So, I started on the next scarf, and came up with an awesome and terrible plan for when I’m done with this warp. Awesome and terrible as the sea, and amazing enough it might be worth pushing off other plans… assuming I can pull it off. It will be plainweave, which is new to me, and the yarn I think I have enough of for it is sockyarn, which is stretchy. Hrm, not sure about that.

But it really needs to be a shawl to show off the effect properly. And I don’t think I have enough white zephyr left for that. Which leaves my sock yarn base. We’ll see.

Anyway, current stuff. A ways back I finished spinning my first Abby Franquemont batt in a luxurious and shimmery grey-blue. I finally got it plied (with itself) and set, so I wound up some bobbins and started weaving on my next project. This scarf uses elements from the two preceeding it, combined into more complicated (and elegant?) motifs. Also it will involve a bit of colorwork as I want to blend from this blue to an (unplied) forest green midway.

Here’s the first end motif, with the yarn. Still the same black zephyr warp.

I’m very happy with it. I’m into the body of the scarf now which is a fairly basic (but elegant) goose eye, similar to the first scarf I wove, but with a starred eye instead of a dotted one. More photos soon.

XMas:

Xmas was, as usual, with family. Plus the lovely Jess, my brother’s girlfriend. It was a great time, as always.

I gave Jess a genuine bottom whorl spindle from Peru, with braids of my hand dyed Rambouillet, Romney, and Wensleydale. I taught her to spin on a bottom whorl last year. She took to it like a fish to water.

I got Matt a handwoven alpaca/wool belt from Chinchero Peru… which I still need to ask someone how to properly tie so it holds things better. We sang!

Matt, Jess, and I went for a lovely hike. They’re cute together, don’t you think?

Nice views. Notice I am standing lower than him, he’s not really that much taller (2 inchesish).

We could look out over town! Good walk, good company.

New Fiber Equipment:

Most of my xmas gifts were backpacking/camping gear, which is excellent. It keeps me from freezing.

My biggest gift was from my little brother, Matt. An Ashford DRUM CARDER, ZOMG! ZOMG! With a lovely blending drum on it!

So, of course I immediately set it up and blended myself a batt! Looking through my stuff I grabbed some grey shetland and some white wensleydale. Opening it up and feeding it in slowly in layers, I made an approximately 50/50 wensleydale/shetland blend. It’s very soft and lofty and awesome. I need to get out a spindle and spin it because it’s awesome! I can’t wait to play more.

My first ever batt. The second one was even more even.

More soon, socks, New Years, and more!

That’s all for now!

~The Gnome

So this was my latest yarn commission.

310 yds of superwash merino, handspun to be deliberately not-quite-perfect in an array of blues.

It was interesting. This is the first time I’ve ever purposefully spun in periodic slubs/thick-thin sections.

The fiber itself was also interesting as I used mill end SW Merino for it. So I have this three pound bag of mill ends, which are really mill ends, totally tossed and turned and shredded. The answer, as it so often is with fiber, was sampling.

I spun up some straight out of the bag and it was way TOO slubby and uneven looking. I just couldn’t control where things were happening because of the odd nature of the fiber. So… I learned to comb fiber, which was a fascinating endeavor, especially with already combed but no longer aligned fiber. Thanks to several YouTube videos and explanations, I figured it out and was off and combing.

Combing produced a yarn with periodic neps that spun into small delicate slubs (the consequence of combing pre-combed stirred up fiber instead of locks), just what I was looking for. You can’t see it much in the finished yarn, which was my goal. I wanted it to look not-perfect, not like art yarn.

It’s a two-ply, as it’s for the making of a balaclava, in worsted weight. I dyed it in a yarn version of my colorway “Sapphire Surprise.” Happily, the commissioner was quite pleased with the yarn upon receipt.

Superwash Merino is one of my least favorite fibers to spin, but this project went fairly fast (minus the combing which was a learning thing). And any project during which I actually learn things is good! And working on Strider (the Schacht-Reeves 30″) is always a pleasure

Sapphire Surprise
310 yards
100% SW Merino
Worsted Weight
2-Ply

Thats’ all for now!

~The Gnome

I will be updating the shop tomorrow. Border Leicester, Merino/Tencel, Finn, Wensleydale, and SW Merino.

I’m heading up to Canada with some college friends on Sunday to Friday of next week. Any orders placed by mid-day Saturday, will go out Saturday. Any orders placed after that will be held until I can get them out when I’m back, next Saturday.

I have written the first page of my dissertation. This doesn’t seem like much (it’s likely to be a 100+ page document) but the first page is in many ways the hardest. Because you have to get something, anything, on the paper to help lead into writing the rest of the thing. So that’s done.

We’re looking to get my paper out for review (this is the published paper, which will be the central chapter of the dissertation) today/tomorrow I believe.

Ok, and now…

The Great Fleece Adventure, Part II
(Or part III if you include carrying 40 lbs of fleece across NHS&W with the Tsocktsarina part II)

So, you might remember, the Great Fleece Adventure Part I where I picked up a billion and twelve fleeces, brought them home, skirted them, etc.

I dropped most of them off with a mill for processing into roving. All but two, in fact. The mill is almost done processing those, so I suppose it’s fitting I finally got to the two I kept to process myself.

I’ve been waiting for a good weekend to do this at my parents’, when the weather was ok, there wasn’t super important things to do there, and I had the weekend to spend if I needed it. Well, this summer has not cooperated on the weather front, so I settled for the second two and a passable day.

It was muggy and hot, but not too too disgusting. The yard ended up smelling a little, as my hyssop retting experiment failed (making very nasty stinky water). Looks to get those fibers out (I know they’re there, we’ve seen them) I would have to go with a lot longer dew/snow retting method. ::shrugs:: No biggie.

Anyway, the first thing to do, of course, was make hot water. Luckily my parents’ hot water heater makes water almost too hot to put my hands in, and Mom has 3 very very very large buckets (which we use for all sorts of things from weeding to dirt, originally for toys). So I put the buckets right out back of the kitchen so I only had to carry water about 15 feet. This is good, since it takes one metric ton of water to fill these things. Ok, so only 3 trips with a 5ish gallon bucket. Still, a lot. And add a bunch of soap. Mmm soap.

Here are the fleeces in their first washes. Note that this is about 5 minutes after first putting them in their baths. And the water on the edges of the dark one especially are already brown as brown can be. The dark was a larger fleece to begin with, and I gave away less of it. There’s probably… 6ish pounds or more? And it was dirtier. Vera (the white one, and my Great Grandmother’s name) was apparently a pretty clean sheep and after giving away much of it is probably 2-3 pounds, but stuff still came out, of course, beyond just lanolin.

They soaked for a few hours in this wash, soaking out dirt as well as lanolin. Then they were transferred to another hot wash, and sat for a few MORE hours. Then, because there was still some crap coming off, I put them in a final hot wash.

You can see the water’s much clearer now. Much of the remaining fog is soap. Vera’s fleece went from this into a cold wash, without soap. Cocoa’s fleece (the brown one) being so much bigger and dirtier, went into Vera’s still hot wash for a little more hot soaking. From there, Cocoa’s fleece followed Vera’s through 3 cold water soaks to get the soap and such out. Vera’s was done after 3, but Cocoa’s got a 4th cold water soak (since there had still been some residue in #3).

Here’s Vera’s fleece in the last cold soak. It was too late for a photo of Cocoa’s by the time that one went in. You can see there’s almost nothign left in the water.

The tips are still slightly “antiqued” but that’s not actually lanolin still built up, but staining from the fleece sitting (2008 fleece). More about that in a bit.

The next question was, how to dry close to 10lbs of soaking wet fleece? And by 10, I mean 10 dry, full of water it weighs a lot more than that. Well, luckily, being an old farm, we have a lot of random things. My first thought was an old window screen or screen door. No such luck… BUT we do have a bunch of old fencing we used for making mobile duckling/chick fences. While up getting those, Dad found these old boxes, screened on 4 of 6 sides. I’m not sure what they were originally for. But they worked great for this…

I pulled out one lock of the white and dried it indoors overnight (the fleece was still quite damn, being in the humid outside). In the morning, I flicked it open with an old cat-comb I found in the drawer.

Yeah, that’s an 8 inch staple right there of shiny antique white fluffy, soft, lustrous, wavy border leicester. You can see that the “antiquing” visible on the tips in the water is almost invisible once opened up.

The drying fleece got moved to the garage, so they wouldn’t get rained on, and are drying there this week.

The lock, I spun, because… how could I possibly resist? Spun up on my Bossie midi.

Mmm single… A little underspun, I’ve never spun from the lock before. So I wrapped it up into a little plying bracelet, and plied it up. Of course I had to overply a little to make a “useable” yarn, all 3yds of it (yeah 3yds of 2ply from one lock, not bad in my mind).

Yeah, it’s overplyed and underspun enough that in the “miniskein” it basically becomes a super cabled yarn. ::chuckles:: But still, nice, fine, shiny, laceweight sample!

I’m pretty happy. I can’t wait for it to dry. That’s a lot of fiber. Fiber I think I’m going to have to spin myself. Eeep!

Aaand that’s about it for today. Back to writing.

~The Gnome