March Wrap-Up

I don't have much new to discuss since my mid-month check in, but I have some new spinning on both wheels.

Fiber Prep

• Still combing Corriedale, since I am flicking the locks first I end up with really nice/clean combing waste so now I'm starting to save that because I am planning on using it for some batts later on.
• Does dyeing count as fiber prep?  I had approximately 125 g of Shropshire Combed top that I dyed.  

Spinning

Flatiron

• I started the month by playing around and spinning some smaller skeins of yarn from some drum carded batts.  
• Next I spun a braid of Organic Polwarth from Three Waters Farm in the colorway "Dusty Books."  I decided to keep this one a single-ply yarn and I broke the braid up to spin the whole color progression together.
• I am working on a 2-ply fractal with my last braid of Three Waters Farm fiber, this is Falkland in the colorway "Falling in Love."  I am on bobbin #2.

Kiwi 3

• I finished my Stroll roving and ended up with a nice sport weight sock yarn.
• Next I spun Corriedale combed top.  After spinning a finer yarn and also knowing that I would be spinning Corriedale for awhile with the fiber I am prepping, I went for a nice aran/bulky weight skein.
• I finally started properly spinning up the Corriedale I am combing.  I even made a control card for myself!  This will end up being a sweater quantity and I did a little sampling on the Flat Iron, but I was much happier with the results on the Kiwi.  It should be a sport/DK weight when finished.

Knitting 

Finished

• Purse socks (top down, heel flap & gusset, stockinette) from Voolenvine Yarns "Manderlay" on the Footsie base.
• Cottage Garden hat, this was from my Marie Wallin British Breeds yarn from TWT Selection box and was for TWT Colorwork Accessory KAL.

On the Needles

• Newleaf by Jennifer Steingass: both sleeves are done and I've knit about 6" on the body past the sleeve divide.
• Festive Sweater KAL Pullover by Skeindeer Knits:  I am still knitting on the body, about 5" past the sleeve divide.
• Purse/Bus Stop Socks:  I divided the skein in half and cast on both socks, one sock lives in my purse and the other sock lives in a project bag I can easily grab and take with me to the bus stop.  The bus stop sock has been progressing faster, but on these top-down socks I have turned the heel and am knitting the foot of both socks now.  

March Mid-Month Check In

Spinning

On the Kiwi

• I am working on Teeswater combed top (UK source).  I am intending to spin a 2-ply to use as warp for a scarf or cowl.

On the Flatiron

• Today I took some time to do some sampling with the Corriedale I am combing.  I haven't landed on anything that feels right yet.  If I spin in double drive it gets too fine.  If I put it in scotch tension I am finding the treadling a little heavy and I don't see that being sustainable for a sweater spin.  Long story short- I think I am going back to the original plan of spinning that wool on the Kiwi.  I'm not sure what I will spin next on the Flatiron. 

Knitting

Sweaters

• Newleaf: I finished the left sleeve last weekend and am about a third the way down the right sleeve.  I want to finish this soon so I can go back to working on the body and be done with the handspun yarn that I used as the contrast color.
• Festive Sweater:  I am still picking this here and there because it is on the body and is just inches of stockinette in the round.  I am still in no hurry to complete this but I feel good knowing I am continuing slow progress on it.  I have about 5 inches or so under the sleeves done.

Socks

•  I cast on a new pair of purse socks!  Actually, what I did was divided the skein in half and cast on for both socks and one sock is in my purse and the other is in a bag I can easily carry with me to the bus stop etc. because the weather has been warm enough in the afternoons that I can knit while waiting for the bus without my fingers freezing.  

Fiber Prep

• I'm trying to work on the Corriedale more frequently now.  I've been using the lock pop to open the locks and then loading up the comb.  I am really liking this method for a couple reasons.  First, it gets a lot of the trash (vm, dirt, second cuts) out before it even gets to the combs.  This means that my combing waste is nice enough I can use it for carding.  Second, these locks are really dense.  It is easy to overload the comb with them because they end up fluffing up so much.  When I open them up on the lock pop first I don't have that problem.  All this means I can make fewer passes with the combs which my arms really appreciate.

Palette Cleansers and Play

Sometimes I like to spin yarn with no particular purpose.  I don't mean "here is a beautiful braid I am going to spin into yarn, but I don't have a project planned yet."  I mean that I take bits and bobs and combine them in ways that feed my creativity and then I just spin it up.  Usually I haven't done a lot of fiber, maybe 20-40 grams, so the resulting skein of yarn is low yardage. 

I tend to turn to these especially after completing bigger projects.  When I've been doing something very intentionally it is so freeing to just do whatever I feel like.  The smaller quantities are nice too because it is just enough to give me something different, something to play with, and then I can go on to the next thing.

As I finished up my big sweater spin I was needing exactly that sort of thing.  I had a few blending board rolags hanging around from a few months ago that became one skein, but this time most of my blending was done with my drum carder.  

I don't think I've talked about my drum carder here.  I have a Louet Jr. that I bought second (well, actually at least third) hand from one of my friends in my fiber guild when she needed to get a carder with a crank on the opposite side.  It has a narrow carding cloth advertised as "roving sized" at about 3.5" across.  I can get about 1-2 oz on there because despite the narrow width, the teeth are long and can hold a lot of fiber and texture.  I am not sure if it is a 72 tpi or a 46 tpi, Louet makes both, but comparing the cloth to my 72 tpi blending board and hand cards I think it is 46 tpi.  

Most of the time when I do things like this I don't bother documenting the process or measuring out the batts I make and what I put in them so I don't have much for that.  Except I did take a picture last time I was playing around.

