From fleece to fiber art: alpaca like the ocean

A few weeks ago a friend of mine called me up. "Will you spin me some yarn for a Mother's Day gift? Any kind of yarn you want," she said (though, I admit, not in these precise words ;)). "I've never seen you make yarn I haven't liked!"

Once the temporary ego-swelling had subsided, of course, I had to make some decisions. My friend (hello, Ms. Friend! ;D) and her mother are both allergic to wool, so anything but wool would work. Well, I have plenty of alpaca fleeces, so off I went to the stash.

I wanted to pick a fiber good for dyeing, since alpaca doesn't naturally come in blue, green, or purple, the colors I hear Ms. Friend's mom uses the most. ;) This, a fleece from Calypso Farm, from a Suri alpaca named Glass Slipper, seemed perfect:


Suri, by the way, is a rare breed of alpaca known for having silky, warm, lustrous, drapey fiber. Only one percent of the alpacas on the planet are of the Suri breed, so "rare" isn't just hype! ;) (Check out Suri Network for more information on Suri alpacas and Suri fiber specifically.)

So the fleece visited the wash tub and the dye pot, and voila! Oceany alpaca!



Anyway, originally I thought I'd do a lightweight yarn that might work for knitting a shawl, as Ms. Friend mentioned something about a lace book for her mom. Now, maybe you know this already because you have lots of friends who are fibers, but fibers have preferences about what makes them look good and behave well. Some look good in little black dresses, some look good in jeans and a t-shirt — well, okay, I'm really talking about fiber preparation here, like combing vs. carding, but I am so not in a jargony technical mood today, so we'll pretend it's kind of like clothing style. ;)

Point is, since I hadn't worked with this particular fleece before and didn't know its preferences, I experimented with different fiber preparations. I tried preparing it on my hand cards, on my drum carder, and with my hand combs, and I tried spinning yarn from all these preparations as well as spinning the fiber straight from the cloud (meaning without doing more than picking it apart with my fingers a bit).

Some of the results I won't share with you *cough*, but I found that while the different preparations weren't radically different in results, the different processes were different amounts of pain in the butt. ;) (Suri alpaca doesn't look fluffy until you try to run it through a Louet Junior Roving Carder, let me tell you ... and then it flies everywhere. I guess I need a drum carder with finer teeth? Or maybe I need to buckle down and get those cotton hand cards I've been drooling over for years.) Anyway, in the end I end I went with the hand combs — even though I think of them as fairly slow, they seem suited to the Suri's straight, silky fibers ... and they don't make the fiber fly everywhere and stick to everything. ;)


Scary fiber equipment, yay!

I even knit up some of the sample yarn to see how it behaved.



That looks pretty decent, huh? But like I said, different fibers have different preferences, and there was just something about this preparation that didn't seem ideal. Sure, it was functional, but the Suri seemed like it wanted to show off a little more, and not be so traditional. Lots of fibers do traditional perfectly well, and the Suri does have an interesting halo to it when spun like this, but ... well, at the rate I was spinning, it also would have taken me forever and ever to finish the whole batch of fiber at that weight. And I had this possibly odd idea that a Mother's Day gift should probably be ready before Mother's Day, plus, I didn't want to think about pricing a yarn that takes 9 whole hours to spin, not even counting the combing and the dyeing and the washing and, and...

So I decided I'd spin it fatter, since the fatter yarn sample I did seemed to show off the Suri's qualities better. Then I thought again: If I spun it fat, because alpaca tends to be fairly heavy and dense compared to wool, I'd end up with a fat, short skein of yarn, an amount that would make it more of an accent yarn than something Ms. Friend's mom would be able to knit a whole item out of. And that'd be silly, wouldn't it? But the singles alone, with its decent yardage, didn't seem appealing enough — again, it was functional, but I wanted to do something special, not just a plain ol' singles.

Then I remembered thread-plying! And so I went into the part of the stash with the cones of vintage weaving yarn, and I pulled out some white thread, and went to town. Ply, ply you fools! The result:


Ta-da! A little over 100 yards of thread-plied art yarn. (Okay, it's a slightly sedate art yarn, but I didn't want to force anything too wacky on someone I can't remember meeting in person, meaning where she would be in range of my ability to sense wackiness tolerance. ;))

Yeah, I may have fallen victim to making things more complicated than they needed to be, by following my own preferences and treating this project like I would have had it been a present for my mom, but that's not such a horrible thing to do when you're given free rein to make whatever yarn you like, right?


