TwistedLoops

I spent the last weekend up at Sock Summit with Kelly, Melissa and Alyse.  We had a great time.  I didn’t get into any classes, but I did do quite a bit of shopping.  There was so much more I could have bought, but I tried to keep my purchases down.  I tried to keep the buying to vendors I wouldn’t see again soon, or deals that I just couldn’t pass up.

First up is some more roving from Creatively Dyed. I purchased from them at Black Sheep Gathering, but they won’t be on the west coast again for a while, so I took the plunge and purchased some more.  This is 8 ounces of the merino/tencel blend.  This is my first roving with tencel in it, so it should be interesting to spin.

Next is some Yummy Superwash Sport 3-ply from Miss Babs.  They’re each 255 yards of sport weight yarn.  I’m thinking it should give me enough to do a long-legged, heavily-cabled sock pattern.  I’d never seen the Miss Babs yarns before, but I hope they knit up well.  There were some really lovely colors and nice yarns in a range of weights.  If it knits and washes as nicely as I hope it does, I could definitely see additional purchases in my future.

These are Stitch Savers from 5elementknitr.  It’s such a simple but brilliant idea.  Short sock-sized crochet hooks on key chains so you always have one with you.  I stopped in on Sunday to pick up one for myself and one for Kelly, Since she had a buy three for a set price deal, I now have two of them.

I picked up some Cherry Tree Hill solid and semi-solid sock yarn.  They were clearing it out at the Cherry Tree Hill booth, and I couldn’t pass up the deal.  I’m thinking that these two colors, jade and mulberry, will make a really bright, modern-looking two color sock pattern.  I’m thinking one of the longer knee-sock styled ones would be perfect.

This rug was so much fun that I had to get one.  It’s by Lantern Moon and was available at several of the vendor booths.  I put this one on hold when the market opened on Saturday morning.  I’m not sure that there were any left by the afternoon.  Right now it’s in our entry hallway.  I’m not quite ready to have it outside and exposed to the elements.

This may well be my favorite (and least expensive) Sock Summit purchase.  I’ve been wanting a WPI gauge for my spinning wheel.  How can you pass up a bamboo one that looks like a sheep?  I know I couldn’t.  It’s from Girl on the Rocks, and she’s got them for sale on her etsy site.

Now I just need to make a cute way to hang it off my wheel and I’ll be set!

There were a ton of wonderful vendors that I hadn’t seen before, but I couldn’t buy from all of them.   Some of my other favorites were:

• The cashmere blend sock yarn from Mackintosh Yarns (Kelly got some of this)
• The adorable yarn lollipops from Lollipop Cabin Yarns
• The fabulous box bags from SplitYarn – all of the fabric patterns I liked on Saturday morning were gone by the afternoon
• The vendor with the vintage knitting accessories (I don’t remember the name), but they had these adorable beehive-shaped yarn containers.  It made me want to start collecting vintage knitting accessories.

All in all it was a really great event.  I don’t know what the plans are for the next one, but if it’s in Portland again, I’ll definitely attend.

I decided to join the Tour de Fleece group over on Ravelry.  The idea is to spin every day the Tour de France rides, if possible.   It starts today, July 4th and runs through July 26th with a couple days of rest, July 13th and July 20th.  I figured planning to spin just about every day for a month should help me improve my spinning and become more consistent.

I’ve been working on cleaning and dyeing a fleece that was given to me.  I had no idea how much work it was going to be.  I started this morning by dyeing up the rest of the fleece.  I dyed three batches – yellow, orange, and green.  Since it was a hot, sunny day, I laid out the wet locks on the floor of the greenhouse.  It was over 100 in there today, and the locks dried quickly.

In the afternoon, I sat down to play with my new (borrowed) toy.  Kate lent me her drum carder.  I had so much fun!

I made holiday themed batts.

I made a whole rainbow of batts.

I’m not planning to spin these as they are, I do plan to blend them.  But, this was the first pass on the drum carder to turn the locks into batts.  I hand-teased each lock and then ran them through the carder.  I can’t believe how much vegetable matter was still in the locks.  I thought that I’d done a great job of cleaning the fleece.  I managed to get a lot of it out, but there are still bits of it in the batts.

When that was all finished, I actually sat down to spin for a bit.  I started spinning the watermelon batts that I made at Fiber Fun day.  I figured that watermelon was an appropriate theme for this summer holiday.

Happy Fourth!

I had a great time at Black Sheep Gathering last Saturday with Kate.

There were no yarn purchases this year, but there was a lot of fiber purchased.  I didn’t have a huge fiber stash before, but now I’m fairly satisfied with my stash.  I’m going to post in the order of purchase.  I’m not sure that there was a method to my buying, but I’m pleased with the fiber I came home with.  On to the details…

First up, 10.2 beautiful ounces of Blue Faced Leicester Top from Diacentra Designs in the colorway Madrona Dark.  It’s a soft blend of dark red/maroon, slate blue and gold.  It really became a tough color to capture with the camera.  I know that the photo here does not do it justice.

