One Truth For All

Yesterday my fiber buddy and I went up to Orland, about three hours' drive to the north, to observe/participate in a sheep shearing. Shearing for spinners is different from shearing a meat flock, because the quality of the fleece really, really matters. Also, this were Cormo sheep -- a cross that includes Merino -- and they have wrinkly, delicate skin. There are inevitable nicks and scrapes to be dealt with.

I spent most of the day doing animal handling -- that's pretty interesting to me and it seemed like they had plenty of people to deal with the fleeces -- and she spent the day dealing with the fleeces.

I've put my (numerous) photos after the cut, and I'm still editing the video I shot.

Technorati Tags: fiber, shearing, sheep, wool

Just as I was starting to feel like I was running out of fiber to spin (really? ha ha ha), I got this lovely box from Morro Fleece Works:

Inside, we had two lovely fleeces, one from Sue Reuser (Flora, about 5 lbs), and one from Merry Meadows (Chloe, about 3 lbs). Both white, obviously, both Cormo. Both nice (though Sue's was the nicer, I admit).

After trading some with my lovely fiber buddy, I have slightly less of each plus a bonus bag of Merino. I'm not sure how it worked out that I thought I gave away a bunch of fiber and yet I think I ended up with more than I started with. There's some kind of fibermath going on there that is not entirely obvious to me.

Anyway, I think I might be set for fiber for the time being.

Technorati Tags: fiber, spinning, wool

Apart from working on the house and on a couple of projects I'm keeping on the down-low, we also took a nice little weekend road trip up to Seattle, to make up for not being able to go to Tokyo for Thanksgiving.

It was lovely. Here's the view from our hotel room:

We were a couple blocks from the Space Needle. It's much prettier in the fog than the last time we were in town, when the weather was warm and sunny and clear.

We saw the library, which is far more beautiful in context than in the publicity photos that somehow remove the entire city. We saw the Experience Music Project (hard to miss it, really) which still looks like a pile of dirty laundry. We had a nice dinner at Flying Fish. And on the way home, we went to Voodoo Donuts in Portland and got hassled by the recreationally homeless, which is apparently a local sport/tradition.

Technorati Tags: portland, seattle

I've somehow managed to not post about much of my spinning and other fibery hobby time during most of September. Well, it was a busy month with other things, including taking up some Facebook games, which is totally pathetic, I know. Also, I took two AREs, so that has to count for something.

Anyway, this will just graze over what I've been doing. I've put it in the extended entry because it ended up being a LOT of photos.

Technorati Tags: county fair, crafts, fiber, knitting, lace, spinning, wineries, wool

Cue your dye/die puns. Over the last three weekends, I took a class on natural dyeing at A Verb for Keeping Warm.

The first class was about mordanting. Kristine uses aluminum sulfate, which is a garden additive and thus relatively safe as a mordant. Many mordants are made from heavy metals like chromium, and they can be difficult to handle and dispose of.

We did our mordant bath in this large aluminum pot. Usually aluminum is a bad choice for dyeing, because it is highly reactive -- even the aluminum in this pot has an effect on the mordant. But if the effect is what you want, then what the hey. This almost looks like one of those crazy turkey fryers, but it is actually for making fair food, which brings us right around to my theme for the summer, which is Stuff Yourself Silly With Fair Food.

The mordant pot can be reused many times, adding more aluminum sulfate and water as you go. Eventually it gets really murky and needs dumping. If you happen to have hydrangeas, they love the stuff. So do most acid-loving plants.

After we'd weighed out our fiber and put it in the pot to stew for an hour, we sat around and talked about dyestuffs. You can buy concentrates of many natural dyestuffs if that's what suits you -- the benefits are a certain kind of predictability that is useful when you are dyeing on a commercial scale.

These are (dead) cochineal bugs. They live on prickly pears, and they make everything red. They are a foodsafe red dye -- any natural red colour in your food comes from these bugs. I'm thinking of giving some to a chicken as an experiment -- will the bugs turn the eggs red?

The concentrated powders are interesting to handle. This is a pot of Lac, which is where lacquer comes from. Many people have a strong allergic reaction to this, plus it smells terrible. That's why there's so much in the pot.

We talked quite a bit about the properties of each kind of dye, how mixing different things in changes colour, and on and on. My interest in natural dyeing is pretty academic, at least on this scale. I'd like to plant some dyestuffs and dye with my own plants, but I'm less interested in dyeing from concentrated powders produced in a plant somewhere.

Our next class, we dyed. The fiber had been sitting, damp, soaking up mordant all week. Now we mixed up a concentrated dye solution, put the fiber in it, and then put the fiber into mason jars.

We put the fiber into a dye bath in a bucket first, to get it all soaked up with dye. Then we stuffed it into the mason jar.

We set the caps of the mason jars on top loosely, then put them in water baths on the stove to heat up for an hour.

When they cooled down, they were set aside in their jars to sit for a week. You can get different effects by soaking the fiber for more or less time.

This is what greeted us this last Sunday. Twelve shimmering, jewellike mason jars full of fiber. You can see the dyes we used: pomegranate, madder, madder with cream of tartar mixed in, quebracho red, logwood grey, and logwood purple.

Our last class was all about washing. You can use a lot of water in washing that just gets wasted (if you don't have some kind of greywater system). So Kristine showed us how to waste less and get more out of the water we did use.

The key to not felting the fiber together is to handle the fiber as little as possible, but the key to saving water is pressing as much water out of the fiber as possible before each dunk. It's a balancing act.

When we finished, everybody had about an ounce of each colour to take home and finish drying. I'm thinking of carding mine together to make some batts of a larger amount of fiber so I have enough to make a real project.

I'm looking forward to taking more classes on natural dyeing, especially a dyer's garden class they're still working on developing.

Technorati Tags: art, crafts, fiber, dyeing

This month I'm taking part in a spinning race. It started after the Tour de Fleece, which is when spinners follow the Tour de France while spinning, and use it as a stretch of their own skills. I didn't do that because I had other commitments for July, but when a group of my online spinning friends decided to continue the fun with another themed race month, I joined in.

This month's theme is Fleece to the Finish, and the goal is to go from new fleece to finished yarn in one month. Now, I don't have much for new fleece hanging around the house, but I do have that black alpaca I've been very lazy about spinning. So I'm using this month to motivate myself to spin up as much of that alpaca as I can. It's destined to be 3-ply yarn, to be knitted into a warm (VERY VERY WARM) sweater for Noel to wear while biking across San Francisco every day. I'd like it to come out somewhere in the fingering range, which it might be; I'm not consistent enough to be sure of what my gauge is before the yarn is finished. When it's made into yarn, I'm thinking of overdyeing it with a purple to give it a more inky colour, and reduce the rusty look that naturally black animal hair always gets.

Here's my starting point: I had 19 batts of alpaca. Of those, I'd spun up one and a half onto two partial bobbins (I started one, took it off for a class, then misplaced it for a few days, during which I started another).

Here's bobbin #1 (which was really the second one I started while looking for the real first bobbin; sorry for being confusing, but I decided to number them by the order in which they are completed, not started):

And bobbin #2 waiting in the wings:

Hmm. I should count my remaining batts, because it kind of looks like there may be two and a half batts on these guys, not one and a half.

Anyway, last night I sat down to spin for at least an hour. We ended up watching a couple of movies (one documentary on TED, and Spies Like Us, both of which were disappointing in their own ways). But I did get a lot of spinning done, and ended up finishing the partial batt I had in the project bag. And here we are:

Tonight I plan to spin at least half a batt. That'll fill this bobbin and get me onto bobbin #2. I'll try to be less sloppy about my bobbin, too; filling it this unevenly can lead to twists and knots in the singles, which is Not Fun.

The plan is to spin three bobbins full of singles, then ply them together until all bobbins are empty, repeat until done.

Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn

I brought home a couple of locks from the fleece my fiber buddy and I are splitting, and today I washed up one of them as a reference.

That's washed on top, of course. Both locks were about the same size; this stuff poofs up very nicely in the bath. And the lanolin is very light, which is welcome. I just gave it one go-round in the soapy water (well, I actually use shampoo, because if it works on my hair it should be OK for fleece), and all the grease was pretty much gone.

The fleece is a cormo, entry #1193 from Sue Reuser, who as far as I can tell pretty much doesn't know how to produce a bad fleece. I'm thinking I may buy direct next year, if I have any need of fleece at all (which seems a little unlikely given how much fiber I have now and the fact that I'm going to two more fiber events before the end of the year).

Technorati Tags: crafts, fiber, wool

Today we joined some friends and drove down to Monterey for the Monterey County Fair and Wool Auction. Actually, mostly for the Wool Auction, though appropriate fair food was also consumed (Noel: corn dog; me: funnel cake and cotton candy).

I loved this fleece, but it went for way more than I could have possibly afforded:

Also, looking at it, I realized that I really do not want massive amounts of coloured wool. This was light enough that it would dye decently, but still, being grey took some value off it for me, as lovely as it was.

Not that there was not plenty of fleece:

Anyway, for the next few hours I sat and followed along on my auction list while knitting away at my latest project, which is the Icarus Shawl that was in Interweave Knits a few years ago. It's a nice, mindless lace pattern for most of the shawl, so modulo needing to be able to count while the guy was calling all sorts of numbers out, I made decent progress.

(I'm knitting it in some laceweight hand-painted alpaca I bought a couple of years ago and wanted to use up. There's nowhere enough shawl to use all 2400 yards, but I have a sort-of plan for the leftovers.)

Fiber buddy hlf bought three fleeces, one of which we're splitting (um, I think it might be the one under her at this point; she was a little giddy). We dropped them all off to go to Morro Fleece Works. It will eventually be delivered around November or later.

I think I'll end up with a few pounds of pencil roving, which is nice and easy to spin. Although I am happy with the fleece and excited about getting the end result, the drawback to buying at auction is that prices are very high (in auctions, the winner always ends up paying more than the object is worth because by definition nobody else was willing to pay that much). I think I like events like the Spinning at the Winery day better; the pressure is lower and the prices are better.

After the auction, we had lunch then made a brief tour of the livestock pavilion. This sweet grey alpaca flirted with us when it kind of looked like we might have edibles in our bags (if we did, the alpaca wasn't getting any).

And then the long drive home in the usual terrible Sunday traffic. I forgot how backed up it gets even on 101 coming North. I was always driving against it back in the school days; Noel was the one who'd get hit with that stuff coming back from a weekend with me in SLO.

I was intrigued by this place:

I guess they had really sold out, then.

Technorati Tags: county fair, crafts, knitting, lace, spinning

A few people have e-mailed me lately asking why I opted out of a recent high school reunion (20 years), or why I opted out of a recent college reunion. The answer is multi-part, but the primary reason is this: I am the most Google-able person in any graduating class I have been in.

Seriously. Type my name into any search engine, and my web site is the first result. I have one of the more unique names on Earth, and I've been creating content online since before the web was created. I've had my own domain since the early 90's, and I've had this domain since about 1995 or so, I've lost track. I live a high school and college reunion every day. My classmates get online, they go to a search engine, they type in my name, and bingo! I get this e-mail:

Hi, Ayse!!!! It's been soooo long! I can't believe I found you on the internet! I just got cable internet and looked up your name! What a blast from the past!! Remember when we did [thing]? I've been doing [things] and living in [place] and always wondered what happened to you!

Some of the pieces change, but it's pretty much the same thing. Some of these classmates stay in touch and we get to know each other again, in the cursory way you get to know somebody who hasn't bothered to stay in touch with you for twenty years, or even somebody you didn't know all that well to begin with. They add me as a Facebook friend, I return the favour. You know the routine. It's great, I love getting e-mail from people I actually know wanting to say hi, and it is nice talking to old friends. But it happens often enough that it's not as if I needed to go to a reunion to find out what happened to my old classmates.

Which brings me around to the next reason, which is that a lot of people just couldn't be bothered to stay in contact with me. It was about ten years after high school that I winnowed my contact list and thinned out the number of people I was willing to make an effort for. What I did was just stop keeping in touch with people who hadn't initiated a contact with me in five years. Despite my introvert nature, I have a lot of friends, some close and many more distant, and staying in touch takes time and energy on my part. I don't see any real reason to spend time or energy on people who can't be bothered to reciprocate when I could spend it on somebody who obviously does want my company. By definition, if one of my classmates hasn't bothered to even drop an e-mail saying hello, I see no reason at all to fly across the country to see them in person.

Which brings me to the third reason, which is that the timing of all the reunions in the last couple of years has conflicted with other things I wanted to do. Like the incredibly engaging series of seminars on building systems I took over the last three weeks (ask me about fire suppression). I already have planned travel back east for holidays later in the year, and we've had two unexpected and sad trips to Minnesota already this summer. We have an unbloggable but time-consuming event coming up in this week and possibly stretching on for more than a month. We have out-of-town guests, and family visiting. There are a few wool shows I want to go to, such as the Monterey wool auction this weekend. Then we want to actually have a little vacation together at some point, for the first time in years. Adding a weekend trip or two would require a really compelling reason.

And lastly, reunions aren't fun. The food is always terrible, there's always retrospective music (but pop, not the stuff I ever listened to) played too loud, and everybody wants you to play the role you had in high school or college. When I was at Smith I worked reunion weekend a few times, and nobody ever seemed to be having huge amounts of fun. The 5-year reunion I went to at Smith was OK, but I was getting over being seriously ill and I didn't need the extra stress of being around a bunch of people who hadn't treated me very nicely the first time around, even to see the ones who had been good friends. I had planned to stay an extra day and enjoy Northampton, then take the Peter Pan to the airport for old time's sake, but instead I called a cab and paid to change my flight because I just wanted to be home.

I go to Ithaca at least once a year. I visit Minneapolis regularly, too. Heck, we often drive across the country. I'm on Facebook and a dozen other social networking sites. I answer my e-mail relatively promptly. I think that's good enough.

So, finished my fourth-ever skein of yarn today. The Ashland Bay merino/silk was a really nice yarn to spin, but I have to say I kind of wish I'd plied it on the wheel; the spindle was a bit tedious.

Anyway, I did finally finish plying it last night, right at the very beginning of a dinner party. It was pretty heavy, the yarn plus spindle weighing in at a total of 6.0 oz.

This morning I wound it off onto my swift to make a nice big skein, then washed the skein in hot water, whacked it against the wall a couple of time to help distribute the twist through the yarn and bloom it up a bit, then threw it into the dryer (on the sweater rack) to dry off.

Then I went outside to turn the compost and play with the chickens, so I would not constantly be checking the dryer to see how it was going.

I came inside to a nice, even, fluffy yarn. It's about 24 wpi, which is somewhere in between laceweight and light fingering -- the yarn itself varies in thickness and it's hard to say exactly what weight it came out to. I have 555 yards (from 4 oz), which is enough to make a decent sized scarf thing; I'm thinking something lacy and large.

And because I just can't get enough, here it is with my novelty dime:

Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn