The Yearly Slump - Joy Spinning

 This time of year is always difficult for me, the joy of the holidays is over and Minnesota winters are still dark. The subzero (F) temps arrive with the new year and while I LOVE living in a place with four seasons and appreciate the beauty of winter this is the time of the year when I struggle with the lack of light, the cold, the long wait for spring. This is the time of year when I have a hard time feeling creative and where spinning and mindless knitting are the projects I gravitate towards. 

I always have long term spinning projects going on and currently I am spinning 7 lbs of Corriedale x Romney roving into three ply knitting yarn. I am about halfway through and it's a great, mindless enjoyable spin but is not bringing my any joy when I sit down to it. To brighten my spinning time I have instead been focusing on things which bring a smile to my face when I start spinning. One project is a set of Batts I carded after returning from SOAR21, inspired by the 'Spinner's Palette' class I took with Maggie Casey. I was particularly enamored with the heathered batts I learned to card and  once home I combined much of my 'bits and pieces' bag of small bits of fleece, top, and roving on my drumcarder and carded them into a complex heathered blend. I added hemp to half the batts and left the other just wool and recently pulled out the all wool batts to spin during a weekly zoom happy hour I have with friends. I am spinning it longdraw on spindles to maximize the pleasure and am SO enjoying it. It is just default spinning, but the smoothly carded batts flow through my fingers almost effortlessly and the complex colors are satisfying to watch. I do not have the photography skills to capture the blend of colors, everything is looking very washed out in these photos. 

The other spinning project I am working on is spinning some Montadale fleece I carded into rolags on hand cards and which I am spinning on my antique Norwegian broken table slanty wheel.  Carding the soft fleece lets me spend time appreciating the fiber, and rolling up the rolags on the carder brings a satisfying sense of accomplishment, as does watching the rolags pile up. Spinning on this particular wheel is still a novelty for me, I have only had it since July, and I am still getting to know this sometimes temperamental, but beautiful survivor. I have found that it is well suited to spinning a fine thread and I enjoy seeing the yarn build up on the small beautifully turned bobbins. Spinning a fine yarn from soft fleece is a sensory joy added to by the rattle of the flyer and bobbin and the slight noise from the treadle. 

I have no end use planned for either of these yarns and instead am just taking comfort and joy from the process of turning fiber into yarn and seeing order come out of chaos. The sense of making and creating when I see so much destruction happen around the world is a comfort. Do you have anything you are working on just for the Joy of it?

The Unsized Warp Experiment

 It is no secret that I love bast fiber, spinning it and teaching about it. Something about the sturdy practicality of the resulting cloth appeals to me and I aspire to surrounding myself with handspun and handwoven linen and hemp household textiles and clothing. Every time I have woven with bast fiber I have sized the warp, per all advice i have been told or read and I have passed this on to students. I prefer, however, to speak from experience and so determined that I would attempt to weave a piece with handspun linen with no sizing, just to see what would happen and the pitfalls, problems, and frustrations that would occur. 

I have been excited by the 'Berta's Flax' project originating in Austria and flowing across the world via the Facebook Group and ordered several kilos of fine  pre 1950s line flax, grown and processed on farms in rural Austria and when I received them, of higher quality than I had been able to acquire before. To make room for this I spun up the line flax I had acquired prior to this, of varying quality and sources, experimenting with various ways of dressing my distaves. This led to a collection of yarn that was widely variable in quality and grist and I used this for my unsized experiment. 

I created a 7 yard warp 20 inches wide sett at 30 epi and dressed my loom. I sett it more loosely than I normally would as I expected a lot of sticking from hairiness raised by the abrasion of weaving unsized yarn.  I use a newcomb studio loom , which has a sectional beam dress the loom back to front, it has metal wire heddles (with a few flat steel ones as well) and a 12 dent reed. I wove plainweave. The first day of weaving went well, with one snapped warp and no trouble weaving, after about 12 inches of weaving. 

As I continued to weave over the next few days I had 6 or 7 warp ends that consistently broke, and realized a skein I had set aside for weft as being indifferently spun had gotten into the pile I used for warp. I also had very large amounts of lint abrading off the warp accumulating behind the beater. This would occasionally form 'clots' around a group of warps and I needed to manually clear and separate them to get a clear shed. I did not have trouble with individual warp threads sticking to their neighbors apart from the clots of lint, which was a surprise to me. I expected them to stick. 

Weaving was possible though not as pleasurable as i would like. I had to stop to mend a broken warp every foot or two, and had to be 'delicate' in the weaving and pay a great deal of attention to tension every time I advanced the warp. I advanced the warp about every two inches and kept the tension slightly looser than normal and was pleased that other weavers confirmed they too kept linen at a looser tension. 

