Spinning FO: Indigodragonfly PandaBaa

Posted on July 14, 2014 by Rayna

Two years ago, I started Tour de Fleece, armed with nothing more than a few braids of fibre and my Houndesign spindle. I got about 9 days in, and a few things came up, and that, as they say, was that.

Two years later, with my trusty Lenrdum wheel, I decided to give it another go, and while I was at it, I thought I’d head up the indigodragonfly TdF team. I had a single braid of PandaBaa (merino/bamboo) and if I managed to finish that one, I figured, I had another couple I could work on. Truthfully, I was not really expecting that to happen, but a girl can hope.

PandaBaa in “Cast-On Couch”

I had not at all figured on the addiction-inducing properties of this fibre. So soft, so lustrous and it, as I have said before, drafts like butter. I had half the braid done in the first weekend, and then spun the other half over the next four days. Plying always takes longer than I think it will (this is in no way aided by the fact that I have had to ply my last two skeins twice) so I saved it for a peaceful Sunday morning activity.

Finished Single

There’s a saying…”Man Plans. God Laughs.” I am guessing he had a mighty chuckle at me yesterday morning.

After the recent success of plying from both ends of a centre-pull ball, that seemed like the most reasonable way to go. I wound the single off the bobbin and settled in, not knowing the horror that awaited me.

Ready To Ply!

This time, something went horribly awry, and even now I can’t say what exactly. The strands doubled back on themselves and each other. They got twisted and tangled, and the strands were almost sticky….keeping them apart proved to be impossible and in one case, no matter how hard I tried, scissors were required. The air was positively blue from the language that erupted as I’d untangle one bit, only to hit two more.

The only thing we could see that would work would be to have the ball spin so that the strand on the outside never had a chance to wind itself around the middle one. My darling husband was good enough to hold the ball, slowly turning it to keep the strands apart while I plied. (As I write this, he is busily trying to invent/MacGyver something to help me with this in future. If he fails this will NOT be a method I am idiotic enough to try again. Fool me once….)

90 or so minutes later, the yarn was plied, but I could see, like last time, that it was too loose for me to be happy with. So after some coffee and pancakes (yes, I was also stupid enough to try this un-caffeinated) I settled in with the plied bobbin and ran it through the wheel again. I mutter as I do this, but I have to say, for the second time now, the second pass made all the difference in the world. Actually, since the last skein had already alerted me to the fact that I ply loosely, I suspect that this one would have been tight enough the first time if not for the unanticipated snags I hit, as the closer I got to the end, the more nicely plied the yarn was already.

In the end…just barely shy of 300 yards. It looks like fingering weight but might be sport – I haven’t had a chance to do a WPI test on it yet. But no matter what, I absolutely love it. So soft and squishy and such lovely colour. I am seriously contemplating using it to warp my loom and then wefting with just a plain natural colour lace or fingering weight to keep the colours from being obscured.

And now back to the Humpspun I started last week.

The Tour de Fleece is underway!

Posted on July 5, 2014 by Rayna

My indigodragonfly PandaBaa is all ready to go! Come join us!

Let’s get spinning!

Some Saturday morning spinning inspiration!

Image

Where I’d Rather Be Today…

Image

Where I'd Rather Be Today...

Caught the spinning bug

Posted on June 13, 2014 by Rayna

Two years ago, when I started spindle spinning, I signed on for Tour de Fleece, a Ravelry event that takes place during Tour de France where we spin the same days that the riders do. I got through a 50g merino sliver in the first three days, and started on a 115g braid of Mixed BFL from Two If By Hand in an interesting pink and gold colourway called “Blooming Bougainvilla”.

I got 9 or 10 days into TdF and fell off the wheel, so to speak, with about a third of the braid on my spindle.

My Houndesign spindle…as pretty as the fibre!

And so it has sat in my crafting cupboard for the past two years. With my renewed interest in my wheel, I decided I’d probably never finish this on a spindle. But why couldn’t I finish the braid, but on my wheel? Since there’s only a third on the spindle, if I spun the other two thirds on the wheel, the amounts would be uneven and make for weird and awkward plying. So what’s a girl to do?

I’ll tell you…she spends an entire episode (and then some) of Scandal winding the spun yarn off her spindle onto her wheel, then attaching some new fibre to it and continuing the effort.

And off we go, albeit a little blurry!

The yarn is significantly thicker than my current spinning so it will be a task to keep it that way. And if I choose to chain ply, that resultant yarn is going to be quite thick.

