Category Archives: Spinning

My new toy

Just before I went off to France my birthday present to myself arrived:

After playing with Jill’s drum carders up in Stourbridge earlier in the year, I went to Wonderwool Wales with the mission to look at and try different carders and ask lots of questions. It was lovely to be able to chat to Paul who makes the Classic Carders and ask his opinions. I have gone for a jumbo carder with the fine carding cloth, and have an extra long removable table. It required nearly a day of thinking to decide which combination to go for!

It has that lovely wood smell (all the jumbo carders are made of Ash), and I am really looking forward to having a go with it.

Also talking of spinning things in the run up to the start of this year’s Tour de Fleece (spin along while watching the Tour de France in case you haven’t come across it yet) which starts tomorrow, I have indulged in some lovely dyed fibre which arrived at the weekend.

I have 100g of each and they were from Picperfic, she says she is going through a bright phase, and I for one am definitely enjoying it!

Polwarth:

Coast, 75% superwash merino, 25% seacell. I haven’t spun seacell yet so I am looking forward to this.

Merisil, 75% organic fine merino, 25% mulberry silk.

I think the Coast is going to be socks. The other two I think might be the contrast for a circular yoked jumper, or rather two separate jumpers, perhaps with millspun yarn as the background. I am still thinking on that one.

Yet more socks in progress

Leave a Reply

I have been doing some more knitting with my hand spun. Although I enjoy the process of spinning I am primarily interested in creating yarns that I would like to knit with, so it is handy to knit up a bit of my hand spun and get the feedback. This is the yarn I made a couple of years ago with my first fleece I processed from scratch. I wasn’t terribly good at it (there were quite a few felted bits that I couldn’t use), so I ended up plying it with some super wash blue faced Leicester to make it go a bit further.

I had two fleeces, a white Dorset, which I processed first and did very badly, and a grey dorset cross which I did a little better with. So I ended up with two 3ply yarns, one with a strand of white Dorset, a strand of grey Dorset, and a strand of BFL, and the other with a strand of grey Dorset, and two strands of BFL. I then dyed the whole lot in shades of green.

For these socks I used the yarn with grey Dorset and BFL for the leg, and the yarn with grey and white Dorset and BFL for the foot. My rationale being that the one with more Dorset being coarser would hopefully wear better.

I have finished one sock so far and am on the second. The pattern is Cirque Socks from Knitty. I had a bit of difficulty shortening the pattern for my short wide feet. There are only certain points in the pattern repeat where the toe decreases can start, but then I needed to cast off before I managed very many decreases otherwise they would have been too long. They have ended up looking a little bit like a sock for one of Roald Dahl’s witches 🙂

Java Socks

Leave a Reply

I had so much yarn left over after finishing the Cathedral Socks, that there was at least enough for another pair. I thought I would try a different pattern. This is the Java pattern, also from Knitty, and also using 2.25mm needles. I used about 83g, 324m. There is still about 214m left of this yarn, so probably not enough for another pair of socks, but maybe enough for fingerless mittens or something.

Here is a close up of the pattern on the leg:

They were a really nice pattern to knit. A simple 4 row repeat that was easy to memorise and pleasant to knit. Since I finished these the weather has warmed up so I haven’t worn them yet. I am a little concerned that the toe might be a bit pointy but we shall see.

Mini moebius waistcoat

Leave a Reply

At the end of April Tricia Holman (Elizabeth Zimmermann’s niece) came to the Ash knitting group to do a workshop on Elizabeth’s moebius waistcoat.

Here is Tricia (on the right) wearing her waistcoat, and with some of her other yarns and patterns.

During the day we knitted (or at least started knitting) our own little mini waistcoats.

I used 4mm needles, and some Manx Loaghtan handspun I had left over from my Handspun Leaves Waistcoat, and some red merino handspun for the edging, again another left over from my waistcoat.

It was good fun, and I am keen to make a full sized one at some point, although I think I may need to fiddle with the pattern a bit to get it to fit me. I am not very pleased with the way my icord edging came out. You can see the background colour through it, so I think I need to experiment with other ways of doing the join. Usually I do my icord from the inside, but this pattern with only one surface doesn’t have an inside and outside so both sides of the edging need to look good.

Colour blending in Stourbridge

Leave a Reply

Back in the middle of April I took myself off up to Stourbridge for some woolly fun organised by wrigglefingers (aka Jill). There were a small but select bunch of us, and we all brought what we were working on at the moment, or things we were keen to learn more about. I bent Jill’s ear about drum carding for colour blending, and she was kind enough to let me use her carders and lots of her lovely coloured fibre for two days, and give me lots of helpful info in the use thereof.

As you can see Jill has a fair bit of fibre:

I had a fabulous time playing with it all, and was definitely getting better by the end of the second day, fewer lumps and feeding the fibre in more smoothly. I made 8 little skeins – they are each only abot 10 – 15g.

They are mostly merino, but a couple have silk in, and a couple trilobal nylon sparkle. My favourite is the green 3rd from the right. This is an optical illusion (which I dreamt up at 6am on the second day of the workshop!) and actually contains no green fibre, only yellow and cyan.

I loved it so much that I have ordered a drum carder as a birthday present to myself and am eagerly awaiting its arrival.

The mini skeins are all around 4ply weight, and I am planning on using them as the contrast colour in mittens.

Cathedral Socks

Leave a Reply

Back to a spot more catching up 🙂

In the blog silence I have been doing a bit of knitting as well as being busy generally.

I fnished these socks back at the beginning of April and am now finally sorting out photographs of them.

The yarn is some 70% merino, 30% silk blend from Wingham Wool Works, that I handspun, I think it was last year. The pattern is Cathedral socks from Knitty a few years ago. I used 2.25mm needles and about 92g, 350m ish of my yarn which meant I have plenty left over 🙂

I tinkered with the pattern a little bit, removing some of the internal ribs on the leg pattern:

And I fiddled with the toe pattern to make the cables flow into the stocking stitch:

I love the way the cables continue down the back of the heel:

They fit really well too:

Please excuse the slightly odd photo. This was taken by me standing on the windowsill of a B&B in mid-Wales while we were on holiday. The other half thought my antics were hilarious.

A really nicely thought out pattern which was fun to knit.

Some more alpaca merino

2 Replies

Those of you with long memories may remember that a couple of years ago I bought some lovely 70% alpaca, 30% merino fibre in colour Cappuccino from John Arbon on one of our jaunts to Devon, and spun it up to about a DK weight during last year’s Tour de Fleece. I had intended to knit the Sleeves in Your Pi cardigan / shawl, but when I finished the spinning I realised I was woefully short in the metreage needed. So last November on our latest Devon jaunt I bought some more fibre when we dropped into John and Juliet’s shop and I have finally finished spinning it.

It has come out a bit different to the first lot. I think the second batch of fibre included a darker brown and also the fibres were not as blended together as the first lot. My plan is to use the second batch for the edging of the cardi and hopefully make the most of these differences, as the two yarns are close enough to tone together but different enough to add interest. I have 920m and 531g of the second batch, so I think that should be plenty for pattern. It is a 2ply construction, approximately DK weight, and I used the 10:1 ratio on my Majacraft Suzie Pro.

I am looking forward to casting on!

Wingham sample day

Leave a Reply

Back on the 11th of March I went along to a Wingham Woolwork sampling day near Didcot being organised by the Kennet Valley Guild of Spinners, Weavers, and Dyers. The idea is that you bring your spinning wheel and your lunch, pay £6 entrance fee and then can try out as many of their fibres as you would like during the day. It was great fun!

I find it quite hard to know how the colours are going to change from the fibre, to the yarn, to the knitted piece, so my plan for the day was to spin a little chunk of a variety of their blends of merino, and merino and silk and see how the colours blended together.

Here is the finished tube, with a little bit of the fibre next to the knitted fabric it became:

Some of them were fairly predictable, but others were surprising. The more different colours in a blend the more difficult I found it to predict how it would come out. A very useful exercise, and I am very keen now to have a go with blending more colours myself rather than just buying pre-selected blends. I do love colour!

Of course no day of this kind would be complete without a bit of stash enhancement. I bought two bags of Rainbow Merino fibre, this one is actually two shades of navy although they are quite close together:

And this one is a bit less subtle 🙂

And some Rainbow Merino Silk too:

I bought a bit over 100g of each, the measurement is a bit vague because I was weighing it rather than them. It should hopefully be enough for a pair of socks in each colour. I am looking forward to seeing whether I can make socks that are soft but also will wear reasonably well.

Unravel 2012

4 Replies

This weekend was the annual Unravel festival at the Maltings in Farnham. It is great to have a woolly festival so close to us, and this year there was even more fun stuff to look at.

As in previous years I was helping out with demonstrating and teaching spinning and knitting with the West Surrey Guild of Spinners Weavers and Dyers, and with the Surrey Knitting and Crochet Group. Members of both groups lent a wonderful selection of things they had made for our display table. We had our usual corner of the Cellar Bar which was handy as we knew the lie of the land beforehand. Here it all is on Friday afternoon after we had set it all up:

A good number of members of both groups volunteered so we all managed to have a good look around the show too which was excellent, and I also managed to hear Lesley Prior‘s talk about the Campaign for Wool which was very interesting.

This year’s January competition at the knitting and crochet group had the theme of sheep, and we had all the entries on display for the weekend. I made a Shetland Sheep out of some natural black handspun Shetland, although I didn’t manage to finish him in time for the competition:

He is made entirely out of bobbles, which nearly killed me. He wont be having any friends! I find bobbles very hard on the neck and shoulders, and had a headache for a week after finishing him! Luckily I am pretty much better now.

