fiber

Spinning = Happiness

| Teresa Craighead

My, my, my … how the time does get away. Life intervenes with plans … and even hopes and dreams. The necessity of earning a paycheck often takes up the time we romantics would rather spend spinning, knitting, creating, or otherwise engaging in activities for which we do not get paid. Thankfully, we have friends who can drag us back into the worlds we love!

Arabella encouraged me to go with her to Mary Berry’s Fiber Retreat over Valentine’s weekend. I am so happy that I went! The entire experience was such a reminder how much I need creative input into my life — and I believe this is true for all of us, whether we realize it or not. It can become difficult to set aside the time, but the peace that a creative experience can bring into your life is so worth the effort.

various fibers for spinning
All happily spun during the fiber weekend

 

I LOVE spinning! But I haven’t done much of it in the last two years. The weekend was an immersion in luxurious and delicious fiber–so many types of wool, silk, camel, alpaca–it felt so good to get them running through my hands again. The retreat also included a multitude of workshops on knitting techniques, spinning, weaving and even dyeing. It was a lovely group (I think around 90 women) with knitting needles, spinning wheels and portable looms.

I was able to spin this gorgeous teal skein (top of pic) that I purchased from Christine, who owns Spinning Straw into Gold. It is a 50/50 blend of silk and a material called tencel, which is fascinating! Tencel is a fiber made from wood pulp, it absorbs dye beautifully, blends well with others, has natural breath-ability like cotton but can absorb a lot more moisture, AND it makes beautiful yarn!

I was also able to finish spinning the fabulous Jacob wool that I got from Cindy’s farm (Jacob’s Reward), and a wonderful art batt that Arabella had made.

The silk/tencel was wonderful to spin!

silk and tencil batt
Spinning silk tencel blend

The Journey of Corriedale

| Teresa Craighead
A Corriedale who wants to share!

Our lovely Corriedale sheep has decided to share his wool with us! We are thrilled–we LOVE wool! After shearing, processing, and carding, the lovely wool was formed into the roving that Arabella shared with me on my birthday.

Corriedale roving, ready to be dyed

We dyed the Corriedale in her high-tech dyeing center, and dried it outside on her drying frame (aka, trampoline).

Dyed roving drying outside

I took the dyed roving with me to my very first fiber retreat, Wildflower 2011, and happily spun it between workshops, which were all about color this year. I have discovered that dyeing wool is a creative process within a creative process, because the spun wool can look so different than the dyed roving–it is it’s own creativity!

Spun beauty! 

Arabella suggested that I ply this yarn with a thread, choosing one of the colors I wanted to bring out. Plying the yarn with thread gives me more final yardage of the wool, because otherwise I would ply the wool upon itself, and get half as much to knit with. So I choose a lovely teal thread from the fabric store.

I can’t wait to see how it turns out!

Finally, the Dyepot!

| Teresa Craighead

On a gorgeous Texas day in February (yes, we have those!), Arabella invited me over to learn some color dyeing techniques. She has a very high-tech operation going on in her kitchen:

Arabella's high-tech dye pot

Sometimes it’s nice to know that the practices from 10,000 years ago still work! Get a pot, get some water, get it hot, you can dye wool! Yes, that is a large aluminum mixing bowl set directly upon her electric stove burner, filled with water and roving. Do NOT boil the water, or you will end up doing something else that is 10,000 years old — Fulling. (You’ll have to click to get the rest of that story…)

The water should be hot, but not at all boiling or simmering. Add some vinegar. When I asked Arabella how much vinegar, she moved her hand as if she were pouring out vinegar from a bottle, and she said, “I put glug, glug, glug.” Classic instructions! (Good news: you can’t really go wrong. So glug, glug, glug, and you’ll be fine!)

So far we have roving

Roving ready to dye

we have the dye pot, some water, and some vinegar…..which makes delicious hot roving soup!

Soup, anyone?

Now we mix the dyes. We used Jacquard acid dyes. Mix the powder with water in a jar according to package directions.

Mixing the dye with water

Remember your color wheel from high school art class? It still works! We used our primary colors yellow, red and blue.

Add yellow...
A large syringe and a chopstick work perfectly!
Add red and blue...

With more high-tech tools such as a chopstick and syringe, add the dye and work it into the layers of roving by poking at them with the chopstick. You can also create additional colors by blending where the colors meet each other. Simply use the chopstick to move the roving a bit, adding more of whatever primary color you want to that area with the syringe. Stir a bit, and voila! new colors.

Mixing to produce green, purple, and orange

Let the roving soup sit on the stove until all the dye is absorbed into the roving. Like all things good, it takes a little doing before you’re going to feel like you’ve got it! Take the dyepot off the heat and let it cool down naturally. Once you can put your hands into the water, then rinse the roving a few times with the same temperature of water. You are rinsing out any unabsorbed dye, and the vinegar.

Rinsing the roving

Cooling and rinsing the roving is a S L O W process, and you should not be eager to hurry it up, or you can end up “shocking” the wool into felt!  Once the roving is very cool, you can put it in the spin cycle of your washer (on cold!) to remove excess water. Then air dry.

Air-drying the roving outside

Understanding “Dyed-in-the-wool”

| Teresa Craighead

Ahhh! I get it! Dyeing the wool before it is spun (i.e., dyed-in-the-wool) is the best way to ensure the color doesn’t fade once the wool is spun into yarn or thread, and then fashioned into a garment worn around town. The literal meaning of the phrase is simply a description of when the dye is added.

The phrase has evolved over time to mean something metaphorical as well. We use this expression “dyed-in-the-wool” to indicate a person who is committed to an ideal so deeply that it has become a permanent part of their being, as if they had been “dyed” that way prior to being “formed.” For example, I would say, “My dear Arabella is a dyed-in-the-wool romantic.”

Here, Arabella is rinsing some Corriedale roving that she dyed while it was “in the wool.”

Corriedale "dyed-in-the-wool"

I have been anxious to get my hands into the dye pot, and finally had opportunity at Arabella’s. She had received a 3-lb bump of lovely Corriedale, and shared a generous portion with me as a birthday present.

A “bump” is simply a bunch of roving, usually 1 to 3 pounds in weight.

A "bump" from a lovely Corriedale sheep

 

 

Here is what our lovely and generous sheep might have looked like when the wool was still a part of him!

Truly "in-the-wool!"

Gorgeous and generous sheep! They have been supplying us with fiber for our clothes, blankets, coverlets, coats and carpets for centuries!

Spinning Tips: Camel | International Fleeces

| Teresa Craighead

Spinning Tips: Camel | International Fleeces.

Check out International Fleece’s blog post on spinning camel fiber! Talia says camel fiber is 1/2 the price of cashmere, yet as soft with a micron count of 15-22; cashmere falls in the micron range of 14-18.5.

What’s a micron count?

Basically, micron count is a way to measure the quality of fineness or coarseness of fiber. A micron is equal to 1/25400th of an inch, or about a millionth of a meter! Special lab equipment is used to measure the actual diameter of each fiber in these tiny fractions. The lower the number, the softer and finer the quality of the fiber.

Click through to this brief article from bellaOnline about the three grading systems of fiber.

Did you know that the finest cashmere comes from the underbelly and throat of Kashmir goats primarily raised in Mongolia, Tibet, India and China? Lesser grade cashmere (thicker in micron count, and also shorter in length) comes from the Kashmir goat’s back and legs. It is said to take four years for one goat to shed enough wool to make just one sweater! No wonder it is so pricey!

Watch out once you start spinning luxury fibers such as alpaca and mohair. The incredible feel of the fibers in your hands is completely addicting, and soon you’ll be panting after some cashmere…so I am thrilled to hear Talia’s explanation that camel fiber is half the cost but in the same range as cashmere. More luxury fiber for less money!

You can find out more about these incredible fibers at the Cashmere and Camel Hair Manufacturers Institute (CCMI).

But you simply must go to Talia’s site to see the GORGEOUS luxury fibers she has available, especially the baby camel and bleached tussah silk blend. Oh my goodness, I just want to eat it!

 

 

Warm, Useful, and Beautiful…From Wool to Blanket

| Teresa Craighead
The mohair is the shiny, thicker single. The merino is the softer, fuzzier single.

Ta da!  The process still works! Take some beautiful, soft white wool from a merino sheep and some shiny, slick gorgeous white mohair from a goat, spin singles of each, and then ply them together for a lovely length of textured and interesting yarn.

Using US 10 (or larger) needles, knit with a pattern from f.pea for a baby heirloom blanket with a lovely scalloped edge. Add some color–in this case, a skein dyed aqua and salmon from Arabella, handspun thick and thin for extra texture and interest. Keep knitting–in airports, in the car, on lovely evenings at home, to avoid housework, when you should be working, etc.