Once off the loom I mended some errors and then washed the fabric in hot water with detergent in my washing machine on the normal cycle and then put it though the standard cycle of the dryer on hot. A huge amount of lint came off in both processes and the resulting cloth was pleasantly rough but not stiff and has great drape. I ironed it on both sides, but did not press, mangle, or beetle the cloth.

Before wet finishing

After wet finishing

 

I am satisfied with the fabric which I will make into bath towels, it has a drape and hand very similar to commercial linen towels we had and which have worn out. I am looking forward to making them, which I will as soon as I weave some linen tape for hanging. 

What I learned from this is that for a loosely sett handspun flax yarn I CAN weave unsized singles but I don't really want to. It is easier to use sized singles and I can justify taking the time to size my handspun bast yarns before using them as warp. 

New Year Thoughts

 I haven't made New Year's Resolutions for several years, it adds too much pressure to my life I find, and they always get discarded sometime before I plant my spring garden so they add nothing to my life. What I have done for many years is to make some fiber plots and plans for the coming year. I always did this on Ravelry where I spent a lot of time and energy as part of various online communities. With the new user interface causing me migraines and eye pain after even a few minutes of time I deleted my Ravelry profile and have not been back since the change. It was an adjustment for me, but I found that I enjoy the time I spend on zoom or in real life with fiber friends immensely more since losing the fiber communities I was a part of, and with viewing things on instagram and twitter I also get to see the amazing work textile folks are creating. 

What I miss though, is the accountability and clarity that having a public list of annual fiber goals and the discussion that happens around them. In order to have a place I can refer back to I will list out my fiber goals hear and review 2021's accomplishments. 

In 2020 I pushed my boundaries and hand sewed several garments; two shirts and a vest with commercial fabric and one vest with handspun, handwoven fabric.

I spun and wove two tablet woven bands, which was a particular pleasure for me, as in the past I had always failed when attempting to warp and weave anything tablet woven outside of classes where the teacher was available for questions and problem solving. I wove a shawl with singles handspun wool which I had dyed using natural dyes and explored natural dyeing much more extensively than I had in the past, continuing what had started in 2019.

 I also proposed and wrote webposts and articles which were published, furthering the writing goals I have had since attending an arts based highschool for writing. 

Looking forward into 2022 there are several goals i have for the year. 

• Weave handspun linen singles into fabric and make household textiles with it
• Complete a project using Ramie handspun yarn
• Complete a sewn garment using handspun and handwoven fabric
• Continue to write and seek out opportunities to be published and to teach

The biggest goal for the year, however, is to ENJOY MY SPINNING. Everything I do with textiles confirms that at heart I am a spinner. I enjoy weaving most when doing it with my handspun, I love knitting with and spending time with yarn I have spun. Even with the longest slogs of spinning for large projects where I get bored, I still enjoy the actual process of spinning, the tactile feeling of the fiber turning into yarn in my hands, or at the very least the satisfaction of seeing the yarn build up on the bobbin or a pile of skeins get larger. Nothing has brought me more calm in the years of the pandemic and some considerable personal social upheavals than time at my wheel(s) or with my spindle creating yarn and dreaming of what it will be used for. Currently I am loving the time I am spending with my antique super-slanty Norwegian wheel which I picked up at a local antique shop on my birthday for only $60 and dreaming of the warmer weather when I can spin in my favorite spot on the back patio, as pictured here. 

What are your fiber goals or aspirations for 2022?

In which I sample

This winter I have been spinning large amounts of cotton. I spun a pound of sea green cotton sliver from Sally Fox, a gorgeous easy to spin delightful wonderful fiber to spin. After finishing in an alkaline simmer it turned a lovely olive green. As I was spinning it I knew that I wanted to make a summery fabric that would be cool to wear in the warm summer weather of Minnesota. I love the idea of a seersucker style fabric that has some 3d effect and I want to try and get that texture and so I made a warp with stripes of the green cotton and cream tussah silk handspun, I am hoping that when the fabric is wet finished there will be differential shrinkage in the different fibers to make a seersucker style effect. Instead of weaving an entire shirt's worth I wound a warp that is 9.5 inches wide and am weaving three samples, two will be scarfs; one a plainweave (unpictured) and one plain twill. The last bit of the warp I am playing with different twill treadling and will then be able to choose the fabric I like best. 

