march handspun
April 5, 2011
That I completely forgot to show you even though it was all spun up and plied early on in the month.
Eight ounces of merino from Dyed in the Wool Handmade in one big luscious skein. It makes me think of baby chickens hatching out of Easter eggs in old television commercials, and even though I don’t like any of those things (chicken, eggs, Easter, television) I’m totally in love with this yarn. I haven’t checked the yardage yet but I have a little project in mind. . .
Okay, baby chickens are all right, I guess. Kind of cute. I mean I don’t like them to EAT.
Posted by jodi on April 5, 2011 at 4.10pm
february handspun
March 2, 2011
I don’t know if this will become a thing, this having a new finished handspun yarn to show each month, but at least until La Liga‘s season ends I’m spending a few hours a week spinning upstairs in front of the television while watching football. Lemmy and I spin through all of FC Barcelona’s matches and the occasional Real Madrid match as well (although, when we watch Real Madrid, we’re always rooting for the opposite team).
Full disclosure: February’s handspun isn’t actually done done. BUT! It was actually started in January, and it’s a sweater’s worth, and there’s only 1.5 more bobbins of plying left to go and a Barca match from this afternoon waiting on the DVR, which we are going to watch tonight. While spinning. So by the end of the evening we’ll be close enough to call it, I think. A SWEATER’S WORTH, SERIOUSLY.
February’s handspun started with the top three of these fibres:
Top: black and white mixed Brown Sheep mill ends from Sheep Shed Studio.
Middle: blue wool roving I got ages and ages ago from Jacey at Insubordiknit. I don’t remember what kind of fibre this was, just that it’s cruelty-free and lovely to spin and beautifully dyed and I wish I’d bought a whole lot more of it.
Bottom (not the very bottom, just the bottom of the top three. Got it?): more Brown Sheep wool roving from Sheep Shed; this gray roving was given to me by a grad school chum as barter for spinning thread which she used to construct her thesis work. Which I would show you if I could find a picture of it anywhere on the internet. Maybe later. Anyway: spinning for fibre? I need to find more trades like that.
So I mixed those three fibres together in hopes of coming up with something subtle yet interesting with flecks of blue throughout, without a hope of having enough for a sweater but self deluded enough to try anyway. Starting out, the plan was to spin up all of the singles, numbering the bobbins as I went, then ply together bobbins from the beginning with bobbins from the end by a clever and complex system not-yet-devised so as to even out any changes in yarn weight over the course of the singles spinning. But halfway through I realized that the lovely blue wool from Jacey was pretty much disappearing into a homogenized gray. So was the black. A little panicked plying test yielded this sad little bundle:
Ugh. UGH. Want to know what I’m using this yarn for now? Bobbin leaders. That’s how dead this colour is.
So! Not to worry. There’s lots more of that Brown Sheep roving up in the attic, left over from my graduate school fibre binge. Remember that blue stuff I dyed a while ago? Here’s what it looks like mixed with the gray, in singles (on the right; gray singles on the left):
The two plied together: much better!
I also did some of the blue all on its own, enough for a colourwork yoke.
So! My predictions for tonight: Barca will win (the match is over already, NO SPOILERS!), and Lemmy will spin, and February’s handspun will be all done but for the washing. Now, what shall we spin in March?
Posted by jodi on March 2, 2011 at 5.36pm
january handspun
January 20, 2011
Up in the attic there are two LARGE boxes of spinning fibre, all bought while I was in graduate school in the States and could order stuff online with my bank card (!) and not have to pay cross-border shipping and, of course, when I didn’t actually own a spinning wheel (oops). Now that I do have a wheel, I’m trying to get the lot of it spun up and knit into publishable designs so that I can justify buying a whole lot more.
This month’s finished handspun comes to you courtesy of FC Barcelona, during whose matches Lemmy and I spin upstairs in the tee vee room, and courtesy of the Letter X for xmas holiday which allowed me to get a bit of spinning in while the family was here, because it was vacation time anyway (there’s some internal guilt going on here about time spent spinning rather than doing other work related things). Ahem.