And hey, if the recipient hates it, or if she happens to see this blog post and decides she likes it the traditional, takes-two-gazillion-years-to-spin yarn better than the arty yarn, I do have more of this fiber, and more dye. I can always call a redo! It may even take me slightly less than a gazillion years to spin it next time, since then I'll have had the practice of spinning it this time around. ;)

Of course, I do hope she ends up liking it, maybe even making something out of it that eventually shows up in my inbox in photographic form. That's one of the coolest things that can happen to your handmade stuff — seeing it in happy use, in action.

So here's hoping it's well-received. :D Meantime, I'm off again. There's still more of that gigantic scarf to knit...

In which I, like, babble about yarn, Craft or Bust, gratitude and snow — in video!

Everyone take a deep breath with me; I ask you for moral support! I'm doing something brave that I have literally never done before, even though I've been on the Internet for oh mumblemumble years. And I've videotaped myself and other things for years (though of late I haven't had a real video camera, just the one in my computer and the one in my phone, which has dampened my enthusiasm somewhat...).

Maybe you can guess by that last sentence that What I've Done is make a video. GASP! Yes. I'm live-ish here on the blog at last.

I give you fair warning that this video was the last one made in several hours of taping and it is unedited (except to take out the two seconds of me holding up a piece of paper as a pseudo-clapperboard — meaning to visually mark the beginning of the video clip). I also say "like" a lot, which bothers me, largely because I took acting classes in high school (and I did actually go back and start to count the number of "likes," but I stopped once I got to a number I forbid myself to think about because it will irk me seriously ;)), but also because I promise I do not say "like" that much in person (though I do say it a fair amount — it's fair!), and because it seems to be the most "like"-ful video I recorded today. HMPH.

But while the earlier videos were less full of "like," they were also more full of tangent. That will probably be hard to believe when you watch the video, but believe it. Someday I will post a video that is not the final one in a long series, and you will see ... oh, yes, you will see! Besides, you should be used to my tangents my by now. Right?

Next time I will consider writing an outline for myself and going off that so I don't repeat myself so much, too. I hope it at least entertains you.

Without further ado, here it is. My video debut on the Internet — may it not come back to bite me. ;D


Edited to add: Duhhhh. I forgot to actually link you guys to the mailing list I keep talking about at the end. Maybe recording four hours of video eats your brain. Here's the link to the mailing list sign-up for Craft or Bust. Go forth and craaaaaaaft!

Edited again to add: And here are the links to Velma's blog (on which she has not indeed posted in a while, but you can always leave her comments begging for her to come back), and to her shop on Etsy. Ta-da!

It's Roc Day again! So have some llama yarn + LED sheep art

This year, once more there will be no traditional Distaff Day fire-setting or water-throwing in the Star & Crossbones studio (crossing fingers as I type this — at least mentally ;)), and I'm not even sure I'm going to make it to the spinning wheel, as I'm knitting some Brigit socks — but I can at least post photos of some yarn I spun earlier this week.

A whole 8+ oz of chunky llama yarn (it's the yarn that's chunky, not the llamas ... as far as I know) spun out of some of the first fiber I bought when I started spinning, which has been sitting in my stash waiting for the right project:


Pretty sure most, if not all, of the fiber is from Bahr Creek Llamas and Fiber Studio. (Half the fiber was actually labeled as such, and if the rest is from elsewhere, I can't think of where it came from.)

And actually, right now the yarn exists as two skeins of two-ply that I don't have photos of yet. Eventually it will be a Capucine hat, hopefully to come with me to Vogue Knitting Live later this month.


If you look closely, you can see that the center of the light-colored ball is beige rather than off-white. I used four different bags of fiber to spin the yarn, but I'm reasonably sure it's all llama. It's definitely camelid and not sheep's wool, at least. ;)


Edited to add: Shout-out to Linda for sending me this kinda hilarious video called "Extreme sheep LED art." Because everyone needs to see sheep wearing Christmas lights and playing Pong. Happy Roc Day. ;)

Soft blue, prickly green: a quick check-in

Still cleaning, still reorganizing, still crafting (particularly in preparation for the SaSS Bash this weekend).

We recently harvested all the lemongrass from our front "yard" under the imminent threat of the homeowner's association president removing it for us. I would have appreciated having more of a warning than an offhand mention while she was complaining about how "junky" it looks when people have decorations on their porch, but I guess I should be thankful that I got a warning at all.

On what I hope is an up side, we have an obscene amount of lemongrass in the freezer now. Last year the lemongrass tea went through an interesting (not actually bad, but not really good, either) taste-morph as cold weather came on, so maybe having a huge stock in the freezer will mean summery-tasting lemongrass tea all winter.

Also: Lemongrass loves Florida. One tall plant gives a truly serious amount of tea-making leaves. We had two. This is maybe a third of what came out of the larger of the two:


For scale, that is a bed the lemongrass is on, and it takes up about a third of the bed. The leaves are on the order of three feet long.
In a bright spot, today the yarn I won from the Grad School Knitter giveaway got here. It's a lovely squishy skein of superwash Malabrigo in my favorite color.


Nom nom nom.
Now I need to figure out what to do with about 200 yards of Malabrigo. Suggestions, anyone? ;)

Mushrooms, compassion, yarn in orange and green, and a geeky song reference

Did you see the new Tour de Fleece 2010 tab up at the top of the blog? I'll be updating that page to reflect my overall progress while I continue to blather in individual blog posts. Seems neater that way, huh?

Plied this Shetland in the wee hours of Tour de Fleece Day 4:


And spun these singles from a set of Wooly Hands batts:


Yesterday, Day 5 of the Tour de Fleece, I finished plying the green singles:


...made some new Waves of Compassion shawl pins to fill recent orders...


...and dyed a full pound of Corriedale fiber for the Phat Fiber sampler box. No pictures of that yet, but maybe if you wish at me, I'll get some soon. ;)

As a bonus from the world, maybe for getting so darn much done in one day, I finally found the tiny fairy ring that I was searching for a few weeks ago. Where was it? Fifteen feet from where I sit every day, under the huge live oaks outside the windows.


Looks like it's going to be another busy day today, but if all goes well, there will be a shop update tonight.

For some reason, I now have a song from Mulan stuck in my head.

Once you find your center/You are sure to win...

Photo Post: Maybe Merino, Rainbow-Flavored

For your visual enjoyment, the yarn I've been spinning lately:



The fiber is from a grab bag that I won at the Florida Fiber-In's auction last year, so I'm not completely sure of the fiber content, but I'm reasonably sure this is all Merino. I'm planning on Navajo plying it to preserve the color sequence, and then ... I don't know. A hat? A skinny scarf? A mismatched pair of wristwarmers? What do you think?

The Tale of the Monster TwitKAL Yarn: How to Spin a Shawl

O. M. G.

That's what I would name this yarn if I were lazy. (...or feeling particularly bizarre. ;))

I have finally finished spinning the TwitKAL yarn, and it turned out to be a monster. This is the biggest skein of yarn I have ever spun. At a guess, I don't need to worry about running out of yardage for the Traveling Woman shawl.

You want to see photos? Yeah? Yeah? Well, I sat there through what, twelve hours of spinning and plying, not even counting the dyeing? You can put up with a few more in-progress photos before you get to see the finished product, too, dangit. ;)

So we left off after the fiber was dyed and dry. The next thing I did was split each color in half (without worrying too hard about making them exactly equal halves) and make mini-sets of three colors — each set of three colors would go on one bobbin, then the two bobbins would get plied together. I actually wanted a bit of overlap between the color changes, to hopefully make for smoother transitions — which is why I didn't bother trying to split each color exactly in half.



Close enough to equal weight for me. Next up: Spinning. Actually, pre-drafting before spinning, to take out any fiber stuck-togetherness (a.k.a. the bit of felting that I probably did when I wasn't paying attention to whether the dyepots were boiling ... ::whistles innocently::).



For those who wonder this kind of thing (I do), the above photos only show half the fiber of a given color. I have waaaayyy too many photos of predrafted fiber now, though, if anyone likes to look at that sort of thing. ;)

And then it was time for lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of spinning. Mini bobbin montage! (Yeah, this doesn't even begin to convey the hours and hours of tiny-yarn spinnage involved.)


At last there were two bobbins, no unspun fiber, and a ghetto lazy kate. The Magical Jumbo Flyer and Bobbin were just over the horizon...


Finally, after more long hours of plying (with occasional cursing when one of the plies broke — not a problem the intrepid wheel+spinner normally have...), one unassuming but gigantic bobbin remained.



Then, this dark and unpromising yarny caterpillar (if you will) split its chrysalis and unfolded its brightly-colored wings. (Ready for it? Ready? Ready??)



TA-DA! And the close-ups!



There it is. Finished. Done. Finito. NO MORE. And it's, like, way, way, WAY more yardage than I need for this shawl. Ha, ha, ha. 4.9 ounces (weirdly, I didn't "lose" any weight, although I normally do with smaller skeins of fatter yarn). 686 yards. Around 18 WPI, a.k.a. sport weight to fingering weight, which is pretty much what I was going for (did I neglect to mention my trusty spinner's comparison card? Maybe it'll show up in a future photo...). Purple, blue, and greeny-blacky.

You may now applaud. Thank you, thank you. Bows all around. Flowers on the stage. The roar of the audience's sincere and deep appreciation. Ahhh.

(And whew. Wait — you mean I have to knit the shawl now? Groooaaan...)

Banishing creative blocks with randomness: generated art yarn win

1. Art yarn: Dragons in the Playground, 2. Art Yarn: Dragons in the Playground, 3. Dragons in the Playground handspun yarn, 4. Dragons in the Playground handspun yarn

That's my latest art yarn. Okay, technically I spun it in Week 1 of Craft or Bust, which is also when I started the draft of this blog post, but CoB this week has been slow and unpicturesque so far, so it all works out.

Here's the story of my art yarn, and how CoB helped me bust in a good way — that is, how it helped me bust an old block: spinning art yarn.

If you've been reading along for long enough (which seems ridiculously unlikely, but some people even still remember me from high school, so anything's possible), you'll know about my First-Art-Yarn Fiasco: I joined an art yarn swap and tried my best to spin a crazy yarn on my drop spindle, based on exactly zero directions, having never actually seen an art yarn in the flesh wool — and pretty much failed miserably, which earned me a lukewarm rating on the swap and broke my art-yarn-spinning heart.

So from that point — although it clashed with my "I can too do it if I try hard enough" attitude — I was semi-secretly afraid to even try to spin art yarn ... What was the point? I sucked, and had been told so by that crappy swap rating. (Swap-bot, I curse you!) It didn't help that I was in a fail-ful relationship at the time — you trying adding failure to failure and see how it makes you feel. ;) Or really, don't; being a failure zombie is no fun.

And being afraid of art yarn was no fun, either, what with that distant echo in my head that said art yarn = fail. But Craft or Bust is about unfail, and in Week 1 I was sick of being a failure, of feeling like a failure, of letting myself fail...!

So I fired up the Art Yarn Generator, courtesy of the Art and Novelty Yarn Spinners' group on Ravelry, and it told me my fortune:



I stash-dived to come up with this:



...and with many a calming breath and some invisible fingers in my ears to help me ignore the You're going to fail voices, I made the art yarn you saw at the top of the post. (Light shone down from above.)

Which just shows how being completely random — a.k.a. letting yourself be free to fail and releasing yourself from old negative attachments — can help break down old blocks. I haven't spun any more art yarn since, but it was surprisingly easy to just let the Art Yarn Generator tell me what to do ... and I get to look creative as a result. ;D

Check out some more randomly-generated art yarn for inspiration at the Art Yarn Generator Flickr pool.

What blocks could you bust with randomness? Any other random generators you'd like to share?

ARTpool art/craft/vintage show + yarn + a preview

Here's what the sky looked like as we drove to the ARTpool art/craft/vintage show on Saturday morning:



The day was forecast to be rather cool for this area, but it turned out as wishy-washy as the weather in St. Pete usually is: It alternated cloudy/cool and sunny/warm. The turnout for the show was pretty good, compared to the other shows we've done this year, and we made lots of contacts and new friends, including Jennifer Wunderlich of iWunder on Etsy. Alas, your dear captain was too enchanted by the pottery booth across the way, the discontinued fabric sample books, and the other sparklies and pretties at the show to remember to take any pictures. Doh. Suffice to say it was a really fun show, and we hope to do a bunch more shows with ARTpool in the future, if they'll have us!

I did spin most of the singles that turned into this yarn while I was at the show, too:


And while we're talking about fluffies, here's a preview of the fiber that will turn into the yarn that will turn into the magical wristwarmers pattern I posted about here a couple weeks ago:



Tune in again soon for more babbling on creativity. I've got a few future posts bubbling in the back of my head (and in still-in-progress Word documents).

Scarves and Yarn

Just some photos of things I've been doing. More later.

Low-twist singles spun from custom Flying Ewe batts


Better photo of the first scarf I wove on the Cricket loom


Second scarf woven on my Cricket loom

Tour de Fleece, Day (Mumble)

Tomorrow's the end of the Tour de Fleece, and while I didn't do as much spinning as I wanted to, it still helped me get some of my spinning-brain in order. I also used up some stash ... even if I acquired new stash along the way. (And hey, I still have one more day.)

This is the latest finished product for my Tour de Fleece:



That's the moorit Corriedale I've been working on forever. It came out to 448 yards of two-ply fingering weight yarn. I'd say that's worth spending a few hours on, although I'm not sure my total is really respectable (Looking at my Knit Wars totals, I spent a total of 13 hours on that yarn, including plying). It's enough yarn to knit a pair of socks or the lovely Endpaper Mitts, but it's not really a profitable amount of time to spend on one skein of yarn, is it? ;)

Next up, I'm working on finishing the second half of the Proud Peacock BFL I picked up from Gale's Art at Convergence here in Tampa (was that this year or last year?). If I'm very very good, I should finish that by the end of the Tour de Fleece.

Three skeins ain't bad, I guess...

Tour de Fleece, Day 6; and my new Cricket loom!

My Cricket is finally HERE!

Warping it was way, way easier than warping the cheap but bigger rigid heddle I bought a while ago. Meridith of SweetKnits even sent me some nicely-matching yarn to replace the handspun she was going to send along originally (it was an angora blend, so I had to turn it down), and it's on the loom right now. I thought it would take me at least an hour to warp this thing, since it took an appallingly long time (four or more hours?) to warp the monster rigid heddle even with Brian's help ... but I think this took me way less than an hour. Yay, Schacht, for sending good warping directions!

I am, alas, too lazy to take a good photo of the loom itself right now, but here's what's on it at the moment:



And — all right — if I must share my crappy first photo of the Cricket, here it is:



The Cricket and I were bonding, and I didn't want to leave it to spin for Tour de Fleece, but Le Tour is Le Tour. Somehow, using my drop spindle seemed like it would be less intensive than sitting at the wheel, so my poor, abandoned possibly-Greensleeves spins again:



If I remember correctly, that's some Colonial wool I got from Uncommon Threads.

And in case anyone was wondering, last night's test knitting was cursed. First, I couldn't find the pattern, even though I thought I had specifically put it into the bag with the knitting so I wouldn't lose it — it turned out that I had put a different piece of paper in there, that I just thought was the pattern. Sigh. Then when I tried to print a new copy of the pattern, the printer jammed about four times. There must be a tiny piece of paper stuck in there that I won't be able to get out without taking the thing apart. Sigh, I say, again. Then I had to go to bed, since there's still that pesky office job thing going on. The test knitting was just not fated for success yesterday.

Still, that and today's unhinged day at work set me up to receive the Cricket loom tonight, and my first Super-Awesome Bag of Crap swap from the Ravelry Spin or Dye Swapping group:



Those little balls of pencil roving are so very soft, and the chocolates are so very good (and I'm pretty picky about chocolate) ... This is a most awesome bag of crap. It was almost worth having a crappy day to get that and the loom and my new Harmony needles and blocking boards from Knit Picks all on the same day.

Oh. And. I gave in and bought some books from Interweave's Hurt Book Sale. I should really stop buying random things ... but ... but...

But they're useful...?

Tour de Fleece, Day 5

Not much visible progress in today's Tour de Fleece spinning: I got to the other end of the bobbin! Yay! But I only spun for half an hour, as I want to play with the Weave-It and work on the Phoenix Bess test some more.



But I did make a sparkly green square on the Weave-It last night. It took me about half an hour to do this one, but it was my first time using a small loom in a while.



My second square, made of white bamboo yarn, took a little more than 20 minutes. If practice makes faster, maybe someday I'll be able to do four in an hour. Ha!

Tour de Fleece, Day 4

Spent way too much time taking photographs today and far less time spinning — but spin, I did! Inspired by another TdFer's yarn, I dug out some moorit Corriedale I got from a swap:





(Does anyone know what "Wiljamie Victoria" might mean? It sounds mysterious — or like a romance novel character — but that's what it says on the label right below "Moorit Corriedale.")

There's only a little on the bobbin after today's spinning session, but going back to this fiber tomorrow should be a treat more than torture; that is, it'll be the opposite of what I expect the red Rambouillet to be when I get back to it ... This stuff isn't as sproingy as the Crazy Corriedale, since it's commercially processed (or it looks and feels like it), but it's amazingly, blissfully nepp-free. It was even happily cooperative when I tried the long draw technique on it.



Some of those photos I spent too much time taking were of the now-dry Crazy Corriedale yarn I plied yesterday.



The others were of some hand-dyed wool roving in "Glen Eden" from Neauveau, since I thought I might convince myself to spin it today.



Instead, I'm trying to decide what form of semi-artistic-style yarn might best show off the roving's serene colors. Maybe I'll add some extra bits to the yarn to accent the colors without changing the texture of the yarn itself. But what to add? That's a question for another day...