Here’s the most interesting part…looks like I spin in the opposite direction on my wheel than I do on a spindle. With the spindle, I push off the inside of my left leg, this causing the spindle to go counter-clockwise, resulting in an “S” twist. With the wheel, I default to pushing the wheel clock-wise, resulting in a “Z” twist. So for the next few days, I have to remember to spin my wheel as though I were plying, instead of my usual way.

But at least a two year old spinning project will get finished.

What old projects have you resurrected because you got tired of knowing they were just sitting there?

Chain Plying for Newbies

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Rayna

Last night I bit the bullet, so to speak, and decided to try my hand at chain plying. I had a single that I had spun from this superwash merino and I was intent on trying to preserve the colours.

Needlework’s Pleasure Handpainted Extra Soft Merino Wool Roving

The single sat for a few weeks while I balked at the idea of trying a new technique, and a few nice spinners on Twitter recommended this video to help me along.

Last night I pulled out some bits of singles that my friend, Val gave me and made an interesting discovery. Chain plying is not for the faint of ~~heart~~ yarn. A few of her singles were good and sturdy and plied beautifully, but several others were softer and finer snapped at every single attempt to ply them. As luck would have it, my single was either sturdier, thicker or both because while it snapped twice in two very very thin spots, overall, it plied well.

I also noticed something else that, as a newbie, is likely not unusual but for experienced spinners is not an issue. As I plied off the bobbin with the finished single, my yarn got increasingly less “nice”. It got thicker, and slubbier and had more underspun spots, the closer I got to the start of my spinning. Since this was the first thing I had spun in over a year, this is not really surprising. In fact, it’s sort of motivating as I could see, in the span of an hour of plying, just how far I had come in the week or so that it took me to spin that single.

Since I could not sleep this morning, in the quiet of my 6 AM apartment, this:

The single

became this:

The finished skein!

Overall, I am pretty happy with it.

Certainly I am happy with my progress towards spinning that looks like real yarn 😀

WWKIP

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Rayna

On Saturday morning, my friend Liz and I set off on a short road trip…destination: Shall We Knit? in Waterloo for their annual World Wide Knit In Public day. They had hosted quite the gathering last year, and we thought it would be a fun way to spend a day and see some fibre-friends.

Outdoor tents abounded, including one with Super-Kate Atherley at the wheel offering up advice for the knitter-in-need:

Kate and Beth Graham

Kim and Ron of indigodragonfly were on hand for a dyeing demo – proceeds going to the Canadian Breast Cancer Support Fund.

Ready to go!

Cardinal Ruby – one of the four colourways to be auctioned off for charity!

The only picture I got of Marit’s Gobstopper hand-dyed gradient yarn is one of the skein(s) I purchased myself. The colour is so much more awesome than this picture shows. I can’t decide if these will be socks, or long fingerless mitts.

And I may have fallen down on some yummy merino tencel fibre from Waterloo Wools.

Mmm…Spice Trail

I even won a door prize! Thanks so much to the lovely ladies of Shall We Knit? for hosting such a lovely day!

L-R: Lynne, Karen and Cari

Feeling Rather Scattered

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Rayna

I just realized I had not done any blogging for nearly two weeks. Bad blogger! But I realized that a big part of it was due to not being entirely devoted to one thing…and as such, I didn’t have a specific subject to blog about.

I finished my very first weaving project. (Where project = something about the size of a placemat!) But hey, it’s something!

First Weaving Project

I have warped up my loom again; this time, I have used some Berocco Remix – I am still mostly just practicing and using up worsted weight yarn. I’ll be using some left over Cascades 220 and some Berocco I used to knit Chase a hat a few years ago for the weft. I am looking forward to being able to use fingering and even laceweight yarns at some point. I have a suspicion that some of the two colour stashes that I set aside for shawls may end up woven at some point.

I have been spinning a bit as well…a fractal spin of a blue/purple Friends in Fiber BFL/Silk blend.

$The "fractal" half of a fractal spin!$

The “fractured” half of a fractal spin!

The fractured half is nearly complete – seven of nine pieces spun. Then I get to the half that’s still in one piece. I am looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

I have been knitting a bit…a Hermione’s Everyday sock and a test knit sock for a friend. And I am awaiting an email from a designer about another test knit I have committed to. But I have also started designing. This is a bit of a departure for me. I have had my nose in stitch dictionaries for the past week or so, and have a surprising number of designs in my head, and even a theme for them, if they ever all get done. The first one to make it onto needles is a pair of fingering weight socks, and I have a cowl and a DK weight sock waiting in the wings. The whole experience is pretty fun, I have to admit. Never thought this was something I’d ever try.

All other crafts have had to fall by the wayside…so much to do and so little time! Now, I just need a severe case of “finish-itis” so that some of this stuff actually gets done!

