Mixing Things up for a Sweater
words and photos by: Johanna Carter
I always admire those who are able to spin mountains of yarn for a big project, ready to knit a wonderful sweater or cardigan. It is a satisfying feeling when you finish all that work, especially if you started with washing and combing the wool or even raising your own sheep.
Mixing spinning and knitting
The typical way to work through a larger project is to spin all the singles first and ply them in a particular order so you get the yarn even throughout the whole project. I don’t have so many bobbins, but my bigger problem is that I am quite impatient and want to get on with knitting once I have an idea. And normally, my brain is full of ideas for fibre work and the limit is the time, as I am a musician and teacher. I can’t sit at the spinning wheel for a long time if I’m not on holiday, so during the school year I mostly knit, and during the holidays I can dye, spin, use my drum carder, and do lots of fibre work. The only time I was able to produce bigger quantities of yarn before I knitted them up was during the Tour de Fleece in the two years during the pandemic, when we did not go on holiday at the beginning of July.
A highly photogenic collection of naturally dyed fibres.
I like to finish knitting one big project like a sweater or cardigan before I start the next one, or at least until I can’t carry it in my bag easily anymore, so I have an excuse to begin the next one. Sometimes it is good to have a second project on the go – I call it mindless knitting, where I don’t have to look very much – which I can keep my hands busy during Zoom or other meetings, which helps me listen.
Mixing colours and fibres
Usually I dye my yarn with plants which I collect in the woods or get from garden flowers. I also use cochineal and indigo, which I buy, to get lots of different colours. I really love the greens and blues I get from dyeing with indigo. I have lots of dyed wool, and all those colours give me inspiration for further projects.
Beautiful greens and blues dyed by the author using indigo and other natural dyes.
Blending the wool on the drum carder I can get even more shades. I like to blend with fibres like silk, alpaca, or plant fibres, and I love sari silk, to get those little bits of colour in my yarn.
Fibres of different types and colours are blended on a drum carder for elegant results.
When I have an idea for the next sweater, I start carding, and then I can begin to spin. Once I have spun enough yarn – say, for one day – I cast on and start knitting, usually top down, so I don’t have to decide too much in advance about length and width.
An idea for the author’s next sweater in the gathering stages.
When I spin on my wheel, I have to sit at home, but while spinning I can read a book or talk to others during online meetings. I also like to spin on my spindles, and that works on a walk, or a museum visit. I take them on holiday as they don’t need much space, and when I spin for a lace shawl, I don’t even need much wool either. At home there are spindles all over the place; I can spin when I am waiting for the kettle to boil, when the computer is slow, when I am cooking. Like that I can make good use of a short time and the yarn still grows.
Knitting as soon as the yarn is spun helps the author complete sweater projects in a timely manner.
I can take my knitting almost everywhere, which is why I don’t want to wait to get started until I have spun all the yarn for a whole sweater. I knit at home, on the bus or train. The only thing I have to make sure of is to be one step ahead with the yarn.
I love to knit Fair Isle sweaters. My favourite method is to use only one bobbin, which I don’t even fill, because I need smaller quantities of lots of colours. Then I wind a ply ball and ply it on itself. For that I put my thumb through the ball, so I can tension the two singles with my fingers and they don’t get tangled, as long as my thumb (or a cardboard roll or a pencil) stays in the middle. I don’t have any leftovers from plying, and it is quick when I suddenly need more yarn.
Several charming sweaters dyed, spun, and knit by the author.
I have never had problems with the yarn not being consistent enough throughout a project. I just know what yarn I want and my fingers seem to remember what to do. I am sure it is good advice to have a little card tied to the spinning wheel with a bit of the singles you are aiming for, so you can check and make sure you are spinning a consistent yarn.
Mixing breeds
There are so many different breeds, but some of my favourites are Shetland, BFL, and Jämtland – a Swedish breed. After dyeing them, I often forget what I have used, so when I do a new project it often turns out that I have used different breeds and fibres just to get the right colour. For the Fair Isle knitting I want to juggle lots of colours, which is more important to me than making a sweater out of only one breed.
Recently I made a pullover for my husband using about 12 different breeds and colours, even mixing short and long draw. For me it was a breed experiment and a way to use up lots of smaller quantities of wool I had in my stash. For that sweater I used combed top without blending.
Mixing in knitting during the spinning process is a wonderful way for a spinner to avoid being overwhelmed during a sweater project.
My feeling is that some people don’t dare to start spinning for a bigger project because they get overwhelmed by the quantity they have to spin and then all the knitting there is to do, especially when you want to spin the yarn entirely on spindles. Mixing the spinning and knitting for the same project is more interesting; you get more variety and more freedom to choose what you want to do next as long as you don’t run out of yarn. It breaks the project down into smaller, less daunting parts. The only thing you might want to plan is to have enough fibre at the start, but even that is not necessary, there is always a sheep growing more wool.
Teach or Vend at PLYAway 2023!
Attention all fiber artists! We’re looking for a few good teachers & vendors for PLYAway 2023!
The PLYAway retreat will be held at the Westin’s Crown Center in Kansas City, MO, April 18-23, 2023.
