A milestone of sorts

What is this, you say? It's a heap of skeins of singles yarn, each skein marked with its yardage and weight. Why? Well, it's a long story ....

I haven't been spinning regularly for quite some time. Last fall I got all fired up about spinning again, and decided that the best way to get back in practice was to tackle some large, but not too large project, and just spin, spin, spin. I had some concerns about my consistency, though, especially since I was out of practice. So I decided to spin all the yarns as singles. Next I will sort the skeins by grist and ply the thickest with the thinnest, the next thickest with the next thinnest, and so on, in order to end up with a two ply that was reasonably consistent.

The fiber is left over from my early days of spinning, circa 1993 or 4, when I bought enormous amounts of almost anything put in front of me. It's about a pound and a half of a fine wool/kid mohair blend, dyed a truly shocking fuschia. I know from experience that the dye bleeds, plus the fiber is kind of sticky. (The person who produced this blend was still learning.)

I don't like the color any more, and so as I've been spinning I've been trying to decide what to do about that. I think I'm going to dye the yarn as singles, then ply it, in order to minimize streaking in the final yarn. But what color? I'm thinking of brown, maybe a gingerbread sort of color. A very yellow green ought to do the trick, I think. I'm also thinking about using two slightly different colors of green, and about complicated ways to divide the yarn into the two pots (e.g., thickest goes into pot A, next thickest into B, next thickest into A, etc., so that the thickest ply in the two ply isn't always the same green) but I'm not sure all that is necessary.

So I'm not quite sure where I'm going, and I'm not quite sure how I'm getting there, but I'm making some sort of progress on my Road Back to Spinning. I wonder if I could get the dyeing done this afternoon .....

Blast from the past

Just before Christmas my sister-in-law called me to say that she had put on her mittens and her little finger had gone right through! Could I fix them? I said sure.

I made these mittens somewhere around 1996, two moves ago for both of us. I'm almost certain they're made of jumper-weight Shetland, and I think they've held up remarkably well. Kathy says she wears them all winter long. I couldn't find matches for the yarn in my Shetland box, so I mended them with some white Shetland that isn't quite the right color and some gray handspun that is exactly the right color but much harsher. I don't think it will matter, though.

Even though they're looking pretty good for their age, these mittens are reaching the end of their useful life. I mended three fingertip holes (both little fingers, one forefinger), an incipient hole on the outside of each thumb where the yarn had broken but the hole had not yet spread, and a break in the cast-on on one side. I could see lots of other thin spots that could break at any time.

So I promised Kathy another pair for next winter. She wants almost exactly the same thing -- a low-contrast Norwegian style mitten -- although she said the colors could be slightly different. This time I think I'll make them just a tiny bit longer so that the fingertips don't wear out as quickly. Also, a little longer hand would frame the top motif better.

But what yarn shall I use? Last time I picked Shetland because I had lots and lots on hand. I still have lots of that Shetland around (abandoned that sweater plan) but no natural colors. I could spin the yarn (there are five or six or maybe seven Shetland fleeces in the garage) but I'm not sure it would be even enough. Or I could buy something that would be more durable than the Shetland. Ten years is a good run -- but it still was a shock to see all those thin spots. Maybe a Norwegian yarn?

I guess this is the first on the list of 2007 projects. I need to make sure they get finished, too!

More needlefelting

Pretty cool, huh? I'm not sure I can make the dozen or so that I originally planned, though. He took two full evenings to make.

But you know what I need now, right?




More colors!

My dye setup (two big canning kettles) lets me do 14 jars at once. I was too impatient to mix up new dye, so I used what dye stock I had on hand. I also decided to wing it on the weight of the wool & therefore on how much dye & auxiliaries to use -- very seat of the pants. But I'll weigh the amount of wool that fits in one jar so that I can be more accurate in the future. (Based on the amount of rinsing that I am doing this morning, I'm pretty sure that 40 grams of wool per quart jar was a wild over-estimate.)

So I dyed three jars each of turquoise, blue, cherry red and fuschia (white Shetland, white Columbia, gray Corriedale/Churro), two jars of yellow (the two white wools), and one jar of black (the gray wool). I plan on blending lots of colors from these primaries. I'll probably dye some more colors, but not until after Thanksgiving.

Not so Dala, but darling.

Yesterday afternoon Gloria Galasso of Tres Hermanas came to my house to teach a class on needlefelting. It was fun & I think I learned a lot.

Here's the little guy I started in the class. I intended to make a Dala horse; I think I've made a Mexican donkey.