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

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.

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

I did find that the newer method of wrapping the copp works better: you can see that the completely horizontal method results in collapses (and resulting tangles). This is especially true with slippery fiber like silk.

I had a ridiculous mismatch in the amount of yarn on the two spindles, in no small part because my spinning got quite a bit thinner as I went. But also because I just put more yarn on the second spindle, I don't know how (I thought I measured it out evenly). So I tried using a plying bracelet to handle the leftover yarn, but there was really too much for it to be workable, and I lost quite a bit to tangles and chaos. In the end I had this lovely plying ball all ready to be plied from:

That's a ball of two plies running alongside each other, so all I do is feed off the ball and onto the spindle. I could have plied this on the wheel, but after doing the singles on the spindle at such length, I wanted to keep it all on the spindle.

I've even sort-of decided what I'd like to knit with it, but I'm not sure I'll have enough.

Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn

I've gotten 3 12-row repeats done, mostly going so slowly because for whatever reason, this week has not been conducive to sitting and doing anything, much less knitting. I'm really liking the pattern, how simple it is (easy to keep track of and hard to lose your place) and how complex it is (not boring). I'm also using up some of my homespun yarn, the 200-someodd yard ball of Dorset left over from a class that I'd been looking for a pattern for. When Kira showed her sample of the cowl at spinning group (4th Fridays in Berkeley at knit-one-one), I knew I'd found the right thing to use it on.

There's one catch: I like the natural Dorset colour just fine, but it's not a colour I usually wear next to my face. I think I'll see how it comes out when I finish and block it, and maybe I'll end up overdyeing it with some reddish shade.

Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace, yarn

Here's some of that alpaca I've been carding, spun up on the wheel. The batts are spinning very nicely; I can see why nicely done batts are a favourite prep for a lot of spinners. I'd certainly have more of this done if I had not just started a class on mechanical and electrical systems for buildings.

I know how filthy alpacas are -- I happened to be standing next to one twelve years ago when it decided to shake off a little and the cloud of dust was astounding. But what is amazing is how much dirt falls off the fiber after it's been shaken off and then carded three times, given how much dirt came off before. Anyway, I brought an apron to the living room and I'm wearing that while spinning so I don't get quite so utterly filthy.

In between that, I still have this silk/merino on the spindle that I'm working on. I've been working away at it for months, and this week I decided to just get down and work on it more often so I can finish it. I have another spindle full of the stuff waiting to be plied.

And because I was playing around with lenses, a super-extreme closeup:

There you can see how I'm wrapping my copp: alternating layers of criss-crossing across the bulge with layers of tight spiral wrapping to pack on the yarn. It's making a nice, dense copp that mostly stays in place even when I drop the spindle from spectacular heights.

You can also kind of see that my spinning is getting more consistent. Yay, me.

Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn

Let's start with the basics. Both of these are really great carders. I would not say no if offered either one, and if one was for some reason not available, I would happily choose the other. That said, like all engineered products, each one is the result of a series of design decisions, and those decisions gave me a rung to hang my preference hat onto, as it were.

I ran these carders through a series of tests designed to compare their design and performance. These were things that were important to me, things that were important to other people, and some things that turned out to not be that important at all. Here are some quick links to take you to each of the tests:
Features and Accessories
Ease of Use: Handle
Ease of Use: Batt Removal
Design: Drive Belts
Design: Clamps
Design: Licker-In
Design: Carding Drum
Effectiveness: Batt Size
Effectiveness: Removal of VM
Cleaning
Summary

Technorati Tags: carding, fiber, spinning

(Actually, I have a fair idea that the original weight was on the low side.)

Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning

For example, from highlights from the Fiber Arts and Food hall:

A first prize in cake decorating:

A very vibrant quilt (the colours were a bit less saturated, but not much):

I liked the pattern on this quilt:

And this was a professional entry that was very impressive:

Several tables were set up with place settings on themes. Most of them seemed like exercises in creative shopping, but this one impressed me because it used crafted pieces (the china was hand-painted). Plus, I loved the theme:

Then we went to the Small Animals exhibits. There were lots of animals to coo over, like these parakeets:

And this pile of bunnies:

And these awesome pigeons:

I admit that every now and then I think I would love to have a dovecote on the roof full of pigeons. I don't know what the neighbors would think.

They would probably look at me like this:

I also occasionally think it might be fun to buy a few dozen quail and let them loose in the neighborhood. Probably not one of my finer ideas.

This is a bantam chicken. They're basically just small versions of the same big chickens, although some breeds are not available as bantams and some are not available in full sized chickens.

These geese were making quite a ruckus. Hooooonk honk honk hoooooooonk. The long necks only make it funnier.

We went into the "pet store" and admired the piles of ducklings and chicks for sale. Look at all these ducklings:

And loooots of day-old weensy baby chicks. These are bantams, so they are extra-tiny little puffballs.

This frog was also pretty funny. A couple came around the other side of the tank looking for him, and burst into laughter when they saw him.

There was one exhibit hall entirely filled with cages of chickens and rabbits, some for sale and others just for show:

This sign brought to mind a certain over-quoted movie:

Most of the rabbits seemed pretty mellow, relaxing and just sort of hanging out in their cages. A few were anxious and clearly not happy with the noise of the show. This one was keeping an eye out.

This one clearly subscribed to the theory that a good nap makes everybody feel better:

Here are a couple of angora rabbits:

And of course, chickens. This is a bantam Seabright:

Looks like somebody laid an egg.

We admired the plumage on the bantams; many of the smaller breeds have quite lovely feather patterning.

Elaine was quite fond of this configuration:

I liked these guys, though they look somewhat diseased close up:

Then it was time for lunch...

I had deep fried ravioli (the St. Louis treat!)

Elaine had a pulled pork sandwich:

And for dessert we split a funnel cake, ending up entirely covered in powdered sugar:

Fair food is fun, though I admit it is more fun in concept than in execution. I really just love the look of the concession stands:

After lunch we made our way to the large livestock pavilion. Where we saw this interesting and informative (if somewhat weird) diagram:

(Did that steer have the head of a frog?)

There were some steers to look at, but the exhibit was mostly smaller hoofed animals like goats:

And sheep:

And lots and lots of pigs:

We briefly watched a steer show:

Then headed off into the Amateur Garden exhibit hall. We learned how cows are awesome and help prevent fires:

And learned that you should eat carrots, raw eggs, and pellets, but should not eat carrot tops or broccoli.

We admired the cut flowers entered in the show:

Saw a small urban gardening exhibit,

And spent quite a bit of time ogling the beekeeping booth.

Including a terrific observation hive setup:

I liked this ice cream stand, which reminded me of driving around with my sisters-in-law last month, looking for vanilla/chocolate twist soft serve in Minneapolis.

And boggled at this until i realized it did not say "Shiksa Shack":

Then we made a brief stop in the Small Animals exhibit again to make a purchase:

Yup, Elaine bought herself a lovely gray female English Angora rabbit, and I've promised to teach her how to spin its fur (since I can't tolerate being around rabbits enough to do it for her).

We made one last stop for cotton candy on the way out, and then it was time to go home and get the new bunny settled.

A great day for all concerned, except maybe the rabbit did not care for the car ride home.

Technorati Tags: bees, birds, chickens, fair food, gardening, goats, pigs, county fair, rabbits, steers

I had a wad of Dorset left over from a class, so I spun it all. And plied it. I do like spinning on the spindle, but I have to admit that spinning on a wheel is super fast when you can just sit down and zone out. This is 203 yards of 2-ply, from 1.7 ounces of fiber. It's fingering weight.

And the other fun piece of equipment I played with for the first time was a ball winder. When I got the Clemes and Clemes wheel, it came in the box of stuff. I've never really used one, because I can wind a decent center-pull ball on my hand, and I hate buying expensive stuff that takes up room when I have a ball winder with me at all times, anyway.

On the other hand, I will give it points for being obscenely fast at winding a ball. So I'm not getting rid of it any time soon.

As for what I'll make with this wool, maybe a scarf? This spinning thing is really testing my ability to come up with projects for small amounts of fat yarns (though with this skein, I've finally got a yarn in a weight I know how to use).

Next up, I will have more yarn to work with. I'm carding up batts from the 2lbs of alpaca I bought at the winery. I'll also be writing up a discussion of drum carders, as I have two on loan/rental. Until then, let me tell you that alpaca is great fun to brush until it is soft and smooth. Num.

Here are my samples from the class, plus remaining balls of fiber:

This is a 50/50 merino/tencel. It was very sticky to spin, almost to the point of squeaking a little on my fingers. I admit I wasn't totally keen on it, and I'm not sold on this as a blend. Maybe if I were spinning for sock yarn.

This is 100 percent tencel. Very very smooth and slippery. More so than silk, but I've only spun silk on a spindle and in this case I was trying to spin on a wheel. Not a big fan, but in general I'm not a big fan of fibers that try to be silk but aren't.

This is bamboo and wool, 60/40, but I didn't write down which was which. It spun very nicely, and I almost didn't want to stop. The difference in the worsted versus woolen samples was marked for this one.

Bamboo/wool/alpaca (about 50/25/25 but not quite): spun nicely but had some funny crispy sections. I didn't like doing this from the fold, it just didn't seem to want to be bent that way.

Wool/flax, both undyed and dyed. I ran out of time on this one and had to rush through. It drafted nicely and was pretty easy to handle.

Flax. Man. I must get some flax. This was so much fun, and I love knitting with flax yarn. Flax and the resulting linen have all the qualities I love in a fiber: durability, improving softness over time, and machine-washability. I have a silk/linen blend sweater I love to death. I can't think why I didn't immediately order a bunch of flax when I started spinning.

Carbonized bamboo. Weird stuff. Very smooth. Doesn't take dye at all. Soft and shiny. I think I'd like to get more of this and spin with it for a while to see if it feels less weird.

Seed cotton. Arg. Little bolls of cotton with a seed in the middle (so a bunch of free cotton seeds!), such a pain in the butt to spin. I felt like I was alternating between having my single fall apart from not enough twist or snap in half from too much twist. It was terrible.

Cotton punis. Cue about ten minutes of a bunch of spinners sitting around giggling at how they look like tampons. These were also very hard for me, because of the same not quite getting enough twist in/omg, too much twist issue. I didn't even get to the dyed ones.

Cotton sliver. My new best friend. After suffering through seed cotton and punis, this was the easiest thing ever to draft. I had a great time.

And another cotton sliver, only natural colours this time (no dye; the cotton comes off the plant this colour). When heated or washed, this cotton gets darker.

We also tried out tahklis (Indian support spindles); that was really hard. And we watched the use of the charkha, which is an Indian spinning wheel.

It was a good class. I felt like I learned a lot, but also like I still had a lot to learn.

Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn

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

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

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

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.