Vendors: Find your application here. Due by August 1, 2022
Teachers: The application is here. Due by July 15, 2022
We would love to have you!
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Mix Tape for the Modern Urban Spinner
by Andrea Deck
In 2020, we mixed up the fiber festival to become more accessible, more community driven, and more modern than we’d ever been before. Working with social media in new ways, shepherds, dyers, vendors, and spinners alike had to create a new mix of a truly ancient craft and a modern, uber-connected world. Many of us hunkered down from our in-person fiber festivals and started to think about what it would look like to connect digitally.
Come Together (The Beatles)
While the social nature of fiber farming and making beautiful fiber creations is deftly woven into the story, so many of those relationships are based on proximity.
Welcome to the Internet (Bo Burnham)
This transition to the online space was far from new, but many of the most adept at Ravelry and social media were far removed from the production side of the fiber experience. Many small businesses, shepherdesses, and farmers operated entirely in person, selling at small fiber festivals in their area. As you may know, this missing link in the supply chain led to quality wool producers around the world converting beautiful fleeces to fertilizer or trash throughout the pandemic. When Maryland Sheep and Wool, PLYAway and other big national festivals shuttered their physical doors in 2020 to weather the storm, business owners and fiber artists alike flocked to social media. Facebook groups and Ravelry threads were lighting up in new ways to combat isolation and fear but also to ask the very real question “what now?”
Empire State of Mind (Jay-Z)
Living as a City Mouse in a postage stamp of an apartment has a few major drawbacks: price, space, and all my local supplies of yarn or goodies are either very corporate or very expensive. If I was looking for a full fleece or anything that still smelled like a barn, I was headed out to fiber festivals hours from my home. I already had experience scouring the internet for economical resources and shops I’d heard of or seen on festival websites. I was adept at buying hand-dyed yarn from websites older than I was with terrible color photos and worse descriptions, then waiting weeks or months for my squishy mail to arrive.
So by the time the pandemic hit, I was in the right place (already working remotely and adept at finding fiber online) at the right time (my city and work changed dramatically and quickly) to be a part of reimagining the festivals online. I went from the fringe of the fiber community, with no space for sheep or capacity to design new things, to building documents and best practices for transitioning that community online. What lighting were we using for professional social media videos? What network capabilities were needed to live stream? How do you deal with taxes and shipping around the country?
The communal aspect of the craft came to the fore early: join an online festival as a vendor and be welcomed into a league of small businesses learning to survive online. Places like VirtuWool and Wool and Fiber Arts groups offered mentors, weekly check-ins, and volunteers to help run live sales, as well as feedback on your web platform and performance. Need a few hours of professional help? Head to the group to find a contractor who also happens to love wool. Community groups developed codes of conduct, new folks were welcomed by moderators, and excitement buzzed long before and after any individual sale.
As webinars on ad words and stabilizing rural Wi-Fi popped up alongside new online fiber festivals, sales, classes, and more, a whole new audience also emerged. As accessibility into these spaces grew, so did the diversity of both the buyers and sellers. Folks continued to show up: new and older generations of crafters, people facing isolation for a wide variety of reasons, the “fiber curious” who had only bought a ball of yarn at Target. If there is one big takeaway from this crazy time, it’s this: the lowering of all sorts of barriers has made our fiber festivals, and our community, stronger, more creative, and more diverse.
Re-emergence: As we re-emerge, let’s take a look at what we’ve learned and how we’ve connected to create a new mix tape of our favorite tunes. For my personal jams, I’m trying new songs to use my distance from the sheep in the field to develop new tools to engage with the fiber community and using my personal, introverted hobby to connect more broadly across the world.
See You Again (Carrie Underwood)
Return to in person festivals can’t mean an abandonment of the online groups and communities we’ve found so much value in over the past two years. These novel ways to engage in the things we’ve done for centuries is part and parcel of the future and history of fiber craft. My biggest fear is after building infrastructure and community in new online spaces for over two years they (and we) will be abandoned for the in-person meet ups again.
Meet Me Halfway (Kenny Loggins)
How to hybrid? For me, I’m about to embark on a shlep back to my favorite festival, and while I’m so excited to be back in person, I’m also feeling very alone. This is the first festival where not one of my Ravelry or online groups is getting together. The stitch marker swap that has happened for years has fallen apart. It is up to us as artists, community members, festival organizers and attendees, and voices across our fiber community to take the best songs we learned during COVID and keep playing them. The in-person event space has long asked questions about what it means to feel welcomed or to feel like we belong, and there’s a ton we learned as strangers online that we can bring with us! There’s room for all of us and more at these festivals and in our community, because it’s an awesome place to be.
Andrea Deck (@craftondeck) is a spinner, weaver, knitter, and lover of fiber living in the heart of DC with her husband and huge yarn stash. Professionally, she is a community builder specializing in engagement of young adults, couples, and you.
PLY Magazine believes that Black lives matter, as well as LBGTQI+ lives. Those most vulnerable and persecuted in our communities deserve our love and support. Please be good to each other.
Did you know we also have a monthly PLY newsletter? Sign up here!
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