It's a good day to dye...

Oooh it has been a while since I put anything up here on my blog!  So sorry about that!

With the biting cold of this Wisconsin winter, I've been doing some dye work this month.  It is such fun to work with dye on colored wools, so I shot some pictures of the latest batch of experiments.

I soaked 100 grams of wool from various fleeces in my stash and put them in the dye pot to try out the effect of overdyeing the darker natural colored wools.



The mini trampoline drying rack - because I'm fancy like that.

Here's the whole bunch on my drying rack... a mini trampoline that has lost a few too many springs and attachments due to age, but it makes a dandy drying rack when I put it up on sawhorses!

Clockwise from the top:
1. Corriedale, natural gray "Sierra" in Amethyst.
2. Cormo, white "Poppy" in Amethyst and then as a cleanup for Peacock Blue.
3. Corriedale, natural gray "Sierra" in Peacock Blue.
4. English Leicester Longwool steel gray "Theo" clean up batch in Peacock Blue.
5. English Leicester Longwool steel gray "Theo" in Peacock Blue.

Wool is a protein fiber, so I use acid dyes to color the wool fibers.  Typically, vinegar is used for the acidification of the dye bath, but since I plan to sell these colors, I used citric acid instead since it has no odor and uses a much smaller quantity.  I learned this when I started dying with the Nasty Romney fleece that started this journey.

Speaking of the Nasty Romney, I have had good news that I can finally share!  I had submitted a proposal of the story of that fleece to Spin-Off Magazine quite a while ago, and I was selected for the Spring 2014 issue featuring color.  I'm on page 70 of the magazine, with my article titled "Making Lemonade".  Here is a link to the magazine: Spin-Off Spring 2014


I'll be putting some batts from both this dye batch and the Nasty Romney (now somewhat affectionately named Anastasia for obvious reasons) into my Etsy shop for your perusal and purchase.

Currently also hard at work on another delightful series of batts called the "Magic" series.  All of these batts are full of sparkle and an interesting blend of fibers.

Here's a taste of the series for your pleasure.
 


Wings of Pegasus

Here is the link to the listing in the shop for this batt called Wings of Pegasus.

Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival 2012

Amazing weekend!  Took some vacation time and had a wonderful time at this fiber fair.  Probably the best and largest one that is close to me.  It runs from Friday to Sunday and just finished up its eleventh annual event.

As I think back on it, this festival started as a sheep show and has grown into the amazing event that it is now.  It has a full livestock show, fleece show and auction, vendors in two large barns, a sheepdog trial that runs all three days and classes from nationally known instructors.

This year I entered the Open Handspun Skein Competition in two categories.  Experienced adult spinner class - fine yarn lot, and Drop spindle class - medium lot.  The entry for the first one was a yarn that I just finished, I called it Deep Blue Sea and my plans for it are a very large shawl called Shipwreck so I still have a lot of spinning to do!  The shawl requires 1600 yards of fine yarn.  The skein I entered will be used for part of the beaded netting that the pattern calls for out near the edge.  I may alternate the sequined rows with the regular yarn, I'll sample it and see.  Here's what the yarn looks like:


Deep Blue Sea

Deep Blue Sea - swatch

It is a three ply yarn, one ply is a varigated wool from Louet called Northern Lights in the Violets colorway.  It shades from purple to lime green through several shades of blue.  One ply is a lambswool, angora and nylon blend in purple.  The third ply is sewing thread strung with 3mm amethyst iris sequins.  As I plied the yarn, I pushed in a sequin about every 3-4 inches so they would appear about once every knitted inch.  The Shipwreck pattern calls for beads at random intervals, so I thought this would work for me since they sequins are already in the yarn.  Beads strung on yarn have a number of concerns for me.  Sliding the beads along the spun yarn abrades the yarn unless the beads are very large.  If the beads are smaller there is the problem of a thick spot in the yarn that the beads might not fit over, and that is always possible on handspun.  I also made a small swatch, the competition required it to be quite small, so the motif from the shawl pattern was much too large.  I chose a small eyelet pattern from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury.

