Tropical Yarn for Winter

These two skeins are both two-ply yarns in a super bulky weight.  I plan to make them into joyous scarves for my shop for next winter. They will be combined with some lace weight yarns in an all-over textural pattern.

My spinning has gotten more even finally--although a lot depends on the fiber content. The multicolored skein was spun from Blue Face Leicester, a long staple fiber that is super easy to draft and spin. The pineapple yellow yarn is baby llama and it was more challenging. The baby llama is ultra soft and kept pulling apart on me as I was drafting it.

First Art Batt

In the world of spinning, a batt is wadded blanket or sheet of fiber that has been prepared on a drum carder.  You can see photos of the process at the Joy of Hand Spinning. The last of the three photos on their webpage shows a solid-colored batt being lifted from the drum carder.

While some batts are composed of solid-colored fiber, others have multiple colors blended together. The wildest of the multiple colored batts are referred to as art batts. I just bought my first one.

It had tons of wonderful colors, with a preponderance of lavender and turquoise. There were lovely textural nubs of wool, pieces of metallic, and other lovely bits to wind up in the yarn. My spinning process was more loosey-goosey than normal because I wanted a wild thick and thin ply.

Here are some other little bits that got spun into the art batt fiber: pieces of lace, tattered hunks of rayon fabric, strands of handspun yarn leftover from other projects, eyelash yarn, and more. The color tone of this batch of extras was most deep blues and royal purple.

Because I wanted to end up with a little more yarn than the batt would provide another ply of mostly a solid media aqua Merino was spun. This one was done with more evenness and about 10% of the original batt was held back to combine here and there.

The result was a fun skein of one-of-a-kind yarn:

Next post, I'll show you what I made of it.

Fall Finished Goods & Last Chance for the Giveaway!

If you have not entered the drawing for the giveaway of two knit wraps, be sure to enter today before 9 p.m. PST (midnight on the East Coast.) I'll draw names and post a winner tomorrow.

You were promised some photos of the finished items from the last post, and here they are:

These bangles are the first batch of Autumn ones to come off my crochet hook. Fall colors are my favorites because they are intense and sensual. Can't wait to make more!

One can not rave enough about baby llama roving! It is way softer than a baby's butt. Most spinners would probably spin this up thinner, but I really wanted a super bulky yarn from it. The finished yarn is about 6 wraps per inch with only 85 yards from 7 ounces of  fiber. Although you cannot tell from the photo, it's thick and ropey--but unbelievably soft. It is destined to be paired with a lace weight yarn (yep, you heard right) in a luxurious winter scarf.

And finally, the Sangria Chevron Scarf:

If Missoni worked with bulky yarn, would they create something like this? I am not sure, but this scarf was inspired by them. It has eleven different yarns, six of which are my own bulky hand-spun color-twist yarns and five are solid-colored bulky commercial yarns. It's wildly bohemian, but super warm and cozy. 

Valerie just got back from her summer in Europe and had to try this scarf on immediately. There will be some photos of her next week. Boy did she have some adventures!

New Spinner Reading / Yarn Photos

I want all the spinning books on the list from this post from Ask The Bellwether.
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I love making color-twist bulky yarns. Here are some of mine that are destined for hats:

Spinning Goals for Yarn

At the beginning of the year I laid out my spinning goals for the year in this post. The goals were:

1. To be able to spin an even  two-ply yarn equal in dimension (between DK and worsted weight) to a favorite yarn by Mountain Colors, and then to be able to go back to purposely spin a bulky yarn (accomplished!)
2. To learn to spin an even worsted weight single . . .wait for it...
   
   Ta Da!

Meet "Silver-Haired Babe", which is being spun of a scrumptious blend of merino and tussah silk.

This buttery blend practically spins itself. The roving, from Barn to Yarn, was purchased at Designer Yarn in Sandy, Oregon. This yarn store has a wonderful selection of staple, novelty, and discontinued yarns. They also carry lovely roving for spinners. It's a fiber lover's heaven!

Dessert Bloom Yarn

Worsted Weight, 139 yds, 3 1/8 oz (90 g), 12 wpi

This yarn, in shades of raspberry, sage, and scotch, was spun from beautifully prepared Corriedale-cross roving from CJ Copec Creations. It was spun during the Winter Olympics.

