Hard Left!

I'm taking a spinning class!

I'm lucky enough to live near a community center that has a big fiber-arts room, complete with spinning wheels, spindles, and looms of all descriptions. They offer weaving, spinning, and dyeing classes at very reasonable rates.

Now, I'm not really looking for a new hobby, but I would like to learn more about how yarn is made...including where it comes from and all the steps involved in producing it. It certainly is not my goal to "never buy commercially produced yarn", but I'm thinking it could be fun to do-it-myself once in a while. One thing is already pretty clear though: spinning your own yarn is NOT a way to get it cheaper!

So...

I've had 2 lessons so far, and have taken home a "loaner" spinning wheel:

[Louet Julia spinning wheel]

I'm not too interested in learning how to spin on this machine, for some reason the "low-tech" option of hand-spindling appeals more. For starters, spinning wheels are incredibly expensive - the cheapest I've been able to see online is about $300. The one I've got on loan is closer to $500, and if you want something that folds up so you can take it on the bus, then you're going to be shelling out $700. Yikes. This is waaaaay beyond my budget. And learning enough about these things to venture into the second-hand or antiques market is out of scope for me...

So I'm sticking to sticks:

[top to bottom: Tibetan supported spindle, Russian supported spindle, 2 top-whorl drop spindles]

I've amassed a few spindles: drop spindles (sticks with a hook and a whorl at the top) and a couple of supported spindles. These things are much cheaper - the drop spindles are fairly commonly available - I've seen them at some LYS's - and will run you ~$30 each. The supported spindles are harder to come by, but I got mine online, custom made, for a similar price. There are some truly beautiful pieces to be had on etsy...

Spinning isn't very complicated...especially if you do it on a spindle, the process is pretty straightforward. Grab some fluff, pull it out into a thin rope, add twist with either a wheel or spindle, and wind it up. The advantage of the wheel is that the twisting and winding are done in one step. In spindling, you do it in two steps. For newbies like me, it's nice to break it down into separate steps because I can fix my mistakes.

The trick, of course, is consistency. My first week of spinning consisted of producing a lot of what can best be euphemistically described as art yarn:

[art yarn!]

Learning to pull a consistent amout of fluff out, while operating the spinning wheel or the spindle, is not so easy. I can consistently produce blobby stuff that's overtwisted in parts and undertwisted in others!

[overtwisted thin parts, undertwisted thick blobs]

This kind of yarn is really hard to knit. Looks nice on the skein but I find it hard to use effectively in knitting without ending up with "clown barf". Maybe it would look better woven? No...don't get me started on yet another hobby!!

Anyways, after a week of concentrated spindling, I'm getting a bit more consistent:

[spindled, double-ply yarn...]

...and my couch and pants are coverted in hair!

My goal is to be able to make fingering-weight yarn that's consistent enough for a decent pair of mittens or something. The above isn't quite there...but I do see already that the plied yarn I make seems a lot stronger than commercial yarn. I can't break it easily. I suppose this is a good thing.

I've tried (and hence learned about) a couple of different methods of fluff-prep: carded batt and combed roving (or roping). I find the latter much easier to spin with as it's already in "linear form". Making it by hand is quite involved though, as I've been able to learn from the InterWebz. Wondering about how this is done, both commercially and by hand, has led to me wonder where, locally, people with fluff-producing animals, get their fluff prepped...and I've found a couple of places that run basically antique equipment...Birkeland Brothers up the valley here in Abbotsford, and the Custom Woolen Mills near Calgary, AB. These fascinate me - there is so much social history here! A lot of the industrial revolution was focused around mechanizing textile production - and if you've tried spinning you'll know why!! Since my working life revolves around similar industrial processes (paper mills) I'm fascinated by the fiber equivalent. Keeping a machine like this in operation is no easy task, and making money while doing it is even harder. 

I've also tried a bunch of different sheep types: merino, corriedale, and shetland. The corriedale is nice - soft and pretty easy to spin. The merino is a little harder to spin (I think it's a shorter hair) but is even softer. Kind of like the white bread of fiber. The shetland is easy to spin - nice long hairs - but very sheddy and rather rough. I like the colours, but this is outwear-only fiber. Call it the brown bread of fiber.

[spindled shetland]

[yeah, it's underplied.]

Learning about different sheep types is interesting, too. Makes one think about what kind of breeds go into our woolen clothing (and our current fixation on "merino"...), and also where the sheep actually live. Are there even any sheep in BC that are used for fiber? I know of lots of alpacas and llamas in the Cowichan Valley and on the gulf islands...

Makes me want to start a 100-mile-diet for fiber goods...

**update** just found another small fiber-processor : the Gulf Island's Spinning Mill. Looks to be a co-operative which processes local fibers (and has a small, modern setup).

The Swatching Game Continues

Back to that cardigan I've been slowly working on...

So I finished off one sleeve, blocked it and had Younger Son try it on for fit and approval, before starting on the second one. Just for your amazement, here's a photo comparing the two sleeves. Check out what happens to this yarn when you block it!