Blue Neon 3 ply and extra black chain ply

Blue Neon - swatch

The other yarn I entered was also a three ply.  Spun on a drop spindle, this yarn was one ply of a handpainted BFL (Blue-Faced Leicester) roving from Frene Creek Farm my favorite local shepherd.  The other two plies were made from a 50/50 blend of "Dusty" a fine wool covered Corriedale fleece from a shepherd in Colorado (no longer has a web presence) and some black alpaca roving. This photo shows the extra black yarn chain plied on top of the Blue Neon skeins.  I called this one Blue Neon because of the way it worked up - the skein showed brilliant color against the black background which was the look I was after with this combination of fiber.  The swatch shows a nice, shadowy stripe of the varigation of the handpaint.  I did like the swatch at this weight the best.  This one was done on size 4 needles and had the suppleness I'd want for a sweater or vest.  I had also done a swatch for socks on size 2 needles.  It is also pleasing to me, but I think this will probably become outerwear.  Might use some as an accent on socks, but since there is no nylon in this blend, it might not wear well enough for socks.

The skein competition was interesting to watch.  The instructions were that no talking or questions would be allowed, and the judge worked in silence.  Disappointing to me, after listening to the wool judge on the prior day.  He chattered away as he judged the fleeces.  Talked about what he looked for and what he was finding as he worked his way through the many fleeces in that show.  Just a difference in the way the two judges worked.  Perhaps there is a tradition there as well... I don't know, but I did enjoy the way the talkative judge worked.  I think I learned more from that method.

The results were available after the judging and I was allowed to keep my score sheets, which I appreciated.  Sadly, there were no comments on the papers, just the numerical scores.  The nice thing was that I was permitted to speak with the judge when she was finished.  The standard calls for perfection, and appears to compare the handspun skeins to millspun yarns.  I fared pretty well, my Deep Blue Sea got 96/100 points and the Blue Neon got 100/100 points.  Both were awarded second place ribbons.  Deep Blue Sea was topped by a bamboo/silk 2 ply that was perfectly even.  Not as pretty, in my opinion, but it was perfect.  Blue Neon was beat by a beautiful heavier weight two ply, that again, was perfectly even.  That skein also won Best In Show.  I'm content, my scores were very good, and I still love my yarn.  Actually, the judge did too, as I learned in our conversation after the judging was done.  She told me that she knew how difficult it is to ply with sewing thread and that she just LOVES sequins.  So..... I think she liked my yarn - quite a lot.

Will I do another competition?  I don't know.  I learned a lot, but I also know that my yarn scores very high in such a competition.  That part was quite satisfying.  The payout isn't really enough to make me want to do very much of this.  Each of those skeins represent many hours of work, and though the booth was attended, I was uncomfortable leaving my hard work out there for the whole weekend.


So Fine!

Back to spinning... on some super fine Corriedale (yes, really!)
I called my favorite local shepherd (www.frenecreekfarm.com) a little while back and asked about some really fine gray fleece.  She had two on hand, both Corriedale.  I was skeptical, but I went out anyway, since she's never steered me wrong and she has lots of fleece on hand all the time.
I truly couldn't believe what I saw...

This is one of the two fleeces that I bought.  Both Corriedale and both very, very fine wool with abundant crimp.  Also very greasy fleeces, as most fine wools are, so the washing was a bit of an adventure.

I pulled off a small part of one of the fleeces and washed it the normal way I do fleeces.  After it was dry, it still felt sticky, so it got another bath.  Then I put it on the drum carder - mind you, I have a fine fur drum on my carder - and I got a batt full of noils.  

Back to the drawing board...

I took the pitiful, noiled batt and combed some of it to see what would happen.  The resulting nest of fiber is shown above.  Still some waste, but not a total loss as the batt would have been.  I did spin a couple of the nests of combed fiber and they were very nice to spin and quite fine and pleasing singles.

Then I said to myself, "Self, this fiber needs different preparation to be it's very best".  So I set about learning to deal with superfine wools.  Checked some books out of the library, read them, spent a little time in denial and then decided to try lock washing.  I shudder in the face of this kind of fiddly prep just to get the wool clean!  But, armed with a roll of tulle I sewed up the little bags to hold the locks of wool.

After the tulle bags were ready, I went back out to the garage to commune with my fleece.  Took it out of the plastic bag and unrolled it.  Took off some skirting bits that I didn't want to deal with for this kind of process and brought in about 600 grams to attempt my experiment with lock washing.  There is still about half of the fleece in the bag, just in case I want to experiment further.  I also have the other fleece, so there is plenty of wool for me to fiddle with.  I took pictures of the process for my friends over on the Knit Picks Community and I'll share them with you here too.