I purchased this fiber of purples, blues and greys with the colorway name Heather.  I looked at this one for quite a while before I got it.  I wasn’t going to, but I’m such a sucker for purple.  It’s a Wolf Creek Wools blend of 70% superwash merino and 30% alpaca top, 4.3 ounces in total.

Next up, 2 ounces of 80% merino, 20% angora roving.  It’s Bunny Patch Fiber from New Hue Handspun in the Ancient Roses.  This one was a bit of an impulse buy.  I wasn’t sold on the roving by looking at it while walking by.  As I stood around waiting for Kate to purchase some, I noticed she was selling hanspun out of the roving, and I really loved the look of it.  I decided to buy some and see if I could spin a yarn as nice as the ones she had.

Next, 8 ounces of Superwash Merino from Crown Mountain Farms in the colorway Hey Jude.  It’s a blend of purples, blues, greens, yellows, and oranges.  From talking with them at their booth, this is a new colorway for them.  This is the same vendor that I purchased my alpaca lace from last year for my Icarus shawl.  I loved the yarn, so I’m hoping to love this roving.

At the Tactile Fiber Arts booth, I picked up 4 ounces of a natural colored alpaca silk blend.  It’s 80% alpaca and 20% silk, and so soft.  I admired it several times before stopping by to pick it up.  I can’t even begin to be able to explain how soft this stuff is.  I also love the natural black color with the silk blended in to lighten it up.  I think this is going to be a dream to spin.

Finally, on my way out of the show, I stopped by the Creatively Dyed booth.  I debated for a while, but finally walked away with 8 ounces of the 70% Wool, 30% Seacell blend.  It’s mostly orange, with lots of blues and greens blended in.  If I were naming the color, I’d call it Key West, just a vibe I get from the color scheme.

Yesterday, Linda had us over for Fber Fun Day.  What is Fiber Fun Day?

There was dyeing of fleece and fiber.

 

There was lots of spinning.

 

We had our own Fiber Bus full of fiber to try and buy.

 

For extra fun, there was drum carding.

 

I didn’t do any dyeing, but I did take an opportunity to play with the drum carder.  I carded some yellow and blue merino top that I dyed a month or so ago into this big fluffy batt.

I also purchased some fiber and carded up these watermelon colored batts. I used a nice rosey pink-red and a neon green. I also mixed in some sparkly firestar to give it some flash.

I decided to post about how I spun my fiber for the local spin-along that I mentioned in an earlier post.

First, I decided to divide each of the colors in half by weight so that I had two piles with equal color amounts.  In each pile was 0.5 ounces of the blue and screaming green, and 1 ounce of the tropics color.

I took one of the piles and decided to divided it further, and set the other aside. I visually divided the screaming green and blue into four equal sections.  I created eight equal sections of tropics.  Then, I combined the colors into four bundles, each consisting of 2 tropics, 1 screaming green, and 1 blue.

I then took the strips and twisted them into small balls of roving. I may just have to post a few photos of them because they were so fun to photograph.

I then repeated the steps with the second half of the roving, and ended up with eight bundles.

My plan for spinning was to use a short-forward draw.  I’ve developed my own natural backwards draw, and I still struggle with the short-forward draw (which seems to be the way that most people are taught to spin), so I wanted to challenge myself to spin all of it using that technique and see how it goes.  I wanted to spin four of the eight bundles onto each of two different bobbins and then ply them together.

For the actual spinning I held a bit of all colors of the roving in my hand at the same time and spun them.  Sometimes I drafted the colors separately, and sometimes I drafted them blended.  In the end, I was trying to create some gradual color changes in the final yarn.  This is what it looked like on the two bobbins.  At this point in the spinning, it felt stiff and wiry.

Once I plied it, it softened up a bit.  It wasn’t as wiry as it was as a single.  When plying, I made an effort to use a lower amount of twist in the ply then I usually do.  I definitely have less twist, but I think I like my high-twist plying that I usually make.  I love how the bobbin got a stout barrel shape with all of the yarn plied on it.

I found it interesting while plying that a lot of my screaming green areas seemed to meet up and be plyed together.  I’m not sure how this happened, because it happend much less frequently with the blue.

After soaking the yarn, it became even softer than it had been after plying.  There are even some fluffy parts.  In the end, it’s 140 yards of 10 WPI yarn.

I’m suprised by how much the green and blue are still prevalent in the final yarn, I was really thinking that they would have blended together more effectively.

You can see some areas of the yarn where there was some barberpole effect with the green and blue.

This yarn has so much halo and fuzziness. It almost made it hard to photograph.

I’ve learned a few things while spinning this.  This is the first time that I’ve actually spun roving; almost everything else I’ve spun has been commercial combed top.  It’s definitely different, and drafting seemed harder for me.  I had to slow down my wheel to the lowest ratio to try and spin.  My worsted, short-forward draw is not reliable at all.  I got a lumpy, somewhat inconsistent yarn.  I’ll definitely need to practice more in the future.

I’m anxious to see how this yarn knits up.