Oops, we’re alive

It’s been awhile since the last time either of us posted; sorry about that. We’ve both been pretty busy, and let’s face it, we both have ADD when it comes to long-term projects.

Boy: Whatcha doing?

Me: Updating S’s and my fiber blog.

Boy: A FIBER BLOG? You have a FIBER BLOG? Bahahahahahaha!

::stabbing ensues::

Anyway, someone besides the Boy asked about the blog on Ravelry the other day, which reminded me “Hey, it’s been seven months, I should post something…” except that now I’m not positive where to start. After Greencastle, I actually missed most of the festival season except for a day at Hoosier Hills (in which I won two blue ribbons for spinning, end shameless self-promotion here). S went to Corydon, and our friend JE was insanely lucky and got to go to Rhinebeck to help out at the Susan’s Fiber Shop booth. She and I also went to the SOAR marketplace for a day, and I came home with Abbybatts and a pound of brown Polwarth from Rovings.

Oh yeah! We both took spinning classes with Abby Franquemont at the end of the summer- I took the morning “Spinning for Production and Speed” class or whatever it was called, and S took the “Spinning for Socks” class the same afternoon. Can’t speak for S, but my class was lots of fun and went way too quickly, and I picked up a few little tricks that will hopefully improve my speed a bit. Plus, Abby had batts for sale.

On the actual spinning end of things, I’ve been reasonably productive this year considering that I do almost all of my spinning on a spindle (plying happens on the wheel, though). The Amazing Awesome Roving that I wrote about last time has been turned into yarn, though I still need to dye some white Cormo in a color gradient for stripes in the envisioned sweater. There has been a lot of other yarn created along the way, too, and some of it has even been knitted up into various objects, mostly socks and one small shawl/wrap thing that I really should get pictures of, because I think it’s gorgeous.

Lately I’ve also re-discovered how much fun my drum carder is, and that it is indeed possible to steam fiber in a crockpot, so there’s plenty of activity going on with those. I scored a huge haul of fiber-related goodness for birthday/Giftmas last week, and The Fold’s annual New Year’s Sale is coming up, so after that I may have to go on a stash reduction diet for awhile.  Not so hard to do when there are two pounds of Targhee and two of Polwarth undyed top to contend with, not to mention a bin of batt food, and stuff like the super-soft Polwarth from Beth’s that I got last year that I just haven’t been able to bring myself to spin.

(Take a wild guess as to what my current favorite fiber is. No, really, go ahead.)

M

On the internet I hear about people wanting to learn to spin or weave all the time without spending money on instruction. They either buy the absolute cheapest materials that will make it difficult to learn with, or they buy very nice materials and get upset when they don’t have the skills to make the best out of those materials. There are some great self taught spinners and weavers but there are many techniques that need to be taught or shown.

In the 20^th Century the United States developed a great tradition of guilds and conferences for fiber artists to attend. Guilds are typically local monthly meetings with programs that can cover a large quantity of topics, members will teach or give show and tell or teachers from other locations will travel to teach workshops and give lectures. Many guilds have libraries and equipment so that members can check out, this often includes notebooks from past workshops and events, out of print books and old magazines, current books, magazines, videos, and equipment like looms, wheels, drum carders, and sometimes other things many people wouldn’t even think they’d need (we have a rag cutter and a rope maker in my guild). The workshops brought in are often quite inexpensive compared to what they would be at a fiber festival, and you are learning with people you see on a regular basis.

Don’t be intimidated to join a guild because you’re new, they are used to new members, that’s what keeps them going. Go to a few meetings, volunteer to do something small even if you’re not a great spinner or weaver you can take notes, or maybe you have business connections in your town, can be the treasurer, or have lots of garage space to store things, or at least you can bake cookies for the meetings. You learn skills that will be very useful being around fiber artists and you’ll pick up skills at meetings. Then it’s your turn to stick around and help the new members.

Another complaint I hear keeping people from going to guilds is that they think no one in their area spins. There are guilds in most if not all states in the US. If there isn’t one that meets in your town, there is likely one within an hour, and even if you can’t make their normal meetings, ask them if they have study groups or if they can recommend someone closer to you for you to meet with. Spinners and weavers don’t want to be alone, we’ll do whatever we can to get new people interested. Many will do whatever they can to get you hooked. I’ve had people give me equipment and fiber, loan me wheels and looms that cost more than I make in a year (yeah broke college student speaking), and sit with me while I dropped spindles and pulled my selvedges too tight. But I’ve taken classes in spinning, weaving, fiber prep, color theory, and teaching weaving at my lys, through my guild, at a weaving conference (entry to come), and at fiber festivals.

Do not think that you are alone. Even if you live in the most urban city or in the most rural place far from any towns, there are spinners and weavers close. You can find them on Ravelry, Weavolution, or Google. Leave a comment and I’ll help you find groups.

S

Greencastle!

Well, it happened: S and M finally met in person for the first time at The Fiber Event at Greencastle! Unfortunately, while we did manage to obtain banana fiber, we didn’t set it on fire after all (thanks to the wind being a bit tempestuous), and we didn’t get to hang out for very long due to S’s crazy amounts of Real Life Obligations. Still, it was pretty awesome to roam around the festival together and hang out on a blanket in the parking area with our assorted friends and family. Joining us were Ellen of the blog Sheepwreck, Michael (a relatively new spinner who was attending his very first fiber festival), sisters Waldorf and Stadler, S’s mother, Kara, and my boyfriend The Buttface (whose apartment the Chicago contingent took over for the weekend).

Waldorf, Michael, S, M (and penisgun) and Ellen

One of the most fun things about meeting up in person with someone you usually only talk to online is finally getting to show off so many of the things you’ve discussed or only seen in pictures. This is especially relevant when the people in question are fiber nuts- there really is no substitute for the tactile nature of fiber. So, there was an immediate spate of “Hey! Check this out! Pet this! Oooh, right, look at this!” as S finally received her share of our massive World of Wool order from awhile ago and inspected the Wollmeise I’d brought to show her (she wasn’t that impressed), and I got to happily dig through the pile of books she’d lugged along. I also got to shoot her with my penisgun, shown above in its censored form (Ellen took and edited the picture, phooey).

Of course, we all hung out at Susan MacFarland’s and Trading Post Susan’s booths a lot, in addition to dashing between buildings, cuddling baby bunnies, ogling dyed fiber and raw fleece, and consuming way too much kettle corn. I got to show a lot of people my Very Special Spindle Case full of ultrafine 15-micron merino being spun on my Greensleeves Ethan Jakob. It was fun watching their reactions when they realized what the case was originally for.

I had a lovely chat with the people at Cormo 24/7, who had mounds and mounds of luscious Cormo and Cormo-cross colored top. While I was drooling over the various tops, a box from Ohio Valley Natural Fibers got dropped off, and contained within was four and a half pounds of this

ganked from Cormo 24/7's blog

processed into pin-drafted roving. It’s marvelously soft and fluffy and boingy, with hardly a nep to be seen. Two pounds of it came home with me; one before exiting the booth on Friday, and the other one as a gift from Ellen the next day after she heard me dithering about whether or not to buy everything that was left.

It’s been a little over a week since I came home with the amazing awesome roving, and I haven’t been able to keep my hands off it. Seriously, a wad of it is hanging out on the bed with me as I type this. Right now I’m trying to come up with a rough estimate of how much yardage (3-ply, approximately sport-weight after finishing) I’ll need for my very first sweater, and spindle-spinning madly away in the meantime. Yes, you read that correctly. I’m using a spindle (my bloodwood Bosworth mini) to spin the yarn for a whole freaking sweater. My plot to keep the finished yarn relatively consistent is to spin a bunch of 50g balls of singles, number them, and when I’m ready to start winding plying balls, I’ll mix the numbers up so that none of them are in order. This way, even if I fail at keeping the singles the same size over time, the end product won’t be super-thin at one end and thicker at the other or something. I think it was Amy King who wrote about this technique in SpinOff, so hopefully either it will work or I won’t suck at consistency. I’m already about eight ounces in, and am thinking about cobbling together elements from a few different patterns to create my ultimate dream sweater. Have I mentioned that I only figured out how to knit more than garter stitch last November, and have certainly never designed anything? This will be interesting.

Wow, I need to shut up about that roving and its associated project. They’ve taken over my brain.

M

Gossip Time!

I, like most spinners, have become obsessed with antique wheels.  I really don’t have space to put one (well my parents have one that really can’t be functional as decoration).  Here’s a cool one I saw last weekend at a mini fiber festival.

Closeup of  the flierS

The owner of this wheel had me read a little paragraph about this type of wheel.  While they are typically called gossip or friendship wheels they weren’t actually meant for two people to spin on at once.  They were meant for one person to use both hands drafting (long draw?) at once!  This was to bump up production speeds and they were intended for “bad women” possibly because those women were good with their hands?

And for a little gossip of my own, look what I’m spinning this week

Abby Batts!  I have five of these Magnolia batts, exact fiber content unknown but they’re likely merino with silk and silk noil.  Two and a half are already spun.  I think they’re going to become an Ishbel shawl.

S

Flax

For the COE you have to spin wool, silk, flax, and cotton equally to create yarns of different weights and textures.  As a spinner I pretty much have the wool part down, I may need to work on consistency of singles because I usually ply but I can manage.  I have some experience with silk and am looking forward to playing with it more.  But before I started researching the COE I had played a tiny bit unsuccessfully with cotton and hadn’t even knit with flax/linen commercial yarn or seen the fiber in person.

That changed when my spinners and weavers guild selected Linda Beckley from yarn farm as our spring 2010 spinning teacher.  The class was held February 13, 2010.  Linda started by having us set up distaves to hang our long line or strick flax on.

The distaff was made by filling a gallon milk jug with kitty litter then putting a 4 foot dowel with two diagonal slots at the top into it.  For the actual part the flax is mounted on we used three round basket reeds tied together into a sphere and tied them through the slots on the dowel.  When you begin to spin a flax strick you tie it into one of the loops at the top of the sphere.

Next we got to prep our own flax from scratch.  Linda grows her own flax each summer.  Just before the flowers fall off and seeds begin to form she pulls the plants and lets them dry.  Once the plants are dry she puts them in water and leaves them outside for several hot days.  This rotting process is known as retted flax.  What she brought us to start with was full plants that had been retted and dried again.

Linda had us each lay four or five plant stalks on the break which is basically a sawhorse with an arm that comes down and breaks the hard exterior off the long strings of the plant.  You move the length through the break so that the dust falls off of the whole thing and you have mostly very long fibers.

Here Linda is almost finished breaking her flax.  You can see the untouched retted plants in the trash bag at the bottom of the picture.

At this point the Flax is beginning to look spinable but it is not quite yet.  Now you flick it through a series of hackles where the points are getting closer together.  I had problems with this part, I couldn’t get the flick angle right.

Ulla was much better with the hackles than I was.   The parts that do not stay in the main strick when flicked through the hackle are called the tow fibers.  The tow is made up with shorter fibers and is like combing waste in wool.  The long parallel fibers are the strick used for the moothest linen yarn.

Once you have separated the strick and the tow, you tie the strick onto your distaff and begin to spin.  Linda had us put plumbing insulation over our bobbin cores so that we started with a thicker center for draw in purposes and so that we could find ends better when we did break our yarn.  Which we did, a lot.

First we spun the flax dry.  Flax is strongest when it is wet and does not have the cuticle of wool so the yarn spun dry is very fuzzy, it doesn’t smooth in.  I was having enough problems getting the technique of drafting off the distaff that Linda gave me flax she had prepped so I didn’t have to fight my own errors.  She told us if we got one inch of correctly spun dry linen she would be very proud of us.  I think I got two inches.  Maybe.

Then Linda let us have water!  The water wasn’t actually water but flax seeds boiled in water with a little bit of vinegar added in to prevent molding.

Here Linda is spinning with her water cup in her lap and drafting from the flax on her distaff.  She can spin flax without looking.  I can spin wool without looking sort of, but flax no way.   People freak when they see me spindle spin without looking at all.  I think it comes from the ADD part of my brain.

We also spun a a linsey woolsey where we carded tow flax with some wool (I believe lincoln longwool) for a striping singles.  Linda says she likes to  use linsey woolsey in heels and toes of socks and then just 100% wool of the same color for the rest of the sock, it wears well and is more natural than nylon.

I brought home my distaff and bobbin insert and bought a few ounces of strick flax so I’ll work on that at some point and get back to you about it.

S

And along comes Butthead

Hi. I’m M. It was S’s idea to start a blog chronicling our fiber-related shenanigans, and she thinks we should start off by introducing ourselves. I really suck at that, so bear with me here.

I started spinning by random chance in November 2008- my Boy and I visited a yarn shop in Columbus and I was confused as to why they were selling sticks with saucers on them for ridiculous amounts of money, so I asked the lady at the counter what the deal was. She just so happened to be the resident spinner, and there weren’t any other customers in the store, so she sat me down at a table and explained the basics of turning floof into string. I left with the Fall ’08 copy of Spin-Off, an overpriced CD spindle and a braid of nasty blue Kool-Aid dyed crap. Boy left with a stuffed toy sheep that he’d been amusing himself with by making it hump everything in sight- it makes violated baaing noises when you shake it up and down at a certain angle. Humpy’s accompanied us to several fiber events since then.

So when we got home from Columbus, I summoned my mighty Google-fu to dig up some more information on this crazy “spinning” thing, and spent the next couple of weeks reading lot of webpages and experimenting with making toy wheel spindles and turning my blue crap into the functional equivalent of steel wool. The holidays flew by, and then two things happened that solidified my addiction to all things fiber: I discovered The Fold in Marengo, Illinois, and someone told me there was a lot of information about spinning on some knitting website called Ravelry.

And the rest, they say, is history.

What!? I needed *something* to wrap singles on!

Meet S

I’m S. I’m a college student in Indiana working on an education degree with an arts emphasis.  I come to spinning from both knitting and weaving.  I bought a Lendrum DT complete last fall and completely love it, I feel it up every day.  I love to spin all sorts of yarns from super teeny fine cobweb to super bulky, smooth, bumpy, everything.  I have an interest in the traditional novelty yarns though I usually spin two and three ply sock weight.  I am up for anything spinning wise, if someone provides them, I’ll spin Barbie head artyarn. One of my goals for the COE is to knit a pair of panties out of superfine merino for a sample. The part I’m most concerned about the COE is spinning consistent cotton singles of different weights when now it just looks like my cat vomited another cotton ball up.  My fiber goal in life is to marry Lambspin’s son and inherit her wheels, looms, new spindle collection, and stash. We have a lot coming up on the blog so be sure to stick around.  I’m taking a class in spinning flax this weekend, that will be my first real entry.  <span>

Hello world!

“Hi we’re S and M. We’re two American Kids from the heartland. Oops wrong story, we’re two twenty something spinners from the midwest who haven’t even met… YET! We’re starting on the HGA COE in Handspinning with the goal of completing in 2013. We’re going to blog, videotape, and podcast about our adventures and will hopefully become famous spinners who you all want to know more about.”