The batts above were inspired by some Trish from Fiber Love Diary made a few weeks ago and showed on a live stream.  I don't remember exactly what hers looked like, but I made these with what I had on hand.  These batts were on the bigger side, about 45 g each so when I spun them up I ended up with basically a full skein of yarn.  I just did really basic measurements on the skein, but it came in about 90 g and 115 yards and I would say it is an Aran weight.  

I have four other mini skeins I've done this month too.  The first one is the green one.  These were blending board rolags I made as a warm-up for the big sweater spin.  Not only was I reacquainting myself with the blending board I was also trying to figure out the best way to spin these rolags on my Flatiron.  It is somewhat amazing the little skein turned out as well as it did.

My other three little skeins are all somewhat related and all a little experimental.  

The one that is mostly white with sari silk in was blending from the good quality/clean combing waste of the Corriedale I am trying to process.  I've had this idea of blending in sari silk with a clean fleece to get a kind of speckled tweedy effect that I think could look really great in a sweater.  I will want to swatch this up but I do like the resulting yarn.

My other little experiment was to play with optical blending and create an intentionally "muddy" yarn.  I took a bunch of the smaller quantity bits and bobs out of my bag of mill ends and just put them through the drum carder multiple times.  I created a few batts with this method.  It went from super ugly and colors that I would normally NEVER put together to something that was muted and nuanced and really kind of interesting.  I don't know that I would do a large quantity like this but I am excited to know that it is possible to create things I like out of stuff I might otherwise not know how to use.

My last little experiment was a combo of the previous two.  I took some sections of both the Corriedale sari silk batt and the mill end mixed batts and blended them together.  I wasn't particularly enamored with the results, but when I started spinning it up I felt like it was making a really great singles that could stand alone.  So this last skein ended up being single-ply, which is not something I do very often and in fact, I had not done it at all on my Flatiron.  This little skein gave me the confidence to do a whole braid as a single-ply yarn a few days later (see my post from a few days ago here.)

Yarn, Sock Yarn, and Socks

I am going to do a quick run-down of some of the things I've completed in the last few weeks.

First up is skein of single-ply Polwarth in the colorway Dusty Books from Three Waters Farm.  I wanted to do something intentional with color when spinning this braid and this time I decided to spin a single-ply yarn.  I generally don't do this, but I received the Slow whorl for my Flatiron as a birthday gift, so that gave me a chance to play around using the lower ratios.  

The colors in this braid repeated 3 times, so I broke the braid up and lined up the color so it matched up, and then I spun each color at a time to keep a single progression in the color repeats from one end of the skein to the other.  You can't really see that when it is all wound up in a hank, but it will really shine once I use the yarn.  Right now I am thinking of using it as weft in a scarf.

On my Kiwi I spent all of February slowly spinning up the singles for another sock yarn.  The fiber was Bare Knit Picks Stroll that I dyed.  A few months ago I had spun another braid of the same fiber, but the resulting yarn was on the thick side and the yardage is probably too low to be able to get a pair of socks.  I will definitely be able to get a pair of sock out of this skein.  This is a traditional 3-ply.  It still turned out closer to a sport weight yarn than a fingering weight yarn, but that is ok, those socks knit up faster anyway.  I was really pleased with the hand of this yarn.  I often end up with too much twist in my 3-ply yarns and they can be a little bit hard or wiry.  This has sufficient twist for sock yarn but is still reasonably soft.

Finally, after about six months, my "purse socks" are finished!  I had several opportunities to knit on them last week and was close enough to the end that I was determined to pull them out here at home and finish them off.  The yarn is Voolenvine Footsie in the colorway Manderlay.    

We are getting into the seasons where I generally have more time for sock knitting again so I hope that the next pair will be finished must faster.

One more full skein is off my Kiwi already.  This is a skein of undyed Corriedale 2-ply bulky weight.  The fiber was part of a breed study that I am nearly done with (9 months after the program finished!) but I did some samples at different ratios on my Kiwi and tried chain plying it to see if a 3-ply would be nice.  I ended up spinning it in my most default way on my Kiwi.  I used the 7.5:1 ration (the middle groove on the standard whorl) and spun it short backward draft and kept the singles somewhat thick. It poofed up a lot in washing though!  I expected more or a heavy worsted/aran and it is definitely bulky.  It is really lovely though.  I might end up dyeing it, I don't know.

Cottage Garden Hat

This past weekend I finished my first project knitted with yarn from my Selection Box from The Woolly Thistle.  This hat was also for their colorwork accessory knit-a-long.  

I used my Marie Wallin British Breeds yarn.  I received the colors raw (natural), quince (straw/gold), thistle (light purple), and mulberry (deep purple).  Each of these balls is 25 g and approximately 93 yards so I knew from the beginning that I would want to combine them into either mitts or a hat. 

Most colorwork hat patterns call for a 50g ball of the MC, but I found Cottage Garden (by Jennifer Donze) in the book Milarrochy Heids and thought it would make a great match AND it called for a 25 g ball of each color.  In my head I was thinking that all those fingering/sport weight yarns meant for stranded colorwork are pretty similar but I should have taken a closer look at the yardage.  The yarn in the pattern has about 15-20 yards more per 25 g.  

As it turns out, after the second row of the flower motif I figured if I skipped the third one and went straight to the decrease section I would end up with a hat a length I was happy with.  I prefer a hat that fits closer rather than the slouchy styling that has been popular lately.  It was a good thing I made the choice to shorten the pattern.  I finished off the last stitch using the MC with about an inch of yarn left.  Talk about winning yarn chicken!  I did have a backup plan- I had some leftover Finull that was pretty close in color and could have worked, but I am happy that I made it work without needing to substitute.