[ top: blocked; bottom: unblocked sleeve]

So this makes me kinda nervous about starting the body. But heck, here we go.

I measured the top of the sleeve (70 sts) to establish the blocked gauge, and then figured out how many sts to cast on for the body. The pattern has a 10+6 st repeat, and I will add 1 purl stitch to each side plus a 5-st steek for the middle (I'm making a cardigan). So I figure 181 sts for the body (176 + 5 st steek). Then I will cast on about 10% less to give a snug band. 

Done.

I've worked about 2.5" of 2x2 ribbing (same as for the sleeves) and, with smoke coming out of my ears,  have managed to get the design centered as desired while increasing the required 10% to get me to 181 sts total. Whew!

I will knit about 6" of the sweater, and then I'll take it off the needle and block it, just to make double-triple-quadruple sure that the gauge is where I want it. While I'm knitting, I will add an extra row or so every pattern repeat, just along the back of the sweater, the way EZ recommends. The way other sweaters hang on Young Son's skinny body, I figure I need the back about 1" longer than the front.

The yarn I'm using is Beaverslide 90% merino/10% mohair. This yarn has lovely earthy colours and a good price (1/2 the price of, for example, Brooklyn Tweed's stuff!), but I find it rather hard to deal with. For starters, the gauge thing has me very nervous, and then the yarn has lots of knots (6-7 per skein, typically only in one of the two plies), lots of straw ("vegetable matter" - OK, it's homey stuff and from sheep, so this doesn't bug me too much), very low elasticity (tiring to knit; this is actually a problem because I get very sore hands from it) and is not tightly plied, so the two plies tend to split easily - and this makes twisted-stitch patterns like this one a royal pain.

I've got two other projects in the stash from Beaverslide: a pair of socks (2-ply sport weight) and a thick sweater (3-ply "fishermans" yarn)...I think I will wash the skeins before I knit with them....see if that helps with the gauging issues...but gotta finish this one first!

Stripes, Heels and Toes

I've been knitting with a lot of self-striping yarns lately, exploring different design options - I must say I'm not overly fond of letting the yarn do all the work; I get too bored! But in any case, there's always thinking to be done at the heels and toes when using self-striping yarns (or indeed, when making any kind of striped sock). The thinking is required because the stripes in self-striping yarn are affected by:
1. changing the number of stitches you are knitting (ie. increases or decreases), and
2. knitting back-and-forth rather than in the round

Of course, toes and heels are where these two things happen, so you are guaranteed to "destroy" the stripe pattern when using self-striping yarns, at these places.

The easiest design solution is to make the heel and toe out of some plain yarn - either contrasting or co-ordinating. Then you can put in whatever heel you please because it won't interfere with your striped pattern. The photo below shows a flap heel done in one colour (green/camo); I continued in that colour for a couple of rows before the heel to make the same stripe go around the front of the sock).

[striped sock with flap heel in solid colour]

If that's not what you want, here are some ideas:

At the toe, the stripes will naturally get wider, because you are knitting over progressively shorter rows. This can be prevented (ie. make the stripes the same size as on the rest of the sock) by cutting your self-striping yarn and "skipping ahead" to the next colour change, as required. Lots of ends to finish when you're done!

 For the heel, I think the best solution is a "forethought" heel. To make it fit better, don't use little gussets; instead, increase the number of stitches on your heel side by 20% or so evenly on the first row you knit of the heel (if your total number of stitches is divisible by 4, this is easy: k2, [m1 k4] until the last 2 sts, k2). This makes it easier to control the stripe width. You can control the width of the stripes on the heel the same way as you did for the toe, above. The result will look something like below, with a kind of bull's-eye at the heel; the stripes will line up all 'round the heel. (The sock in the photo was made with 2 balls of yarn of different colours, so not really self-striping, and I did use gussets on the forethought heel. But you get the idea.)

[forethought heel with gussets - nice bull's-eye heels]

Heels that really play with the self-striping nature are:

• anything with slipped stitches - slipping stitches changes the striping design completely.
  
  
• any short-row heel, including the Sweet Tomato, because you aren't guaranteed the stripes will line up:

[short-row heel with self-striping yarn -
note stripes do not line up around heel]

• any flap-style heel (which involves back-and-forth knitting) - this includes the Fleegle/Strong - this will insert an area of different striping at the heel. Additionally, because of the gussets usually involved, the rows leading up to the heel get longer, and this will also change the width of the stripes. What you get will depend on the "rhythm" of your self-striping yarn, and is hard to predict. With "busier" yarns it isn't so noticeable, while with simpler stripes it can be quite obvious. You can "fix" this by doing surgery on your yarn to pick out the colours you want.

[flap heel on self-striping socks -

 note flaps have wider stripes due to decreased width of knitting]

[Fleegle/Strong heel on self-striping socks -

while the stripes continue across the gussets, note the small blue triangle

at the base of the heel, due to back-and-forth knitting]

You can always play around with this by putting in a lifeline before you start your heel, so if you don't like the result, frogging it is easy.