Next during the Olympics, I spun two skeins of bulky weight, to be sure I still could. For those of you who do not spin, the typical tendency is for spinners to progressively spin finer and finer yarn while becoming unable to go back to spinning bulkier weights. My interest and goal is to spin between Dk weight and super bulky yarns at will.

Dreamsiscle Yarn

Alpaca/Merino/Silk from hand-painted roving by cjkopeccreations
3 3/4 oz., worsted weight 2-ply, 110 yds

Here is the yarn compared to the super bulky yarn that was spun last summer. Now, the question is whether I could still spin super bulky. Don't know.

Fresh Spun: Lavender and Buttercup

3 5/8 ounces of worsted weight yarn -112 yards
Spun from handpainted roving from oldsheep

Spinning Goals for a New Year

January 1, the first thing I did after returning home from a New Year's Eve dance was to print out my Etsy inventory reports. The second thing was to head to bed. The next day I worked only a little on inventory costing and didn't even think about resolutions.

I'm still working on completing my inventory costing, but working on my bookkeeping always makes me a grouch so I've been playing instead. Playtime has consisted of fiber, my spinning wheel, and my ongoing resolution to spin fiber of a size like the last skein on the right.

In the photo above, the five skeins on the left are mine, and the last skein is River Twist in the Pine Creek colorway from Mountain Colors. You see the yarn in the order that I spun the skeins from left to right.

It is my goal to spin yarn of a consistent size that is the weight of the Mountain Colors yarn. It's between worsted and DK weight and it's beautiful. The Mountain Colors skein has been in my stash for several years and I refuse to use it until I can spin something similar. It is my goal skein. It is idolized and kept in a place of prominence in the studio.



These first two skeins are going to be for items for me. Both are bulky weight 2-ply yarns. The pretty one on the left is 8 ounces of rich red glory somewhere between garnet and rust. It's going to be a scarf. The wonderful 4-ounce skein of multi-colored jewels tones is destined to become a slouchy beret.



These two skeins are thinner. The pretty spring green multi-colored yarn goes from a bulky weight to a DK weight. (Achieving consistency is another goal.) The yummy peachy-orange skein is more consistently spun at a worsted weight. Both of these skeins will be for late winter/early spring scarves for sale on Etsy.

Next up is a yarn from Merino top that spun like butter. Notice that I am getting better at photographing reds.


This yarn is very close to my goal. It's not consistent yet, but it's getting very close. There are 185 yards here from 3.75 ounces of fiber--my thinnest spin yet! It's going to be a special Valentine's scarf for the Etsy shop.

Once this spinning goal is reached, I plan to purposely spin some skeins of bulky weight again so my fingers remember how to do it. The next spinning goal for this year will be to learn how to spin worsted weight singles.

There are no plans in the works to spin thin yarn. There is way too much wonderful sock and lace weight fiber on the market already and I don't have the time nor inclination to make my own.

Here are my first beauties of the yarn year. I love to look at them and pet them.

So Pretty, So Pink

For the last few years I've been attracted like crazy to Autumn colors: deep golds and oranges, magnificent greens and rich reds. Earlier this year I got a bug to work with some blues--that didn't last too long because all of the blue fibers I want for myself and I'm too busy making things for the store. Now, it the pinks that are calling.

I think it was because October was Breast Cancer Awareness Month and there were pink things everywhere, that the pink yarns just started saying "Pick me!"

First I found some lush lovely roving from Woolgatherings in yummy berry colors. I spun it into some bulky 2-ply. I'm going to pair some of it with a sweet eyelash yarn to make a OOAK scarf.

Then I found a lovely mohair sweater in a second hand store. It fit really weird, but the fiber begged to be incorporated into a cowl. I want to pair the fine mohair yarn with a worsted weight or bulky weight yarn for a contrast in textures, but I'm not sure yet if what I see n my head can really be done.




I want the lace to be like a collar on the cowl, but it has no body, so I may be dreaming.




Yesterday I finished this pretty pink neckwarmer that I can finish in two different ways. I think I'll show it on Etsy done like this:




and I'll show another photo with it finished like this:



Which way would you prefer to wear it?

Beginning the Bouclé Beanie

In the last post you saw the sketch of my idea for a beanie with a bouclé brim, and you read about my confessed insanity of creating the crocheted bouclé yarn by hand.

Here's the hat progress so far. This is the crown of the hat before felting, modeled by the lovely Valerie:


After vigorous felting and much dye loss out of this commercial yarn by Malabrigo, the crown looked like this as it dried on the hat block:


After it the crown had dried (and stained the heck out of my lovely hat block) it looked like this on Valerie:


Now I need to do some swatching to decide if I want to crochet or knit the brim and in which stitch pattern.

Making Crocheted Bouclé

Higglety pigglety, this bouclé is bigglety!


The 33 yards of bulky and dense bouclé, shown in the last post, was made of the ingredients that you see in this photo. The curly part is made of 100 yards of a 2-ply handspun wool yarn that I made in the colorway like the yarn on the left, except it was drafted as a thinner yarn than the one in the photo. The binder yarn is a thin wool machine yarn put up on a cone. Some beads were added to the binder yarn just for fun.

Each loop (there are approximately 3½ loops per inch) was stitched in place by my own nimble fingers using a small steel crochet hook and basic crochet stitches.


If you do the math, you'll calculate that there are approximately 4,158 loops handstitched into this fine specimen that took 8-9 hours to create (including the spinning and plying of the original fiber, but not including the time it took to do the process discussed in the following paragraph).

Before the 2-ply yarn was put into a bouclé, it was knitted up as a hat that didn't come up to my standards. That yarn sat all done up as a hat for a month or so before I frogged it. (For those of you who are not knitters, frog is a term for unravelling or ripping apart a knitted item. The term is precise--ha ha!--because a frog says "Rip-it, rip-it!")

Here's a photo of hat undone:


Now, the rational thing to do at this point would have been to put this fiber back in a warm water bath, straightening it when wringing out the excess water, and then drying it with a weight attached to straighten it further. It could then be re-knit into something new.

Why do the rational thing when the crazy thing is so much fun? I saw all the lovely waves in that unravelled yarn and immediately thought, "Hells bells, I could crochet up some bouclé with that stuff!"

Had anyone ever crocheted bouclé before? Was it totally insane? How long would it take?

You can see that I was already obsessed and running down the path to massive time consumption for a hair-brained idea. But, this is what I saw in my head--a better hat with a bouclé brim having the texture of a Berber carpet.


So I sat down and started crocheting the binder yarn around the curly handspun 2-ply.


If you want to try this, go take an old sweater, unravel it, loosely put it on your swift and leave it there while you crochet it into some cool new stuff. Here's what you do: *Work a single crochet (sc) in the top of a little wave, work a chain stitch (ch); repeat from * for each and every little f*ing wave in your yarn. (Have fun with that! Good time to listen to some knitting podcasts or a book on tape.)


Next post I'll show you Bigglety Beanie in process.

Loopy for Bouclé

Bouclé is a french word for curly. With your forbearance in the next few posts, I will take the liberty of using this word as an adjective, a verb, and a noun.

In this manufactured green bouclé yarn sample, you can see evenly-spaced, tidy curls that are plied into the yarn. This yarn is fairly thin and the loops are small. A knitted fabric from it would drape nicely and would also have a uniform curly texture with a short nap.




In this red knitted hat brim, the loops of the bouclé yarn are of a thick and fluffy, loosely-spun roving that was plied around a worsted weight yarn. The result is a soft uneven texture with a fairly tall nap.



In handspinning, a bouclé yarn can be created by loosely plying one strand of fiber around another so that the loose strand forms little circles of fiber that stand out from the other strand which becomes a sort of core yarn. This may not be a good description because I'm no expert (having only tried a bouclé yarn once in a spin class.)

For the same reason (no expertise) I make another disclaimer. Perhaps what I created and am showing you next is not really yarn because the loops are not plied.




Is it yarn? If it wasn't made by plying, how was it created? How big is it? What's it for? You'll find answers to these and other questions in the next post.

Scarf from Cheater Homespun Yarn

In the last post I confessed to creating a two-ply yarn by taking a short-cut: Only one ply was spun by me and the other was a beautiful commercial single-ply sock yarn.

This variegated scarf (un cadeau pour moi) was knit with about half the yarn. The stitch pattern is linen stitch which on the facing side looks like it was woven and on the obverse side looks like seed stitch.




Since my spun single had a short color repeat and the sock single had a long color repeat, a lot of color gradation was created. The linen stitch pattern really helps to blend the colors as well.

One end of the scarf has a more purples and the other end has more reds. Yellows and orange are clustered in the middle. No two projects would ever look alike out of this yarn.



Knitting was fun because it was always a mystery what color sequence was about to emerge.

After the scarf was finished I remembered two of the sample bracelets that I had made for my bead crochet bangle class. They complement the scarf so much that I have decided to keep them for myself to go with the new scarf.

Spinning with Sock Singles

The Sock Summit marketplace was a fiber addict's delight. There must have been nine or ten long aisles of vendors.

I spent half of my budget by the second aisle. (Has this ever happened to you?)

What was in aisle two was a great booth by Wool and Company (They came all the way to Portland from Geneva, Illinois.) They had some spectacular sock yarn! What captured my heart was a lovely sock yarn with a single ply. It's called Poems Sock. I got a skein in the colorway called Tropical Sunset and another in the one called Cruise.

There are two very appealing things about this yarn: the colors are stunning and it is a single ply.

You may remember from this post what my attitude is about knitting wool socks. I don't do it so much. (Besides, I still have so much cotton for socks from the Liz Claiborne sweaters that I recycled.)

What I was thinking, in slacker mode, was this:

Say, that sock single ply is about the diameter of what I've been spinning lately for plying. Hmmm, I have some roving in that colorway.

Hey! I could spin one single and then ply it with this sock yarn and see how it comes out. That way it would only take me half as much time to create a 2-ply yarn!

(OMG, I could even ply from two skeins of sock singles and not do any spinning at all!) Well, that would be dumb--I like spinning!

The Poems Sock in Tropical Sunset is in the center. The roving lying around it is the Autumn colorway from Abstract Fiber in Alpaca/Merino/Silk.

There are 459 yards in the Poems Sock skein (perfectly enough for a pair of socks), but for my purposes there was plenty to ply with my four ounces of roving.

Here's a photo of one of the skeins of yarn that I made:
The roving was split into pencil sized sections lengthwise and then it was spun with short color repeats. The sock yarn has very long color repeats, so this created some great color gradations.

Next post I'll show you the scarf I've been making from it.

New Handspun from Pencil Roving

The loveliest pencil roving that I have seen is from Crown Mountain Farms. It is made from Corriedale sheep, which according to the Crown Mountain website, is a Merino-Lincoln-Leicester crossbreed. It is a nice long fiber which feels springy to the touch.

Corriedale pencil roving is fun for a beginning spinner because it is easy to turn into yarn. You can lightly draft it for a lovely single, a bulky two-ply or a worsted weight yarn. Once you learn to draft a little better, you can easily turn it into sock weight or even lace weight yarn.

I really recommend this roving, not only for its hand but also for the beauty of the hand-dyed colorways that are available. If you are a knitter, but not a spinner, you can knit up the roving itself for a chunky scarf or for a felted bag project. 

A couple weeks ago, I sat down with some of this pencil roving in the colorway called From Dusk to Dawn.  On the right are two skeins of bulky two ply created from 5 oz and on the left is a 3 0z skein spun in worsted weight. 

Notice that the finer you spin the yarn, the more blended the colors become. In a sock weight or lace weight, the color would appear even more solid. 

The next photos are of the colorway called Ghost Dance. The first photo shows some some of the roving that was given to Amelie for her work in the studio. It will really look different after it is spun.

Here's how it looked on the bobbin after Amelie spun and then plied it:

Here are two Ghost Dance skeins after the twist was set and the fiber was dried. It is gorgeous with blues, greys, pink, lavender, cream and more.

The next photo shows the two Ghost Dance skeins next to two skeins which have one ply from the Ghost Dance roving and one ply of a solid-colored lavender from combed Colonial top. Isn't it amazing what the addition of a solid color ply will do?