Sue made the most wonderful life-size model sheep which was then covered in knitted squares by members of the group, and hung in the entrance of the Maltings:

He is called Norman, and will be coming out with us to more exhibitions later this year.

And there were even real live sheep, I think from Well Manor Farm in a pen outside:

There were even more stands at the festival than in previous years. A great selection of things to see and have a go at. There were workshops and talks on both days, and a lot of enthusiastic people.

I had a fabulous time 🙂 It was great to see loads of friends, and to meet lots of new people too. I spent a lot of Saturday extolling the virtues of knitting socks with one long circular needle, and Sunday talking about spinning and different wheels and helping new spinners get started. They were all sickeningly tallented, and grasped the principles very quickly, even those who were rather tired after having a long day round the show 🙂 We had a lot of families around on the Sunday which was fun, and we did some great team spinning. My little victims got the hot seat (although some of them were a little short to sit on the chair and reach the pedals so had to stand up), and they were in charge of the treadle, with their accompanying adult in charge of checking that the wheel was still going in the same direction. Then I did the hands, and when they had had enough I did a little ply-back of the yarn we had been spinning so they would have something to take away with them. I think there will be quite a lot of orange merino featuring in show and tell sessions at Surrey and Hampshire schools this week 🙂

I was also thrilled to win the Best in Show exhibition with my Autumn in Anatolia jumper.

I am looking forward to the prize which was a subscription to Selvedge magazine. Our knitting and crochet group were well represented in the Best in Show competition, Kim came second with her crocheted Dalek Tank top:

Sue also entered her wonderfully witty knitted sheep portraits,and Mary entered her Noah’s Ark.

A show would hardly be complete without a bit of stash enhancement and there were lots of lovely things available to buy.

The first things I bought on Saturday morning when the show had barely opened were Knitting with Two Colors by Meg Swansen and Amy Detjen, from Tricia Holman, and an Unravel bag (which came in handy to put things in all weekend). Here they are with my first issue of my prize Selvedge subscription:

It took me all weekend to decide on which colour of Deepy Wicked sock yarn (100% superwash Merino, 100g, 400m) to buy from EasyKnits – too much choice! Too many lovely loud colours! They humoured my indecision, and in the end I decided on this lovely semi-solid green called Astro Turf 🙂

It is a bit grey and gloomy here today so the yarn is actually even bright than my photo suggests 🙂

I also had a lovely time at John Arbon‘s stand, squishing all the lovely tempting fibre. It was nice to see John and Juliet and catch up with them too 🙂

I bought 200g of white 70% Exmoor Blueface, 30% Bluefaced Leicester fibre:

I am planning to dye this and then spin it into socks. We were using some of this fibre for spinning demonstrations and for the new spinners to learn with, and it is very nice to spin, it drafts very smoothly without being too slippery.

I also bought a kilo of chocolate 80% fine alpaca, 20% merino fibre:

This is a gorgeous colour, very reminiscent of a good milk chocolate. I think this will be a jumper or cardigan but I haven’t thought much further than that.

I also got some lovely Cappuccino Alpaca and something, but I now can’t remember whether it was Alpaca and Merino, or Alpaca and BFL, or Alpaca, Merino, and BFL, or something else entirely. I think my brain may be a little full.

I’m not sure what I am going to do with this yet. I think not lace, because the colours are quite strongly contrasting. Perhaps a 4ply kind of a weight, and then maybe mittens or something. Or I may mix it with some other fibre I already have to eke it out a bit.

All in all a very good weekend 🙂 I woke up at 5.30am yesterday and couldn’t get back to sleep because I was too excited, so I have been enjoying a bit of a quieter day today. Roll on next year, but I shall try and catch up with my sleep before then!

North Ronaldsay spinning

Leave a Reply

I have been spinning some North Ronaldsay fibre I bought a while ago from Scottish Fibres. I thought a bit of variety would be fun, so this is a carded preparation (most of the other fibre I have spun recently is combed) and I spun it up a lot thicker than I normally do.

It has come out about a chunky weight, though is a bit variable, I have 185g, 238.5m of the brown, and 195g, 184m of the white. I am planning to dye the white, though I’m not quite sure what colour yet, possibly red? I am planning to make a double layer hat from Spin Off magazine, though I will have to tinker with the pattern a bit as I think my yarn is a bit thicker than the pattern is expecting.

It has been fun to try different spinning though I did find the carded preparation a bit difficult to get an even yarn from. I think a bit more practise is probably required 🙂 The North Ronaldsay is surprisingly soft, although interestingly I think the brown is slightly softer than the white, and the white has more kemp (brittle hairs that I think wont take the dye, and tend to shed). I am interested to see how this will dye up, and am looking forward to knitting with it, and seeing whether that will even out the lumpy bits.