Archive for category: Spinning

Words and Photos by Margaret Wright

Three years ago, I went from a Jersey Shore schoolteacher and suburban mom to living in the woods of Western Maine. I purchased my first spinning wheel and joined an amazing group of people in a spinning group out of Cornish, Maine. They insist they love me despite the way I say coffee and dog, and they totally took pity on my lack of fiber knowledge, taking me under their wings. They truly are my fiber angels. It was from them I learned how to prepare small batches of fiber.

After buying a few really dirty and stinky fleeces, I decided I really hated the whole process of cleaning the poop parts off the fleece, known as skirting. So I now purchase my fleeces at fiber festivals or at reputable fairs as they are usually skirted and much better quality. Although the fleece still has some poop, there’s a whole lot less of it. At the Fryeburg Fair in Fryeburg, Maine, I purchased a very nice Romney fleece. I prepared the fleece in small batches for spinning.

Supplies

I recommend using a double sink, but you can improvise and use a single sink. You’ll also need Dawn blue dish soap, really hot water, a salad spinner, and some sort of rack to dry your fiber on. I have used a dog crate, a fireplace screen, and lawn chairs! Improvise is my middle name. I also wear gloves as I like really hot water, and, oh yeah, I hate poop.

Process

I squeeze 3 to 4 circles of Dawn into my clean sink after making sure the stopper is in. You do not want too much soap or it will be too sudsy. I then fill the sink about 3/4 full of the hottest water I can get from my tap.

I gently pull a chunk of fiber off the fleece, making sure to remove any straw or poop. Then I gently submerge my fiber into the hot water. Be careful not to agitate it or it will turn into felt like you buy in the craft store.

I set my timer for 30 minutes. Then I go do whatever. Pet the dog, have a coffee, whatever. After 30 minutes, the water will be dark and nasty looking due to the combination of dirt and lanolin that occurs naturally on wool. I unplug the drain and gently press the water from the fiber. I like to press it against the side of the sink. I know I say gently often, but it really is important to be gentle.

At the same time, I have the second sink filling with clean, very warm water, but not as hot as the first sink was originally. I submerge the fleece gently into the clean water and allow this to sit for 30 minutes also. If you don’t have 2 sinks, put your wet fiber in a bowl or pot while you refill the sink with clean water.

Note: I like my fleece a little greasy, meaning I like to spin it with more of the natural lanolin in it. My friend washes it twice, repeating the first wash, as she likes her fleece really clean. Try both and see what you like best.

I drain the rinse sink, gently press the water from the fiber, and divide the fiber into smaller batches that can fit in the salad spinner. I place the wet fiber into the salad spinner and spin it twice, one time in one direction and the second time in the other direction, dumping the water out in between spins.

Prep for Spinning

Once your fiber is dry, you can prep it for spinning a variety of ways. As you gain more experience and become more comfortable, you may want to try different methods to prep your fiber.

For spinning prep, the easiest way for a newbie like I was just 3 short years ago is to do what is called flicking. I love to sit in the evenings and flick the ends of my fiber locks open using a dog comb. To do this, I firmly hold one end of 1–3 locks, depending on thickness, and gently pull the dog comb over the ends until the tips are nice and fluffy. I then turn the fiber around and repeat the process.

You can also use a hand carder or a dog brush to open up the fiber ends. I find this very relaxing in the evening when my husband is mesmerized by his Bigfoot shows and I listen to an audiobook. When we go places, I frequently take fiber with me. I combed enough fiber one night watching our son play lacrosse to spin 75 yards. Plus, it’s a great icebreaker as people will come up to investigate and you end up meeting some great people.

Margi Wright lives in Maine where she sells baked goods and fiber products at a local farmers market, a switch from her former Jersey Shore life as a teacher. Margi enjoys an active lifestyle completing triathlons, cross country skiing, and traveling with her husband to see her children and grandchildren.

Words and Photos by Anne Schwarz

I’m making my first sweater from scratch.

