Yarnspinners Tales

Episode 34 of the YST podcast is posted and is available here or at ITunes by searching for Yarnspinners Tales. In this podcast I talk about what I've been doing a lot of lately, carding fibers for blending. I usually use a drum carder, but in the podcast I talk about both hand cards and the drum carder, comparing some of the pros and cons of each. The first section is very good for anyone that is not familiar with carding, as I cover many of the basics. The second section goes into more details about actually blending, either different fibers or different colors.

Early this spring in a dire need for color, I dyed white Maine Island washed fleece a yellow and orange, in two tones, deep and light. I had done just a sample batt of the dyed fiber and had decided to go ahead and do all the carding as a basic yellow with highlights of orange in the batts. And since these color contrast so well, I decided to use them as the example for carding in the podcast.

Most of the batts look like this:



The difference of when more orange is showing is often just a factor of how the batt is rolled. It could look yellow on one side and more orange on the other. I admit I did not really follow any set ratio for the colors, I was just adding orange to the batts as I thought they needed it. I wanted my yarn to spin with as much variation as possible.

I ended up with a lot of orange left over, and in a snap judgement from a dive into the fiber stash, I thought the orange might look interesting with this left over bit of brown shetland fiber.

I have heard the siren call of knitting dishcloths.

A long long time ago, I went to R&M yarns and bought a cone of a 2 ply cotton. I really didn't have a specific use for it but the quantity would easily have made a sweater of shawl.

Just recently I found a dishcloth pattern group on Ravelry and joined and that cone of cotton was easy to grab when I wanted to start my first pattern. I have none of the traditional cotton yarn in my stash, and I had not ever come up with a use for this cone, so it is now labelled as my dishcloth cone of yarn that will probably outlive me.

Here's my first dishcloth. The pattern for this cloth can be found here. It is called Eyelet and Bead dishcloth. It's so pretty, I haven't given it a dunk yet in soapsuds. I have to get over that and remember, I can always make another one, in a matter of three episodes of my favorite TV show.


I admit I still get the giggles when I look at the cone of yarn and try to imagine just how many washcloths can be made from it. Care to guess? I could hold a contest, but I doubt we all will be around 10 years from now when I hit the end of the cone. Here's a picture of the cone.

I suppose it is only fair that if I get to post something that I am very proud of, I need to post the ones that I am not so proud about.

Recently I needed a very easy mindless type knitting project and when I was going through the stash yarn I found four skeins of this soft and pretty acrylic yarn. I found an afghan pattern in Quick Knitted Afghans called Cross Stitch Squares that I really liked. I knew that four skeins of yarn was not enough for a full afghan, I was going more for a wheel chair lap throw, or baby blanket.
The pattern is fun and easy to memorize and I was enjoying the knitting. The recently I had my knitting with me at my mother in-law's house and she just raved over it. But when she took it out of my hands, what she did was through it around her shoulders, like a shawl. And insisted it was just the right length and would be just perfect for something to throw on in cool air conditioned resturants. Well. I first tried to talk her out of it, saying that it was too square in shape to really work, and she kept saying, oh it goes around my shoulders just fine. See, she's not a knitter, and had no idea that the reason it went around her shoulders just fine was because the knitting was bunched up on a circular needle, giving it that nice round shaping. I knew if I just cast off it would be a rectangle and not fit at all.

But I relented and said that I would have to do a few more rows on it, only increasing the length some. I knew during those rows I was going to have to figure out how to create a shoulder shaping 'after the fact'.

So I discussed it with my daughter, who is more of the knitting designer than I, and also consulted a sweater pattern with a circular yoke style. I was trying to get an idea of how many stitches I could go down over about 10 rows.

The final outcome of that was I took the shawl down from 140 stitches to 64 stitches over the ten rows. I followed the garter stitch pattern that was used at the beginning of the afghan, so it would match that. except that I purled on the wrong side on the three stitches used in the decreases. This made the decreases show up more, following the obvious block look of the body. Finally I cast off, made a loop and found a button and now have a shawllette to give my mother in-law.

A close up of the decreases:

I just discovered tonight that this post was still saved as a draft and not really posted. My apologies to those that came to see the photos connected with the podcast episode 32 Silk soy and milk.

These are fibers for spinning of course, not food. It's part 2 of our non wool fiber podcasts. We talk a little bit about silk, since it was also covered in a previous episode. We focused on the soy fiber, talking about how to spin and dye it. And also a bit on the milk fiber. All of these fibers belong with protein fibers group, and dye like wool, with the exception that they should not be held at heat above 200 degrees.

