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- Law of Magnetic Attraction (2)
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- Practise Spinning
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- Three Balls Full
- A Class for Spinning
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- Cable-Down Raglan: Repeat #2
- Cable-Down Raglan: One Skein In
- Cable-Down Raglan: It Burns
- A Few Tales of Cooking and Learning
- Three Photos from Elsewhere
- Too Much Jelly
- What I Did All Weekend (and Today)
- Experiments in Alcohol
- How Many Friends Do YOU Have?
- Cold and Damp in the Netherlands
- Amsterdam in the Fall
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June 21, 2009
Finnish Wheel Finishing
The Finnish spinning wheel arrived by Fedex on Friday, and we unpacked it to great interest from the dogs. I spent some time cleaning it as it had been in a house with two smokers for a very long time and needed something to smell less smoky.
Then Noel took apart the flyer that was broken and cleaned it out, and put it back together with glue and a couple of wooden pins (sometimes known as toothpicks).
Once the pins were trimmed down, the flyer was as solid as it could be. We had a few more things to fuss with to get the bobbin to spin smoothly, but soon enough I put a drive band on the wheel and spun up some Dorset wool I had left over from a class. One of the hooks broke off; they're all kind of right on the edge of breaking in half so it might be time to just replace them all. But the thing works. See:
We figure that's the first wool spun on this wheel in 50 years.
In short: this wheel wants to go fast. It does not like being treadled slowly and handled cautiously. It likes to be on its fastest ratio and treadled like a bandit. Also, it eats fiber for lunch. Not a beginner wheel. But it's going to be a lot of fun.
Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning
# Posted by ayse on 06/21/09 at 6:55 PM | Comments (2)
June 16, 2009
Law of Magnetic Attraction
There's got to be some kind of law somewhere that says that when you have an [obscure item] you are more likely to be offered additional [obscure items]. So we end up with Noel owning 29 accordions, and now I have 2 spinning wheels.
A week ago Noel's grandmother died, and when we went out for the funeral we also spent some time dealing with her possessions, among which was this very nice spinning wheel.:
She never used it: I asked her about spinning on our recent trip to see her, and she said it was her grandmother's wheel, and that several families shared it. This is a wheel that has been used and broken and worn down and repaired and used some more. Here's the flyer: the part that adds twist to the fiber and then winds it onto the bobbin. You can see from this that it's a double-drive wheel with two ratios available (I didn't measure them). At some point the flyer broken in half and was repaired with brass wire. That repair is suffering now, so we will repair it again, with dowels and glue this time.
When I tried out treadling the wheel, it ran like a dream despite having spent decades in an attic. One reason was that the place where the wheel axle rests on the uprights has a sliver of metal as a bearing point: no wood to get gunked up or wear out. A nice touch. (This photo taken with the wheel partially disassembled, so the decorative finials that cover the ends of the supports were off.)
Here's my favourite part of the wheel: the treadle. Worn with time and use. A little damaged. This is where people interact with the wheel, and this is where you see how this was a valued and well-used tool.
On the bottom of the treadle it says "No. 28"; Grandma thought they'd brought the wheel from Finland, but this is the only thing that gives me pause about that. In several other places on the wheel we found "No. 28" written in pencil. That could have been done by the maker, in which case it was made in the US. Or it could have been done in the course of a repair job.
On the bottom of the bench it says, "New York Mills, Otter Tail County, Minnesota," which could again be written on there well after building or by the maker.
Wherever this came from, it's an honour that I get to have it. Noel and I disassembled it and packed it carefully for shipping. It will arrive later this week.
So that's wheel #2.
In the meantime, I've been doing an extensive teardown and rebuild of the first wheel, mostly to deal with a bit of stiffness in the treadling. I took it all the way apart, cleaned it, and greased it. Then it popped right back together. It's spinning better now.
I also did some spindle sampling of the Teeswater fleece I picked up at Retzlaff. I tried a semi-carding technique (left) and a sorta-combing (right) technique, and I liked the carding results much better. I will need to try real wool combs on this, though.
And I also did some quickie sewing, whipping up a pair of drawstring bags to store the alpaca fleeces in. I got some more fabric to make more of these, and actually spent some time figuring out what it would cost to make them, but unless I got the fabric basically for free and paid myself minimum wage, nobody would buy them for what it cost to make them.
And finally, a sneak peek at a little project I have going. I'm still working out some details, but I hope to have something bloggable in the next couple of weeks.
Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning
# Posted by ayse on 06/16/09 at 7:15 PM | Comments (2)
June 6, 2009
Spinning Day at the Winery
I spent most of today out in Livermore at Retzlaff Winery with my awe-inspiring fiber-shopping buddy. It was good times from beginning to end. Starting with getting to park down the rows of the vineyard:
I had been to the winery before and was curious about how they would handle parking.
We got there right at the beginning, because the shopping buddy wanted to get some fleeces from Janet Heppler, and the best ones were sure to go fast. Sure enough, she snatched up two really lovely fleeces -- one of them one the sort of fleece that even people who don't know how to check a fleece look at and know is good stuff. That's Janet in the blue shirt, shopping buddy kneeling down (to write a check, not to be knighted), with the two fleeces beside her.
As she was dropping the fleeces off with a processor to get them cleaned and into a spinnable form, I noticed this:
4 lbs. of Teeswater wool, washed and ready to prep. So I bought it. That's enough for a couple of sweaters.
There were many many kinds of fiber there, some less tempting than others. I know wool spins up to look quite different from how it looks as fiber, but there was something about this one that was less than inspiring. It did make me kind of want some cotton candy, though.
Also represented were some vendors with stuff other than wool, like the ubiquitous Carolina Homespun. I had thought I might look at spindles and maybe get some carders, but I'm happy with the spindle I'm working with now and I'm still dithering over carders since I don't know how to judge them except by weight.
I also tried the Schacht Ladybug wheel there, and it was nice. Not, like, save me a couple hundred bucks on a spinning wheel nice, but I'd spin on that nice.
After a while most people slowed down on hitting the booths (and the very best fleeces sold out), and we settled into a large group of spinners.
I decided against lugging my wheel along, and brought the merino/silk I've been working on. I've been being all anal about cop formation on this spindleful, and it's very gratifying. A layer of parallel wrapping all nice and tight, then a layer of criss-crossing to lock it into place. It's working very nicely for me, with only one small collapse that I could have avoided (I unwound the cop onto my hand to the point of collapse, then fixed it). I admit that most of this spinning was done on Thursday at a class about solar water heating, but I did make some progress today.
At the end of the day, the shopping buddy finally decided to get one of those nifty sheepskins she'd been ogling all day. She really wanted the goat, but it was not washable because of how it had been processed. So sheepskin it was. She loves it. Her cats will loooooooove it.
She and I also split a grey Pygora fleece. This is my half, about 17 oz. It's marvellous stuff, soft and lush and curly.
And I got a couple of alpaca second cuts (not the same as sheep second cuts; they're shorter but still workable). In all I brought home the Pygora plus these:
Clockwise from upper left, that's 16 oz. of white alpaca, 16 oz. of black alpaca, and the Teeswater.
I think I'm set for fiber for a while now.
Technorati Tags: spinning, wineries
# Posted by ayse on 06/06/09 at 9:59 PM | Comments (2)
May 30, 2009
Be Still, My Metal Pot
I've been incompetently building a steam distillation rig this last week or so. I started with this pile of stuff, some scrounged from neighbors or junk piles, some bought at thrift stores. The squirrel was Goldie's contribution.
First up was drilling a hole in the pot lid, which Noel did for me with a fine step bit. I won't say how I attempted the job but I will say it involved that ball-peen hammer there and made quite a racket if no progress whatsoever.
The hole in the lid allowed me to put a compression fitting there to hold the condenser coil in place. Then I could move on to making a rack to go inside the pot and hold my material to be steamed above the water bath.
So we have a weird metal plate thing from the Sally Am, some long bolts, some washers, and some high-temperature adhesive intended for making copper coloured gaskets. Good stuff.
I glued it all together like this and with any luck, tomorrow morning it will be a usable rack that sits just far enough up in the pot to stay out of the water bath.
This afternoon's fun was making a water bath for the condenser. I used the old bucket from the chicken waterers, and spent a good half hour wrestling with the copper tubing to get it in there. Some aquarium silicone around the hole for the drip-out, and 24 hours to sit and ponder its sins, and we will be ready for a test run.
Now to decide what to distill first. I'm thinking roses, since we're sort of all overloaded with roses out front right now.
# Posted by ayse on 05/30/09 at 6:27 PM | Comments (0)
May 28, 2009
Of Spinning and Wheels
I've been plowing away at my latest spinning almost without incident, although this time I'm trying for as thin as possible so there's been a lot of broken yarn and angry putting away of the project until it behaves.
Today's milestone is that I hit the halfway point on this fiber, which I want to 2-ply, so it's time to start another copp (and not a moment too soon as this one was starting to get unstable).
Here we are this afternoon. From the left: a 100ml separatory funnel for scale, the roughly 2 oz of single, my new spindle (more on that in a sec), and the remaining fiber (merino/tussah by Ashland Bay).
I'm pretty happy with how this single has spun up. I've been paying a lot of attention to getting a consistent amount of fiber in my drafting triangle, and working hard on staying as thin as feels stable. I'm still working out good copp shape; as you can see I had a bit of a collapse at the bottom on this one, so for the next half I'm going to try criss-crossing the single as I wind it on.
So, the new spindle. A Bosworth midi, purchased this afternoon at Carolina Homespun, where the charming and efficient Morgaine showed me an endless stream of wheels (well, about six of them) while handling customers, friends, and a cat who was doing laps around the house. Her shop is amazing and if you ever get a chance to see it, you must.
Anyway, I felt the need for a nicer spindle then either of my two (heavier) Schacht spindles, and this was sort of in the middle of what I felt was a nice weight/shape range. Also, it means I now have enough spindles to make a 2-ply yarn without winding off onto skewers.
As far as the wheel tryout went, I'm down to three. I loooooooved the Reeves 30". It spins like fricking buttah. I could spin on that puppy forever. I felt moisturized when I got up. That was how nice it was. However, it is also $1600 in the configuration I tried (cherry wood; it's cheaper to get ash, but not, like, I'll take two cheaper).
Somewhat less expensive was the Lendrum folding wheel. It spun really nicely and reacted to me just the way I expected. An awesome wheel, and it has a bunch of additional ratios to allow me to spin faster (and thus finer). Or the Schacht Matchless, which spun equally as well (but doesn't have the option of such high ratios). But if I were going to (ahem) have two wheels, one being the Reeves Buttah, it would make more sense to have the other be a folding wheel that would be more portable.
Hah.
So I think I'm going to dither over this for a while, mostly deciding whether to get the Lendrum with high-speed kit or just the plain Lendrum.
In the meantime, I'm not totally without resources. I have this "placeholder" wheel to tide me over until I know what I really want (and one thing I really want is to have the orifice on the other side of the wheel). It's a Clemes & Clemes from the 70's, double-drive, single treadle. (Clemes & Clemes is a Bay Area wheel maker, and they just recently re-started making wheels.) It needed some repair but nothing not obvious (the drive band had inexplicably been attached in such a way that it could not work and no sensible person would expect it to, one of the bobbins was unglued, and there was a ridiculous amount of fiber wedged into the wheel hub). My main job lately has been oiling it, endlessly.
It's working OK. Morgaine gave me some good pointers about how to arrange myself in front of it to make it work better, and suggested I use a heavier oil. In the meantime, I admit that I find it so frustrating that I often find myself just using the spindle because it is so much easier and less of a hassle.
Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn
# Posted by ayse on 05/28/09 at 6:11 PM | Comments (0)
May 4, 2009
Revised Lace Design
The AIA convention last week ironically made me incredibly busy while also affording me a lot of time to knit. So during many many hours of sessions, I did this test swatch of the lace patterns I've been revising for my design project.
I work out stitch patterns in crochet cotton, because it is a) cheap, and b) generic enough to let me see what I am doing. I usually ravel a swatch like this and re-use the cotton many times (I've been using the same bit of cotton for all six of the swatches I did for this project, for example). There's a value to saving a swatch of a yarn you actually use for the pattern, but very little to saving sketchy swatches of stitch patterns when you're working out what kind of decreases you want to use.
I spent a lot of time working out how to get the patterns to flow into each other, and I think I mostly have it (there's one funky area there where a pattern starts out a bit too soon, but that's easy to fix). The drawback to doing this test in crochet cotton is that it looks terrible, even more so because I don't generally wash and block my swatches at this stage, but I'll live.
Anyway, I'm mostly done with the lace pattern designs for this except the really hard parts, which are the edgings. I've got some sketches of what I want for the neckline, and a whole chart plotted out for the bottom edging, but the exact mechanics of how to do it were a bit beyond me by the last day of the convention, so no progress there so far.
Once I get the edgings worked out, I will knit a couple of samples in the real yarn, so see what size needle I want. I'd like something a bit denser than this fabric, so I can see possibly having to buy some needles (this was done on a size 3). I have a good selection of smaller needles, but not a full gradation in the range I'm dealing with.
Technorati Tags: crafts, design, knitting, lace
# Posted by ayse on 05/04/09 at 3:47 PM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2009
Finer Spinning Attempt, Plus Design
Having made one massively hugely chunky yarn (that knitted into the World's Ugliest Hat, the sight of which I will spare you), and then one yarn that was just too thick for my usually kind of knitting, I'm now attempting a thin yarn. I'm not sure I'm getting it, but I am getting a bit thinner. I bought a smaller spindle, which seems to help.
This fiber is a merino/tussah mix, from Ashland Bay. The wool is not bothering me, but I've found merino doesn't tend to (yay). I'm doing better at spinning the same thickness, even if that thickness might not be the thickness I really wanted.
I'm also getting neater at making my cop.
To deal with shoulder pain, I'm only drafting out as much fiber as I can with my arm extended in front of me. That doesn't hurt as much, and even if it is slower, I can spin for longer.
In other fiber-world news, I've gotten much further along on my lace design, thanks to an all-day workshop on LED lighting (fascinating subject, but I always doodle in class, so working out problems in my lace charts fits in very nicely).
I've made this modified "fountain lace" pattern (please ignore the mistakes in there; some things had to get worked out live). Now I need to shift it to slot into the fish scales pattern. Also, I redesigned the fish scales pattern and need to re-swatch that, which will work in nicely with figuring out how to slot the fountain design into it.
I know it's probably overkill to spend so much time trying to make my lace stitches flow perfectly from one pattern to the next, but it pleases me.
Technorati Tags: crafts, design, knitting, lace, spinning, yarn
# Posted by ayse on 04/26/09 at 8:02 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2009
I Call That Yarn
Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time plying my Grape Jelly yarn, and experimenting with just how much yarn I could get onto the spindle (answer: quite a bit, but it does get ridiculous after a while). I ended up with this enormous cone:
Which I skeined up into a 5-foot skein, working out to about 136 yards of yarn. I washed it, dried it (I'm liking the flat dryer rack that makes drying wool fast and easy quite a bit these days), and those is what I have now:
I'm thinking I need to buy some larger needles, because this is very fluffy large yarn, and I don't have needles large enough for it.
The book on wheel construction that I ordered through interlibrary loan arrived this week, and I picked it up today, for a little light reading.
Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn
# Posted by ayse on 04/18/09 at 6:43 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2009
Spinning Positions and How They All Suck
So, some more about how I'm spinning.
I started out in position A, sitting on a chair, dangling the spindle. This gives me about 18 inches of drafting space before the spindle knocks into the floor (or, more often, the dog who is right underfoot). Not great.
Then position B: standing. Much better: I can draft out about three feet of fiber before hitting either dog or floor. Holding the arm out isn't a great situation, but not profoundly painful, either.
So we end up in position C: standing, and lifting the left arm above the head to nearly vertical in order to get about five feet of drafted-out yarn before having to wind on. Curse the short arms. The result: ouchies in the left shoulder.
Noel suggests standing on a chair, but I've not been able to figure out how to get enough spin into the spindle to be able to drop it a long distance and bring it back up before it starts unwinding itself and breaks off.
Technorati Tags: crafts, injuries, spinning
# Posted by ayse on 04/17/09 at 9:05 AM | Comments (2)
April 16, 2009
Grape Jelly
I'm finding the real limit on how much spinning I can get done is how much pain I want to put my left shoulder through. I hold the fiber in my left hand for drafting, and end up raising that arm above my head a lot. However, I have a wee bit of a tweak in my left shoulder, from a rugby injury in college, and raising that arm over my head repeatedly sets it off.
So now I'm investigating the possibility of a wheel more seriously.
Anyway, tonight I finished the singles for this two-ply yarn I am calling Grape Jelly. It doesn't look like it much in these photos, taken in really bad light, but the fiber I'm using has a set of colours very much like grape jelly. Also, I wish I knew what breed sheep it comes from, because it doesn't twig my allergies at all.
Here we are all spun up, ready to be spooled off the spindle to prepare for plying (the perils of only one spindle!). I spent a lot of energy working on making a nice, tidy cop this time. I think it came out OK.
And wound onto a skewer spool.
I'll make myself a spool rack from a cardboard box sometime after I stop being quite so busy, and use that for plying onto the spindle. Can I wait to see what this yarn looks like? No. But I must, anyway.
Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn
# Posted by ayse on 04/16/09 at 12:43 AM | Comments (3)