This is new for me. Usually I spin a pound of this, a 4-oz braid of that, enjoying the pretty colors or trying my hands at a technique or a yarn design idea, and then I make yet another hat or scarf. In fact, I just finished another 284 yards of a pretty blue and yellow yarn from fiber that caught my eye at a vendor booth, destined to become something, someday. The joy is in the spinning, right?

Well, for a new challenge, I decided a few months ago to try my hand at spinning for a large project. The challenge was consistency – how could I make a couple thousand yards of 2-ply yarn that would look cohesive when knitted up, without disruptive shifts in color, thickness, or texture?

Consistency starts with the fiber prep.

I chose a 70% alpaca/30% Merino blend for my project because I had a lot of alpaca fleece in my stash in a few different colors. Because 100% alpaca yarn is notorious for stretching out over time, I wanted to blend it with some wool to give it some memory. Whenever I think about blending fibers, I consider what traits I’m adding and why. I chose Merino because it’s a fine wool and would not detract from the alpaca’s best quality, its softness.

Planning My Colors

As I washed and picked through about 2 pounds of alpaca fleece, I put it in 2 large piles; one was a mix of white and light beige, and the other was a mix of natural shades of brown.

There are 2 breeds of alpaca: Huacaya, which is a fluffier, crimpier fiber, and Suri, which is smooth and shiny and has a lot of drape but no crimp. I used mostly Huacaya for this project, but I had a bag of luscious dark brown Suri locks, and I couldn’t resist adding a couple of handfuls to the brown mix, as I thought it would add interest to the yarn.

I knew I was going to leave the brown alpaca its natural colors, and eventually dye the white/beige mix. I settled on a sweater pattern that could be made with either 2 or 3 colors.

The Merino I had was white combed top. This would blend in beautifully with my white alpaca blend, and I had the option of dyeing all of the fiber before blending, after blending, or after spinning. What would give me the most consistent color? Probably dyeing all of the fiber before blending because any inconsistencies in color would be blended together. But indecision got the better of me – I wasn’t ready to choose a color yet, so I decided to wait and dye the finished yarn.

The brown alpaca mix was a different story. I didn’t want to blend white Merino with colored alpaca because it would just dull and lighten the rich natural colors. In this case, I decided to dye the Merino before blending, using colors that would complement the alpaca’s shades of brown. I handpainted a length of Merino top with acid dyes in burgundy, a basic red, a rusty red, and golden yellow, plus a bit of brown that was darker than the alpaca and would blend color with color.

Prepping the Fiber Before Blending

While washing and picking my alpaca fleeces, I found my fiber had some variation in staple length (up to an inch difference), and the Merino was similar in length to the longer alpaca fibers. This pointed me towards a carded prep because combs will separate shorter from longer fibers, while carding creates a web of fibers of different lengths, going in different directions. I used a drum carder for both carding and blending.

The first step was carding the alpaca and Merino separately. I’d washed the alpaca and picked out most of the VM, but it needed a couple of passes through the carder to transform the locks into a loose web of fiber that would blend easily. This step also blended the white and beige fleece into an off-white color and the various shades of brown fleece into a gorgeous variegated brown.

I also put the Merino through the carder once on its own, even though it was already processed as combed top. Commercial top can be kind of dense and compressed, and a pass through the carder loosens and opens it up beautifully. In my experience, it blends with other fibers much better that way. However, with my handpainted Merino, this pass blended the colors together more than I wanted, into a sort of reddish brown. It wasn’t bad, but if I had it to do again I would dye the Merino in small single-color batches. I would then run these through the carder separately at this stage, and I would blend in the next step with the brown alpaca.

Blending

Now I had 4 stacks of batts – off-white alpaca, white Merino, brown alpaca, and reddish-dyed Merino. Each stack had several batts. I’d weighed out my fiber ahead of time, so I still had 70% alpaca and 30% Merino in each color group. The next step was to blend them so the fiber ratio was consistent across all my batts.

I put the white batts in one big stack, alternating layers of alpaca and Merino, and then divided the stack into vertical cross-sections that were each about the amount I could comfortably fit on my carder. I put each cross section through the carder and then stacked the batts again and repeated the cross-section process. This method blended the fibers fairly well and evened out any inconsistency.

I used the same method with the colored Merino/brown alpaca. It was all nicely blended and ready to spin.

A Few Notes on Spinning and Dyeing

It took me a few weeks to spin the yarn for this project, but I must say the spinning went faster than the fiber prep!

Before spinning, I finalized my pattern choice, selecting Coiled Magenta by Carol Feller of StolenStitches.com. It’s a loose, V-neck sweater that uses 2 colors and some cool color blocking. It calls for 2 colors, but I’m going to use 3 because in the end I divided my white yarn into 2 colors.

I dyed the white yarn 2 different colors for a simple reason – the limited size of my dye pot. I had to dye it in 2 batches, and rather than making 2 dye lots of the same color that might not match, I decided to do a blue and a green. The green dyed a little bit unevenly, and in retrospect it might have been better to have dyed the fiber before blending and spinning, but I think the darker areas are well distributed and will look consistently inconsistent when knitted up.

I had noted the thickness (12 WPI) and grist (approximately 1300 YPP) of the commercial yarn suggested for this pattern. I didn’t achieve the same grist; my brown yarn is the same thickness but is a little heavier, probably because I included some Suri alpaca. Suri just has no loft to it and made for a bit denser yarn. But I made a couple of swatches, and I’m happy with the gauge and the feel of the cloth so I think it will work nicely.

Conclusions

I’m very excited about how my yarn turned out, and I’m really glad I took the time to prep the fiber with quantity and consistency in mind. I also benefitted from studying the yarn suggested for my chosen sweater pattern so my handspun yarn would work as a substitute.

And I learned a few lessons.

First, the addition of Suri alpaca, even though it was probably no more than 10% of my yarn, made a real difference in the grist, producing a heavier, denser yarn than a similar blend without Suri. Second, I wish I’d dyed my Merino in small single-color batches before blending, instead of one long hand-painted piece of top – it would have prevented it from getting over-blended, and I’d have had a bit more color variation in my brown yarn. And last, I have more to learn about dyeing a large batch of yarn with even color, so it might have been wiser to dye the fiber at the beginning of the project, before blending.

Anne Schwarz started spinning 11 years ago after buying a soon-to-be mama alpaca, along with a bag of her prize-winning fleece. She found a beginner spinning class and a world opened up. She no longer owns alpacas, but their wonderful fiber is still her favorite.

Words and Photos by Rachel Simmons

I remember the first time I heard the word palindrome. I was in the 4th grade, and I thought it was awesome. I mean, could “straw warts” really read the same backward as it does forward? The answer is yes. And that makes me happy in a strange inner region of my brain. It makes me outwardly happy, too. Just say it out loud – “straw warts.” I bet you’re smiling now.

What does this have to do with spinning? On the surface, nothing. However, when you combine spinning with the goal of making cloth, you can create a palindrome warp for weaving. At least that was my goal in this experiment of wooliness. I am not sure if you’ve ever experienced the disappointment of the chaos that can come from randomly warping a multi-color yarn, but this technique avoids the weird mud through careful measurement. Many handpainted skeins of yarn have repeats, which means that if you can measure out the repeat, you can use it to create vertical color pooling in your warp.

This simply means, as long as you’ve measured correctly, the colors out to your warping peg turn back on themselves as you head back to your loom. (This would also apply to the down and back journeys on a warping board.) By taking advantage of a hidden symmetry, you can preserve the beautiful painterly effect of your handpainted yarn in the cloth you create. An excellent resource on creating cloth with palindrome skeins is from Syne Mitchell, in both her book Inventive Weaving on a Little Loom as well as her article on Weavezine.[1]

It is not hard to find a skein of yarn at your local yarn shop that can be used for a palindrome warp. Many (not all) hand-dyed yarns naturally have this repeat because of the way they are dyed. The real question was if I could create a palindrome skein of yarn by spinning a painted braid of fiber. My belief was that I could create this wonderful, mysterious color repeat through spinning in order to create a cloth with vertical color pooling that preserved a hand-dyed fiber’s beauty. I will state right up front that I was somewhat successful in this first attempt, but a first attempt was never expected to yield perfect results, right? I did learn a lot from this experience and have a lot of new ideas for future directions, as well as a very pretty skein of yarn.

My thought was that I could ensure a palindrome repeat by taking a braid of fiber and spinning it down the side from end A to end B and then flipping the braid to continue spinning from end B to end A. This would create a colorway that could fold back on itself. I am sure someone much cleverer than I has already given this technique of spinning a name, but I will call it the back and forth string cheese method. Using my Ladybug, on a 6.5:1 medium speed whorl, I got to work. The fiber I used was the repeating colorway Southdown by Hilltop Cloud.

A lot worked with this idea, but a lot didn’t work, too. First, it was a little cumbersome trying to manage the length of an entire 4 oz. braid as I spun. The length never shortened, either, because I never spun across the fiber, only down the side. In addition, this length created a really long repeat. I tried cheating by thinking a repeating colorway in the braid itself would shorten my repeats, but this did not actually help due to the variability in color group sizes. For example, the yellow color at the top of the fiber was much smaller than the one in the middle, and thus essentially was its own color group that could not be matched with a middle yellow. However, it is a lovely visual of how a colorway can turn back on itself. In future efforts, if I try this string cheese method again, I will have to considerably shorten the length of fiber I am using in order to shorten my repeat length.

I spun the fiber as a single that I then chain plied.

This, too, presented some issues. I introduced too much variability. First, there was the variability in spinning the single. For example, perhaps I lingered in one spot too long and altered the length of a color group. The color runs were a little short to take full advantage of chain plying, too. This yielded unwanted barbershop poling within my skein. I could not create exactly the same size loop on every ply, so this also affected the length of the color runs. In future attempts, a 2-ply yarn may give me more control over which colors land where, making the overall effect of the yarn more successful. I am also considering singles yarn – perhaps a better place to start though a trickier beast to warp. However, using a rigid heddle loom is fairly forgiving with yarn abrasion and I could try sizing the singles yarn prior to warping for added strength.

As a proof of concept, I warped a small section of yarn on a 10-inch SampleIt rigid heddle loom. The yarn itself was a worsted weight at 10 WPI, and I used a 7.5-dent reed. I warped 30 ends and wove a plain weave pattern. This is where the length of my repeat in the yarn became a little unruly. Ideally, a repeat should happen in a normal skein that can be wound in a 1.5–2 meter loop. The repeat would then be on the scale of inches. My repeat was on the scale of feet. My yarn could fold back on itself at 13 feet. That’s a little long. However, this proof of concept trudged ahead regardless of its lankiness. To see the whole sample, I had to use my front steps of my house.

I was able to match general color groupings. The color pooling was not as clean as I would like, but the cloth has distinct areas of color dominance. In the warp, the shift from the darker colors to the yellow was the most obvious vertical color pooling. I sampled with both a dark and light and medium tone weft to experiment how to create the cloth to make the warp threads visually come forward or recede back. I wove the weft at approximately 11 picks per inch for each of the 3 colors. The dark weft allowed the colors to show stronger than the light weft, but the light weft did show the yellow quite well. The medium tone hid the warp colors almost completely and would not be a good choice for a palindrome final project/spin, though it did create a pretty cloth in its own right.

The end goal, of course, was a beautiful cloth. This little sample I created had its own beauty, and more importantly, it made me even more excited to achieve my palindrome dreams. It is close but not quite what I wanted in my cloth, nor did it allow me the freedom that a better executed skein would allow. While this is the end of the first attempt, I will continue to try (and document) my efforts to create my own form of “straw warts” through spinning.

Rachel Simmons lives in Huntsville, Alabama with her 3 small boys and her very patient husband. She loves all things fiber, most things chocolate, and some things pink. She maintains her own modest fiber blog at http://www.yarntyouglad.com.

[1] https://www.weavezine.com/spring2008/wz_sp08_SyneMitchell.php.html