Functional Art-a simply beautiful blanket

Bind off (loosely!) whenever you want to, or when you run out of handspun yarn. You have now participated in the thousands-year-old ancient collective of outfitting your family with necessary material items.

Archeologists seemed surprised to find intricate beauty when they uncover textiles (or art) from thousands upon thousands of years ago. Their surprise is odd to me–because as long as we have been human, we have infused our material objects with artistic beauty and creativity. This is what it means to BE human.

Useful...and beautiful!

The Spinning Universe Wants YOU!

| Teresa Craighead

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REALLY Old Designer Fabrics

| Teresa Craighead

A TIME magazine article, Science: Cave Cache, published Monday, April 8, 1985, describes some astonishing artifacts found in a cave in Israel, and dated around 9,000 years ago from today (give or take several hundred years). The article says that in addition to the oldest painted mask ever found, the artifacts include:

“…basket and box fragments made of woven rushes waterproofed with asphalt, delicate thumbnail-size human heads and a rodent figurine, carved wood and bone tools, clay, stone and wooden beads and a human skull adorned with asphalt. Perhaps most remarkable are the fabrics, which are woven in eleven intricate designs, some resembling knotted macrame, others fine mesh.” (italics added)

In a previous post, I described a tomb wall-painting found at Beni Hasan in Egypt, dated around 2000 BC, that depicts at least two weavers and a spinner in great detail.  That’s old!!  But the remnants described above date 5,000 years earlier than those tomb wall paintings. We are now stepping so far back into the past that it is fuzzy and mysterious. Who really knows what was happening in 8,000 BC?  It is precisely at the point of “fuzzy” and “mysterious” that our biases emerge. (There’s lots of room for MSU.) For many scientists and archeologists, “primitive” and “intricately designed” just don’t go together, and that interests me.

I thought of this assumed contradiction again as I read descriptions of Naalebinding as “primitive knitting.”  Primitive is most often used in a pejorative sense, implying not only from the fuzzy past, but also meaning “being little evolved, uncivilized, characterized by simplicity or crudity.”

You call this unsophisticated?

When I finally saw examples of Naalebinding, my first thought was “there’s NOTHING primitive about this!”  In fact, Naalbinding is a complicated series of intricate loops created with yarn threaded through a large needle’s eye, rather than looped with two straight needles, as we know knitting today. I will agree that this form of constructing garments is primitive, but only if we use THIS definition: primitive: “not derived by something else; basic.”

Naalbinding needles

Naalebinding is primitive in that it is the first form of knitting. Nothing about it is “crude, unevolved, uncivilized.” The technique produces quite lovely, smart, well-designed material objects such as dense, warm mittens, socks, hats, and sweaters. So, our 8,000 year-old ancestors not only made warm clothing to survive their winters, but they also expressed themselves creatively in design…isn’t creative expression the most basic way we are distinguished from animals?


The Free and the Strange…

| Teresa Craighead

Spin-Off magazine and website is, of course, the authoritative site for all things spinning. If you haven’t been there–GO!  However, be prepared.  I have found the sheer volume of information on the site can be…well…really overwhelming for someone who still has everything to learn. So today I wanted to point out two very interesting areas within the website that you can get to straight from this blog, and avoid the frustration of wandering around lost!

Lovely illustrations

The first area is a marvelous resource for information parceled out in manageable chunks–and it’s all FREE! The Spinning How-To page is a listing of short downloadable pdf’s on basic topics such as Introduction to Spinning, and Finding Balance.


The illustrations in a few of these little brochures are simply lovely, and satisfy my need to see the topic rather than read about it. Susan Strawn Bailey is credited for these elegant line drawings.

Plus, I love Spin-Off’s philosophy behind providing these simple and beautiful brochures–small print on the back cover reads, “For the general advancement of the spinning community.”

The second area I want to show you is in the Forum.  It’s an ongoing discussion of What’s the most adventurous fiber you’ve ever spun? Dryer lint?  The cotton from inside a pill bottle? Long locks of someone else’s grungy hair to be spun and made into a belt for his girlfriend?  EWWWW……

Now I don’t want to get snobby here, because I have definitely been bitten by the spinning bug, and one day if I run out of wool to spin, I just might find myself behind the camel shed at the zoo digging around for fiber…though I think I can safely say I’ll stay away from the human hair belt.