Cotton Cotton Cotton

 For the past several months I have been spinning cotton almost to the exclusion of anything else, apart from some already agreed upon spinning I did for a friend. It started out as something to do during long work meetings where I had to pay close attention. Keeping my hands occupied keeps my mind from wandering and I started out by spinning some of a large stash of cotton bolls an online friend sent me several years ago, several different colors and variety that had been grown in her garden. I spun singles on a takhli spindle and plyed the resulting singles on a high whorl spindle. 

I begin by hand ginning the cotton and then carding the lint into punis, of a sort. I use cotton carders and then form the rolag around a metal knitting needle, rolling it against the carder surface until the rolag compacts into a puni. I find that I prefer spinning from handcarded punis rather than rolags. 

I also have been spinning large amounts of card sliver from Sally Fox in natural colors using my 

minispinner, long relaxing sessions of spinning while I listened to audio books.

 Once the yarn was plied I skeined it up, on a small one yard niddy noddy for the spindle spun yarn and on a 2 yard skeinwinder for the minispinner spun yarn. Now I could finish the yarn by simmering it in a pot with washing soda and dishsoap, revealing the final colors in the cotton. It is always a fun surprise to see how cotton colors develop with an alkaline simmer. It makes me so happy to see the various shades hanging to dry. 

Some of the cotton is destined for knitting and some is destined for weaving. I will continue to spin cotton until a different fiber becomes my primary focus for a while, knowing that I will return to cotton again sometime in the future. 

Finished sweater vest

I was reminded by a comment that I never posted my September Stashdown sweater. 

Here it is and I wear it often! 

(Fiber) love in the time of Coronavirus

It is a frightening time. We are all being asked to isolate for the good of us all and news headlines are popping up minute by minute with terrifying new updates. Those of us who work with fiber have some fantastic resources at hand and we can use these to combat the stress of the global Covid-19 crisis, fill some of the hours and boredom that might come with the need to practice social distancing and isolate, and give us some pure joy on days when we need it.

One thing I have needed desperately as the news changes and unfolds day to day is comfort knitting which I can pay little attention to, but will be pleasant to hand and relaxing. I chose to begin a new top down raglan sleeve sweater in handspun Corriedale cross yarn. Two ply. This is from a fleece I got last spring from Strawberry Ridge Farm and which I had processed into roving at Rach-Al-Paca fiber mill. It was a complete joy to spin (and i have several lbs of roving left, which is a wonderful thing) and It makes a wonderful yarn to touch. Sturdy yet pleasant against my skin and wonderful to knit with. This has been my go to at night when we watch the news or episodes of Poirot, something to keep my hands occupied and it also lets me enjoy the feel of the yarn.

Sometimes we need to focus, to take our minds off of worry and fear and this is where a project that takes all your attention can be useful. A friend of mine is making a new reed to use when she weaves with her backstrap loom. This takes incredible precision and attention and I admire her skill so much. I am spinning singles for weaving. This makes me pay much closer attention to what I am doing as I want a smooth even yarn and so need to pay extra attention to my drafting. My standard default yarn is mostly spun with much less attention but for weft I want to make sure my yarn is as good as I can make it. This attention grounds me and that helps so much to focus my mind on what I am doing, leaving no thinking space for worry. When I am spinning this yarn I am focused on the fiber source, the drafting, the grist, the feel of the wool as it passes through my hands. It is an active meditation. I am spinning Border Leicester from a fleece I purchased from Kate Larson several years ago. I dyed the fleece with various natural dyes and will use it as singles for warp.

For pure joy I have a plan to dig into my stash and pull out the treasures I have been hoarding like Smaug and his stash of gold. The braids of fiber whose colors make my heart sing, the blends that feel like air against my fingers. Right now I am not sure what I will grab first, it could be the box of silk I have been hoarding,  or the indie braids that are so pretty to look at, or perhaps some of the special camel or cashmere blends I have tucked away. If there ever was a time to break something out that we have been saving 'For that special day' or 'Just in Case' this is it.'

For those of use who are able, this can be the time to support our fiber small business and teachers by purchasing that pattern we have looked and looked at, or place an order for that hemp or alpaca or fleece that has always looked intriguing. With festivals being canceled we can use our privilege to both add spice to our fiber life and support those whose livelihoods are so endangered.

September Stashdown

I like alliteration and for September I have a goal to use up some of my stash and make a concerted effort to move some along from raw fiber to prepared fiber, from prepared fiber to yarn, or yarn to finished object.

As August wound down, I found myself looking through bins of yarn and especially drawn to my bin of yarn which holds my natural dye experiments.