January’s yarn is a blend of five fibres:
Bottom: green merino roving purchased from Shepherd’s Corner at SAFF thanks to the champion enabling of one Little Miss Drama Pants
Middle: merino/alpaca blend, also bought at SAFF and split with LMDP (proving I can enable right back)
Top: Brown Sheep wool roving (colour: oregano) from Sheep Shed Studio.
The resulting singles looked like this:
The second set of singles were made up of the same three fibres plus two more:
Bottom: more Brown Sheep wool roving, in brown
Top: something (merino?) given to me by Hockey Mom, dyed yellow by her
The resulting singles looked like this:
All plied together they became this, 961 metres of 12wpi two-ply. A lovely olive green range with bits of yellow throughout. The yellow is definitely what makes this yarn shine. This should yield a decent sized project, eh?
Posted by jodi on January 20, 2011 at 10.57am
blue
January 13, 2011
The finished product of a little comedy of errors the other day. The first dyebath I mixed up (a combination of what I thought was two deep blues) turned out to be a dark grayish purple so awful that I dumped it out five minutes after the roving went in, hoping the dye wouldn’t take too much. I then grabbed the first dye-like thing I could find, which turned out to be several packages of various green flavours of Kool-aid, mixed up a bath and tossed the now pale grayish lavender roving in, only to realize immediately that this was going to yield an uglier form of grayish something. So I quickly dumped that bath as well and, in desperation, overdyed the lot of it with a fiercely bright turquoise. Which turned out a roving of the loveliest blue, much lovelier than it looks in that sad, indoors-in-winter photograph above. It’s a tad fulled after all that bouncing around, but with a little extra love it seems to be drafting and spinning up just fine.
PRO TIP: if you accidentally forget to wear gloves and dye your hands purple, it’s not a good idea to attempt to wash the dye off using that powdered soap that goes in the dishwasher. All this will do is show you, painfully, just where all of your cuts and hangnails are. And, also? You don’t really need the harsh, bleachey soap to help you find those cuts and hangnails because THEY WILL ALREADY BE DYED PURPLE.
Posted by jodi on January 13, 2011 at 7.18pm
something pretty i made last month
November 7, 2010
110 grams of Shetland wool, a two-ply, 14 wraps per inch. From Dyed in the Wool Handmade (colourway: Fall Guy).
Posted by jodi on November 7, 2010 at 9.52am
in which i think i might be getting better at this
October 3, 2010
Fibre: Blue-faced Leicester
Source: Spunky Eclectic
Colourway: Cockstand
Yield: 170 metres of two-ply, 13 wraps per inch
Cleo likes it.
Now to design something that will use it all up.
Posted by jodi on October 3, 2010 at 4.51pm
meet lemmy!
July 9, 2010
She’s smooth. And pretty. And also quite talented.
Because she rocks so hard, she’s named after a rock legend. Plus, the name reminds me of Hammy Hamster. Lemmy Lendrum! Sort of works, right?
Lemmy’s first singles:
From these mixed wool batts from Spritely Goods:
Here they are plied:
I haven’t done a whole lot of spinning and I’m not all that good at it. I don’t really understand a lot of the terminology or the different ways to spin stuff or any of that. I don’t know much about planning for what sort of pattern will emerge in the finished yarn spun from handpainted fibre, for instance, and so I mostly just go for it and see what happens (although, in spinning the last yarn pictured down below, I did figure out how to make the blue areas of the yarn bluer and not so much homogenized with the orange, so, go me!). For now, Lemmy and I are just working on curbing our tendency to underspin everything. Once we’ve got a good pile of sturdily overspun yarns, then we’ll worry about the fancy techniques. We can’t try any of the Jacey stuff until September when Lemmy’s jumbo plying head arrives (insert crass joke about orifice size here) (need I tell you how many orifice-size jokes were flying around the Sit and Spin set? Some ladies, not saying whom, never get tired of talking about our orifices. Anyway, currently mine is small but come September it is going to be HUGE. Positively gaping).
Ahem. More two-ply, this one a blend of soy silk and merino:
Here’s what the fibre looked like before.
Better, de-bobbinated pictures of the spinnings later when I figure out where the homemade knitty noddy got to. Something tells me it got left behind in Georgia.
Posted by jodi on July 9, 2010 at 1.21pm