Here's the setup: nine nursery plant flats and one large tub big enough to hold them all and allow a bit of sloshing around space.  This shot shows the tulle bags with the raw locks stitched inside, in the nusery flat and ready to go into the water.

I stacked up eight flats like this and put an empty one on top to keep everything together and pushed the whole mess down into the soapy water - held it down for a minute or so and brought it up out of the water, and then pushed it down again.

At that point it looked like this and the water was positively filthy... like the first wash on the uncontained fleece the way I usually do my wool washing.

So then I did another wash, and several rinses using this same process, but separating the trays and using the empty tray on top of each one after the first wash.  This was to help each batch of locks get cleaner - at least that is what I hoped would happen!

After all that was done, I took the bags and laid them out on a screen to dry.  I used my mini trampoline for this - put up on sawhorses for good airflow and turned on the ceiling fan to circulate the air around the fleece.  I wasn't sure how much the bags would slow the process, since I usually am able to pull the locks apart as they dry and that can't happen in lock washing.

Here's a shot of the bags drying on the screen.  Nice clear gray, and the dirty tips will come off when I flick card them prior to spinning.  It took a couple days for the bags to be fully dry.  I opened one and flick carded the locks.  I used a small pin brush made for brushing dogs - the kind that looks like fine carding cloth - often called a slicker brush.  Flick carding is a process I hadn't used before.  Grab one end of the lock and brush out the other end with the dog brush until it is nice and fluffy and straight.  Then turn the lock around and do the same thing on the other end.  Remember not to card the fingertips!  It smarts!  I also dug out my old horse shoeing chaps to cover my legs while I did this.  It worked great since it is nice thick leather and I could really get a good push with the brush against the leather.  The flicking pulls out all the tender tip wool and gets out all the vegetable matter in the wool as well.  Very nice preparation and it leaves me with little tufts of fiber that is all lined up in the lock formation and ready to spin.  I started spinning from this preparation - super fine singles and pretty trouble free spinning.  Here's what it looked like after I had a bit of this spun up.

The locks are in front.  Different colors, yes, but I didn't sort for color on this batch of singles.  I wanted to have some variation in the finished yarn.  So I spun the locks as they came up, and there is some variegation in ths singles as you can see.  The singles are super fine, and much stronger than I would have imagined.  I did a chain ply on this bobbin of singles and ended up with 130 yards of chain plied yarn.  I noticed that the yarn was very springy and elastic as it went into its first bath.  As a note, I wind my skeins on a two yard niddy noddy, which I tie in at least four places to keep the yarn organized and easy to untangle after washing.  This means a skein hangs in about a 36" loop when it comes off the niddy noddy.  This skein had a lot of bounce to it, and I expected it to pull up some, but when it was dry it hung in a 24" loop!  I've never had such bouncy yarn!

I re-wound the skein after it dried, since some of the strands were somewhat wayward in the first skein up.  The new skein came out at 120 yards and still has an incredible bounce and springy quality that I've never had in handspun before.  I've got a couple skeins of commercially spun Merino yarn that have a similar feel.  I can't help but wonder if it is the fine wool, the crimp, or the lock spinning that causes this quality in the finished yarn.  Time to do more research into this... in the meantime, I'm enjoying this cottony, next to the skin soft wool that I've made.  Next big decision is what I'll make with it.  Since I have plenty more of this fleece and another fleece that is very similar, there will be much more of this yarn available to me.  Besides - I still have several of the tulle bags left to flick and spin....

Tour de Fleece recap...

It seems that I go through phases in my fiber art life. Right now I'm in a spinning phase and having a wonderful time!  Just finished Tour de Fleece, which I have never done before.  I had not heard of it until recently, but it is a self-directed spinning challenge that runs at the same time as the Tour de France bicycle race.  Having no interest in sports, I did the challenge for the personal satisfaction.

I participated in three teams, the first one was Knit Picks and I chose to spin a three ply yarn to complete the singles I had spun of "Blue Fleck" colorway from AlohaBlu that I received in a spinning swap a while back. 

Spin swap from AlohaBlu, the Blue Fleck custom dyed roving is in the middle

When I get those precious braids of handpainted roving I like to plan a yarn around them to show their beauty. This particular roving was about two ounces, and I like to have more yarn than that in the event I want more than an accent of the handpaint.  So I made up more batts to match. In this case, I wanted a subtle blend of blues and teals so I combined these fibers into batts: some gray Corriedale from a sheep named "Sierra", some wool top in a colorway "Bluebell" and some hand dyed Firestar in blue and teal.  All of this came from my stash (how cool is that!) so it made me feel extra good about the yarn I was making!  Here's the picture of the finished "Blue Fleck" singles and the stash of the other fibers.

Blue Fleck singles, Bluebell top, Firestar in blue and teal

Sierra Corridale

The finished batts looked like this:

I made four of these at 33 grams each so that I would have two bobbins with well over two ounces each for plying.  I prefer not to have to try and match batts after the fact, because it seems to be like dye lots, where even if I use the same materials and in the same ratios it never looks identical.

Then I started the spinning.  It seemed to take forever since I wanted the final yarn to be pretty fine.  I finished a bit early, which was a relief and did the plying and got this yarn:

It ended up being 600 yards, 160 grams or 5.6 ounces!  No wonder it felt like I had been spinning forever!  I ended up with quite a bit of the blended singles left, so I did an experiment with embellished yarn using sequins strung on sewing thread.  I chain plied it with the two strands held together, very fiddly and time consuming, but I really like the resulting yarn:

It is 36 grams or 1.3 ounces and 92 yards.  At this point, I'm planning to use this yarn set for some kind of outerwear with the sequined yarn for trim.  It isn't soft enough for next to the skin, but it is gorgeous and will wear well.  Haven't decided on knitting or weaving yet, or even what form of garment.  So into the stash it goes for the time being.

Nasty Romney goes pink!

Well, a very long time ago I produced this hot pink wool from the nastiest fleece I ever worked with.

One of four dye baths I did with this Romney fleece.  Blogged it at the very start of the blog, so I won't re-tell the story here.  Suffice it to say - I finally did something with some of this pink wool.  Did a nice blend with some gray Corriedale from a ewe named Sierra and added a bit of white icicle fiber for some sparkle. 

It seemed to take forever to get this done, I had 99 grams of batts to spin.  Mostly did it while I was sitting at the computer listening to podcasts and my Celtic music station on Pandora radio.  Nice way to pass the time, to be sure! 

Spun the singles on a spindle and chain plied them on my wheel.

I ended up with this:

A lovely mauve yarn, with a touch of sparkle.  Softer than the Romney alone and more interesting than either color wool would have been.  I'm pretty partial to heathered colors anyway, I like the character and interest that they have when worked up into something.  I originally thought I'd do a scarf out of this, there is a pretty one from Spin-Off by Stephanie Gaustad called Helix Scarf.  It is a ruffled confection that is a very interesting knitting pattern.  Besides that, it would be great with my winter coat.

Spinning in progress...

Busy, busy, busy and always more to do.  But this is what I've been working on.  I showed you the Cormo I was spinning in my last post.  I've spun up about half of what I have on hand and have this pretty little skein to show for it.

The next thing I've been working on is a pretty good sized quantity of batts that I had made of some of the pink Romney from way back when.  I blended it with some great light gray Corriedale from a ewe named Sierra from my favorite shepherd in Colorado.  I also decided to blend in a little bit of white icicle to add some sparkle to the yarn.  My original plan was to knit up a ruffled scarf that I found in Spin Off some time ago.  An odd thing happened as I worked with this blend.  The Corriedale was a little "sticky" to work with. I had washed it quite a while before I actually did anything with it, so it "rested" in that state. Since the blending was already finished, I went ahead and spun it up the way it was.  But I also decided to re-wash some of the fleece that hadn't been used in the blended batts.  Much, much better... feels clean and pleasant again.  I had no idea such a thing could happen with fleece as it sits waiting its turn in my stash.  I'll definitely chalk this up as a learning experience!  I doubt that I could spin a fleece "in the grease" since I found a little stickyness so icky to work with.

Here's a shot of the singles on the spindle and the bobbin that I load the singles onto as they accumulate.  This way I don't end up with a bunch of tiny skeins.

I still have a little more to finish up but I am on the last batt now.  The sparkle of the icicle doesn't really show up on the pictures - most sparkle fibers seem to be pretty camera shy.  I wonder sometimes how people get shots of Angelina that show the multicolor glittery effect.

I made another neat discovery.  There is a virtual knitting/spinning guild of sorts over on the Knit Picks website.  I've just joined up... it should be interesting to see what I find over there.

Until next time....