My Return to Spinning

Aside

One of my fibre goals for this year was to spin more. Spinning always seems to take a back seat to knitting for me, and even more so recently because I had deadline projects where spinning always has less of a sense of urgency.

When I finally did manage to pick up spinning again recently after a several month long hiatus, I got quite discouraged as I was finding I was encountering some difficulties that I hadn’t previously. I had started using some Schoppel Wolle pencil roving that was a gift from my mother in law for Christmas, thinking this would help me get back into the swing of things after such a long break…I mean, predrafted fibre…what could possibly go wrong? Instead my yarn was dissolving in my hands any time I pulled on it at all, but it didn’t seem woefully underspun.

Time to call in the expert! Leslie Ordal, my first-spinning-class-teacher-turned-friend, offered to come take a look, and Shireen thought this would be a great chance to come learn how to spin on a wheel. So the three of us convened at my place on Saturday, with Shireen and me ready to absorb the knowledge imparted by the pro. This was the inaugural use of my new WooLee Winder (more on this miraculous device at another time!), so I put on an empty bobbin and spun up some new fibre, using some bits and bobs samples I had lying about. I showed Leslie what I had been doing and she decreed that overall, I was doing fine and that while I should probably be putting a little more twist into it, she could not see what was causing the issue. And this new yarn wasn’t falling apart. So I showed her the bobbin with the pencil roving and she immediately knew what had been going wrong. The fibre had tweed-y slubs in it, so when I was spinning, most of the yarn was spun with enough twist, but the slubby parts, because they were thicker, not so much. Those were the parts that were falling apart.

Once I switched to something with a more consistent texture, I got this:

Random Halloween-themed fibre spin

Not bad at all, considering I hadn’t spun in ages.

Once I got the hang of it, I broke out a braid of superwash merino and decided to try that. So far I have turned this:

Into this:

Handpainted Merino

I spent about an hour last night spinning away in front of the Penguins/Rangers game and I am planning to set aside some time each day to try and move my spinning forward.

Back From The Dead

Posted on August 12, 2013 by Rayna

My blog…not me. (Although it seems funny that I am bringing my blog back from the dead to talk about dyeing…)

I have been conspicuously absent from the blogosphere these days. Summer always takes the good right out of me, and even robs me of my fibre arts karma. My wheel has been covered for months and my knitting comes in fits and starts. I spend far more time surfing Ravelry and dreaming of what I will make than I do actually making anything. However, when a dear friend says, “We should get together and try our hand at dyeing some yarn”, that’s hard to resist.

So, yesterday my friend Shireen (from over at The Blue Brick) hosted me and our friend/my spinning teacher Leslie (from Leslie Ordal Fibre Arts) for a day of fingerpainting for adults, aka yarn and fibre dyeing. Shireen picked up some undyed yarn and clothing dye; Leslie and I grabbed some bags of undyed fibre from stash and some food colouring and we converged on Shireen’s tidy little downtown condo and, well, pretty much totaled it.

We started out with Kool-Aid and the small sport weight skeins first, to try and get a feel for what we were doing. Not sure if I, as the designated dye blend diva of the day, managed to make them a bit diluted, or if this is the nature of Kool-Aid, but the colours did seem somewhat muted.

Shireen’s Kool-Aid dyed Cascades 200 Sport weight

We eventually moved into Rit and worsted weight yarn, leaving our precious skeins of fingering weight merino for last, when we felt we had a better handle on what we were doing. I even painted some smaller quantities of fibre to get a grasp on how things might look before trying yarn.

Getting ready for a teal/royal blue/purple paint of my worsted.

When we did get to the fingering weight, I was still enamoured with the handpainting process; Shireen and Leslie opted for some immersion/kettle dyeing with a natural dye kit Shireen had picked up at a fibre fair a while back.

I had a specific idea in my head for a red/orange/yellow variegated yarn, so I set to work handpainting my skein with autumnal colours, while the ladies prepped pots for their immersion dyes.

Handpainted Fingering Weight

The immersion dyes both turned out absolutely beautifully (I may or may not have even threatened to steal Shireen’s navy blue skein), and both will be perfect for lace because while they are variegated, they are both beautifully tonal.

Shireen's navy blue and Leslie's forest green fingering weight skeins

Shireen’s navy blue fingering weight skein and Leslie’s forest green fibre

Luckily, there is enough navy dye left for me to do one of my own next time. And we have decreed there will definitely be a next time, that will include expanding our materials list to include acid dyes. I can’t wait!

All photos in this post taken by and courtesy of Shireen Nadir.