Fleece Swap cobweb weight

Phew! I've been testing my limits with this yarn: It's turned in at 26 Wraps Per Inch officially a cobweb weight, and it's spun from a Blue faced Leicester  X (mule) wool fibre prepared by Someone? in the UK Spinners Ravelry Fleece Swap into a fluffy batt with a little bit of slubbiness. I was sent 50 grams of this in the Fleece Swap and I've only spun about half that. It was lovely to spin, but why did I choose to spin it so fine? Well I was testing out my smaller whorl on my Traddy flyer, and with the fibres of this batt being so long it worked out I could do this with it. ( The ratio was 12:1). It's silky and shiny. I'm hoping to spin the rest of it sometime, but colour is calling me right now....

Dyeing, dyeing, dyeing

Somehow it always seems wrong to write dyeing, the "e" really feels like it shouldn't be in there. But hey, the vaguaries of the English language....

 Anyway. Done alot of dyeing. All onto Blue faced Leicester. All with natural dyes using mordants such as vinegar, lemons, alum: From top base of golden rod overdyed with lac and madder. Nettles, black beans and onions. Lac, onions and cutch. Onions, beans, golden rod. Beans with alum. Cabbage and onions and dandelions. Will write more about some of  these sometime soon.........

New fleeces!

How very exciting! I've had some new fleeces given to me AND swapped some via the UK Spinners Ravelry swap.
I got given 2 black hebredians and one white mystery fleece, which I'm slowly processing, and in the swap received some black Alpaca, mule (BFL x), coloured wensleydale and moorit shetland. So far i only have spun a little of the hebredian (to sample it) and the black Alpaca.

The Hebredian was lovely and soft and bouncy and I made it into rolags and longdraw spun it. The Alpaca was such a different story though. It's really short staple and slippery with no crimp, so in the end I spun it from the fold on a 7:1 ratio, slow draw in. It's come out uneven, and a bit ropey, but I suspect it will drape well: Hebredian bottom: Black Alpaca top.

spinning, carding, plying release.

The above pix are all of a yarn I recently spun for my good friend Cath's birthday. It was a big release making it, as apart from colour scheme it was a blank canvas for my imagination to run free.
I've been working on stuff for the York Steiner School Craft group, as we've got Spring Fair coming up, and also being quite specific about what I want the outcomes to be for what I spin, so it's lovely to let my hair down and have some fun with a yarn.
We started a Family Spinning Group at Grace and Jacob (Walmgate, York, Last Saturday of the month), and Fiona, the shop owner, let me loose on her drumcarders last time, so I made the batts that much of this yarn was spun from.Only once blended. Lovely fluffy, squidgy big batts, one made on a Louet, the other on a Barnett. (Think I prefered the Barnett, as it was easily adjustable and had smaller springier teeth. I suspect a more even blend will be possible with it than the big industrial teeth of the Louet, but would probably need DAYS of time and KILOS of fibre to play with to really be sure...)
Cath is fond of pinks and reds aswell as black, so I spun up a squidgy thick thin single and thought I might ply it with a thinner single of naturally black shetland. However when it came to it I decided on gold stitching thread, mostly because I wanted an exagerated "bumpy" plying effect, but also a bit of "bling" that might pull the at times disparate colours together; black might be too bold and distracting from the colour graduations too, especially when knitted up. A warm colour of a quite intense saturation seemed the thing. (I did unfortuantely run out of the gold, and had to use a very similarly toned brown, and then pale pink to complete the ply. The brown works better than the pink in my view). Cath was, in her words "delighted" with the yarn.

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....

Grass and docks as dye plus Secret santa yarn

This top fibre is a recent experiment in plant dye colours. As always I am on the search for ways to obtain greens. I don't know exactly why I'm so obsessed with that colour, but perhaps it has to do with chakra colours! The green chakra relates to the chest/ heart area, and as I understand it the area of the body concerned with being open hearted and love. But maybe green just makes me happy!
Anyway, so to get the greenish yellow in the photo, I used dock roots, freshly dug from the allotment in a hope of having fewer docks scattering their seeds over my veg patch this year. These I cut up quite small and let steep in rain water for a few days. Then I remembered about them, and simmered the pot for about 40 mins on the stove. Then later that day I re-simmered them. Then I let them rest over night, and re-simmered them. Then, when the mixture had cooled, I strained out the veg matter, and mud, and inserted the wetted wool (Texel in this case for sox spinning) I heated the wool in the mixture 2 times in a similar fashion to extracting the colour from the dock roots.I added the juice of 2 lemons before heating. I let the wool rest in the dyepot over night. The crucial thing is to get as much colour as poss out of the docks, then to get as much as poss into the wool, without felting it. This takes as long as it takes, and letting the wool rest in the mixture is very much part of it!
Extracting and dyeing with the liquid from the grass was a very similar process to the dock roots, but the heated up grass REALLY STANK the HOUSE out! I don't know WHAT is in grass to make it so smelly when cooked but it honestly smelled of carnivore excrement. Yuck! My husband and the kids were NOT impressed. However, Fay was very keen on having the finished fibre when it was all dry and fluffy and not smelly.... In the photo the colours look more vibrant than they do in cloudy daylight, as they were taken on our table at night under artificial light.
 The other photo is WHAT I SPUN from the secret santa fibre I received from the UKSpinners on the Ravelry forum.(see a previous post). It was blended with various reds and silky noils and throwsters waste etc. None of the baby batts were more than 50% red. I'm currently really interested in how green combines with other colours, but especially reds. There is an exciting section with cocoons spun on, which I loved doing! It's a soft, slightly overspun, singles of 16 WPI (fingering weight). And I am currently intending to knit it into a cowl in the round. I am hoping that it's slightly overspun quality might make the stockingette twist a little, but I don't know if that happens after you've set the twist?