Both my daughter and a vendor Natural Obsessions have a knack for dyeing these fibers. Here's a few pictures to prove it:


100% milk fiber, dyed by Natural Obsessions:

100% silk, dyed by my daughter:


100% soy silk, dyed by my daughter:
And my daughter spins it well too! 100% soysilk

Natural Obsessions http://www.artfire.com/modules.php?name=Shop&seller_id=28031

Episode 31 of Yarnspinnerstales is posted and is available here or on Itunes.

This podcast is part one of two podcasts on spinning non wool fibers. I asked my daughter to join me for these podcasts, because these are the types of fibers she spins all the time. Although calling them non wool is not exactly right (because non wool can include other animals like alpaca and angora) we can't just call them plant fibers either (because silk falls in this non wool category). So we decided to base the categories on their sources, which affect mainly how the fibers are dyed. The categories are cellulose and protein derived.

Cellulose fibers include bamboo, tencel, and cotton. Although hemp and flax are plant derived, they are considered bast fibers and will have a podcast of their own. And cotton was covered extensively in episodes 12, 13, and 15. So for this podcast we talk about bamboo and tencel, going into the process of their production, as well as spinning and dyeing with these fibers.




As you can see in the photo, bamboo and tencel have an amazing shine. They do feel slippery as you spin them, and for that reason require higher twist and want to spin very thin. This makes many spinners afraid to spin these fibers. We hope that this podcast will help those spinners learn how to handle the fibers so they can enjoy the lovely yarns they create.

Because sometimes a verbal description of a process is not always enough, I have posted a video on youtube that shows tencel being spun on a Lendrum wheel with a very fast flyer.

I am currently spinning a combined combed top of targhee and bamboo fiber on my Ashford with the lace flyer. It is a beautiful white, the targhee being non shiny and the bamboo shining through. The singles are very fine, and a test self 2 ply is measuring 23 WPI. It's going to be a lovely lace weight yarn.

My daughter got me this fiber mystery box for my birthday. These boxes are the brainchild of Phat Fiber. Once a month boxes with samples from Etsy sellers is put up for sale on Phat Fiber's Etsy store. April box's theme was 'green' and so the idea was captured with either green color in the dyed fiber samples or yarn reclaimed. There was a very unique yarn created from soft cotton sheets, cut and plied with thread. A few of the natural fiber samples included angora, mohair and something called South Africian Fine Wool Top. There were patterns and also three wonderful stitch markers. It was like getting a present full of presents!

A few close up photos:

Finished in six weeks. Probably the fastest I've ever done a pair of socks. They fit wonderfully.

Project details:

Yarn: Sock It To Me! Collection
Color: Puzzle
Needles: two size 2 circs
Pattern: Cat Bordhi's basic sock on two circs sock pattern

The April Spin In podcast is posted, you can find it here or in ITunes under Yarnspinners Tales.

I took quite a few pictures that go along with the podcast, but you can enjoy the photos without listening too. The first segments of the podcast are discussions of two sheep breeds, both of which are double coated fleeces. The first called Spaelsau, is from Norway. A big thank you to one of my listeners Silja, for sending me some black and white fleece from this breed of sheep. I was able to wash it and spin some sample skeins to keep in my breed notebook.

Spaelsau was created from an original old breed of Norweigen sheep, bred with Icelandic, Finn and some Faroe Island sheep. The long outer coat of the fleece is rough but spins into a very strong yarn, useful for many non garment type uses. The under coat is softer and can be carded and spun into a bouncy yarn useful for hats, mitten and socks.

This is a sample of the unwashed white Spaelsau:
And this is the unwashed black Spaelsau:

The Serendity stole (aka Mystery stole) turns out to be a hard critter to block. If I could get down on my hands and knees and if I had a stretch of floor that no one walks on, I could block it there. But my usual blocking place, the bed, just did not have enough length. And if I was going to do it in sections (not being able to find room to do it all at once) I decided I might as well put it on something of comfortable reach. So it's blocking on top of my dining room buffet on a thick tablecloth. Well, part of it is blocking, about 3/4 of the length. When that dries I will do the other end.

(Yes that is my wine cellar under the buffet).
I did run wires through each edge in the YO's that the designer conveniently put between the shawl and the scallops. This is also something new for me, I have not used the blocking wires until now. I had to run the wires through the top line, pin that down, run wires through the bottom line, pin that down, and then pin each scallop and the bottom edging.