it combed up beautifully.

So what did the trick?

• The nine days of soaking? 
• Using a decent amount of shampoo? 
• Using super hot /nearly boiling water for every step of the way? 

I could have done experiments with the different methods and I'd be able to tell you. But alas, I just wanted clean fibre so I threw every strategy at it.

And it worked.