I had a great deal of hog island two ply yarn, spun for knitting, which I had been dyeing over the past three years. It was inspiring me to try and make a fair isle vest and so at the end of August I sat down with colored pencils, a book of peerie and border charts, and some graph paper trying to figure out what I could make with the colors I had.

I ended up with this

Once I had the chart, I knitted a gauge swatch and then took that to the Knitters Handy Book of Patterns to plug it into the V neck vest pattern. I have knit this pattern before and enjoy wearing it. Since I am doing fair isle colorwork I want to knit in the round and will just steek the armholes and vee neck rather than knit flat.

I was too excited to wait until September to begin and so cast on immediately. I began August with two repeats of the chart completed and will definitely finish in September.

In the rest of September I plan to spin up some recently dyed Polwarth/Silk roving, spin up the tunis fleece I dyed last month, and get some cotton spun.

Weaving Lessons Learned

I am thrilled to bits that I DID succeed in weaving cloth from my handspun hemp singles. It was a huge goal of mine to weave more than a sample of singles cloth, and I am so glad I did it! I did learn lessons (as always) and learn more about what I like in handwoven handspun cloth. But. I did it!

I wove this at 24 epi in a straight twill. It was easiest for me to do this with my loom as the tie up is done by rods, adjusted by bolts, which have rusted shut. The plainweave treadles do not open a very wide shed and the twill treadles do. I had a very hard time getting a clear shed with plainweave and an easy time with the twill and so I chose twill. Unfortunately, after finishing the fabric I far prefer the plainweave, which my mentor told me I would. I also had troubles with some ends repeatedly breaking. As I wound the warp onto the back beam (I have a sectional beam and so wind on 2 inch wide bouts on the section before threading heddles and then sleying the reed) some threads twisted and I was not as careful as I should have been. Some ends snapped repeatedly as they were pulled against the heddles and the reed. I need to be more careful about how I wind on my warps.
I also learned, I want to replace the tie up rods and the heddles with texsolv, to reduce the noise.

I had planned to make a new bath sheet from this fabric. To sew three panels together. The twill fabric is a bit too thick for my bath sheet preferences though. I will sit on the roll and try and decide what to do with 7 yards of hemp cloth. Some might go into a spindle bag. I am envisioning embroidering in the negative spaces between the stripes.

I loved having a piece on the loom and immediately wound a warp and dressed the loom with handspun Romeldale/CVM for a scarf for this coming winter. I was extremely careful in winding on the warp bouts and it was an absolute joy to weave. I cannot wait to wear it, though I do need to find my fringe twister now.

I also got on a dyeing kick a couple of weeks ago, and dyed polworth silk roving and Border Leicester Fleece with indigo, dyers chamomile, madder, and walnut. (Walnut not pictured). It will be a joy to have this colorful fibre to play with this winter.

Waking up after the winter

This winter was a time for me to hibernate, I did no blogging I know, but I did spin a great deal, and weave. I wove lap blankets for the moms as a christmas present, spun the yarn for a hap on spindles and knit it up, enjoyed carding up my various bits and bobs of roving left over from classes and projects into a fun blend and spun that up, and now I am working on spinning the yarn for a new shirt. I am spinning hemp singles which I plan to weave up, and possible dye in an indigo vat.

Getting Back into the Habit of Blogging

I was just in a conversation with friends, mourning the demise of the blogging community which was so vibrant and active in the late nineties and early two thousands. Hypocritically, of course, as I do not update my own blog. Whilst I do love looking at all the pretty photos on Instagram, I miss the discussions and mini essays that were the glory of the fiber blogging world. I miss seeing the in-depth exploration of a topic or a technique, and also just the better insight into what was going on in my friends' studios.
So. It has been a busy year. Today I am going to discuss my biggest accomplishment.
I finished the cotton cloth, and made a shirt from it:

I learned many things on this project. Biggest of all is the importance of planning rather than estimating. I estimated that I had enough yarn to finish my shirt warp in the pattern I began, however I ran out of the white cotton halfway through. I had a little bit left to spin up and I did that, but I still had over two yards of warp left to weave and no weft to weave it with. In order to finish I started using whatever cotton sliver I had to hand to spin up, and ended up making several different patterns as I finished the warp, green and brown stripes, tan stripes, brown stripes. I ended up with enough cloth to make the shirt but not enough to be able to make it according to my initial plan.

I chose, after much coaching and encouragement from weaving friends, to look on this as serendipity and embrace the different patterns to put them together into one shirt.

This was my first time making a garment. I sat on the cloth, paralyzed by indecision and intimidated by the process of dealing with sizing up the pattern. I needed to add several inches to the width of the garment. Luckilly I had a friend staying with me while he taught locally and he walked me through the process and helped me make a muslin to check the fit of the adjusted pattern piece. Once that was done I spent the better part of a day laying out the pattern pieces on the cloth and trying to decide what the most attractive arrangement of the various cloth patterns would be. In the end I am very pleased and I feel that the shirt is better for having the mix of patterns than for being all in tattersall like I had initially planned. My mistake turned into serendipity.

Sewing the shirt together went quickly and I, as you can tell, and super pleased with the result. It had been my goal since I was eight or nine to make a shirt from scratch--all the way from spinning the yarn through weaving through sewing it. It was a lot of work, all together I spent more than 150 hours on it, but it was completely worth it and I am already planning a series of handspun, handwoven shirts and other garments to make.

The biggest thing about this shirt is that it would not have been made without the encouragement, the cheerleading, the teaching, the hand holding, the explanations, the suggestions and the consolation of my friends in the fiber community. In the end, not only do I have a garment that I love to wear because of my own accomplishment, it also feels like I am wrapping myself in the whole group of friends and teachers that have been so instrumental in my fiber journey.

Slogging Along

I began the year with a new project; to spin, weave, and sew a shirt from cotton to wear at Convergence 2018. Ambitious, but achievable, this is going to push me out of comfort zones, and allow me to finally accomplish a lifelong dream of making a shirt from scratch.
I am spinning Sally Fox's naturally colored cotton in green and brown and white. I purchased a pound of each from her years ago before I realized quite how much a lb of cotton will spin up.

As you can see, gorgeous colors of cotton and they will end up woven into a Tattersall plaid of  narrow lines of brown and green on white. I am excited for this. I have the pattern (my friend Sara recommended it).

 It is so much fun to spin and dream and think of the fabric I will be making and the next one and the next one. This fun, however, does not stick around and now I am at the point where the spinning is a slog. I still have about 2500 yards left to spin (of two ply) to reach the 8000 yards estimate I will need. The problem is, I am tired of spinning cotton and I am tired of spinning for this project. I know I will LOVE making and wearing a garment from scratch. I know the weaving will be fun because I always love seeing cloth build up on the loom. I know I am improving my cotton spinning, and spinning in general, because of the the time I am putting into this. All of those things are wonderful, but in the end, it has become work, a chore, a slog, to get through the spinning.

I think this is a good thing, however. Sometimes working through a project is not always fun, but putting in the time and the effort and pushing through when it gets difficult is what makes a project valuable. It will take me at least 100 hours to spin and ply the yarn for this shirt, and that surprised me. Even though, intellectually, I knew that it takes a great deal of time to make a garment I was surprised by what it FEELS like to put in that time. It makes me think of our ancestors who, until that last three centuries or so, would have had to make everything from cloth that was handspun. What a tremendous amount of time and effort went into every scrap of cloth and no wonder it was valuable, stored and displayed as wealth, carefully mended and patched and cut down and refitted and recycled and used until literally it fell apart or rotted. It is a valuable reminder to me, in this world of disposable fashion and cheap clothing, to step back and remind myself that while there may not be as many hours of work in a garment, there is still the work of people who are most likely being exploited, the resources that went into processing the fiber and dyeing it and transporting around the world the various parts that make up a garment. Textiles are so easy to take for granted, but the slog reminds me that they take work and resources.

Year end, year beginning.

It was an eventful 2017 and so far an eventful 2018. 

After my fall natural dyeing blitz I wove a scarf which as become my favorite piece of clothing 

I knit Mitts, of handspun naturally dyed wool, but need to knit more as these were both given away.

Had a fantastic trip to Germany where I got to see my great Aunt who taught me to knit socks.

And ended the year with a Flax spinning marathon (I love spinning flax!) 

2018 is not off to the GREATEST start as I wanted to weave with my linen singles, but did not size them enough.

Ending with a sad instance of Scissors on warp.

 I will try to rescue this warp, but in the meantime have been enjoying Luxury, spinning Abstract Fiber Yak/Silk in Alfalfa and another green on my matchless.

Spinzilla!

I spin for team Spin Off this year and totalled 3660 yards by spinzilla calculations!

Color from nature!

This summer and fall I have been exploring natural dyes (as opposed to 'real dyes' as a dear friend calls commercial dyes) and i have been having the time of my life! All sort  of yarn and wool dyed with walnuts, natural indigo powder, japanese indigo from my garden, lichen, goldenrod, and buckthorn. I am so excited to use all of this and my first priority is spinning up some of the fleece for Spinzilla.
Indigo powder and lichen :

Local dyes from my garden and surroundings: