About this blog space

This blog space is a place for me to primarily put all my wool gatherings, adventures, experiments. I am now a mum of two astounding daughters, and I used to be a DIY musician and co-ran a tiny independent label (Slampt), so this punk can-do attitude plus feminist analysis and Art school experience somehow informs my wool work! I am also deeply moved by GREEN, trees, weather, colour combinations in nature, and texture. I aim to source wool from round the corner or at the very least UK grown and processed, and to create no toxic waste. This means I get to see sheep as often as I can, sometimes at wool fests.
I am on Ravelry and Etsy as FatHenWildWool and Facebook as Rachel Holborow.

Saturday 23 April 2011

Hard corespun (hardcore)


Ah, reminds me of back in the day, when I was in a punk band, rather than now when I'm a grumpy hardcore Mum. Hardcore? You know the score!
Oh how I struggle with corespinning....
But this one turned out pretty successful.....Floofy and gorgeous.
I made it like this: Blended moorit shetland fibres with recycled sari silk, red angelina, a dash of purple and red merino; then I got some old unused commercial sock wool in orange brown and white, and put it through my wheel taking much of the plying twist off; then I "corespun" the fluffy blended batts onto the opened up sock wool back in the direction it was originally plied in. This has quite a specific action, I kinda teased it onto the core to keep it floofy, rather than sorta wrapping it around, as I have before. I also decided that as I've a always had such unwanted ENERGY in my corespun before to not "Ply in the direction the yarn was last plied in" as all authorities seem to suggest, but to do something else, that actually made sense to MY spinning brain instead, and this worked the best... I tried plying it with a commercial sewing thread after, to "Trap the fibres" but that didn't work out, probably because I'd taken too much spin off the original core.
NB I had to use small very fluffy bits of batts to get it fluffy enough.

Natural Multnomah Finished!




Well I finished this a while back, but I've not been blogging recently... But Hey I'm so proud, dispite the minor mistakes....
Something I'm really proud of is that it's made entirely of PLANT DYED wool fibres SPUN by ME. Most of the feather and fan pattern (a new one for me, and I'm a  uh, fan) was dyed by fibre artist Helen of My Heart Exposed from her Folksy shop. She (and her daughters) are really inspiring plant dyers. I want her to write a book so I can learn much more about plant dyeing...
The rest of the yarn was plant dyed by me, one ply mainly greens, the other purples to oranges to greens to pinks, and I love the shifts. It's really subtle, but striking, even at Wonderwool it was noticed, and that was Thee Place to Wear Your Handmade Shawl. My only regret is that a tiny portion of mystery fibre near the neck is scratchy, but not so bad. Hey, I'm just amazed I can do this, from dyeing, to spinning, to actually Knitting A Lace thing! Next stop owning and shearing sheep ( my pal Cathleeds is threating this as a reality....) Thanks to her for taking us (incl kids) to Wonderwool. Also loads of thanks to Helen for her fibre and just being an inspiration generally....