Confession time: although I’ve done a lot of research about grading and sorting a spinning fleece, enough that I feel I should know how to do it, I’ve only dealt with two fleeces in my spinning life. I’ll share my experience of the third fleece with you, in hope that it helps someone as nervous as I was when I unrolled my first fleece. If that’s you, take heart: it’s less difficult than you might think. And, as Beth of The Spinning Loft says, “The sheep are growing more even as we work”. There will be another fleece along shortly.

Sitting in its bag in the sunshine is one of my Woolfest 2010 acquisitions, a Shetland lamb fleece from Lenice Bell, Todhill Shetlands. It’s a spinners’ fleece, thoroughly skirted, so I don’t expect to find any dags (dried lumps of manure) hanging from the edges. It’s important to encourage farmers to sell clean, well-skirted fleece: you may not mind removing the dags, but dried sheep dung poses a much greater risk to animal health than does clean raw fleece. This lamb lived in Scotland, I bought the fleece in Cumbria, I’m dealing with it in East Anglia and I plan to send some of it overseas: if by chance there was a harmful organism in the fleece, I’ll have done it a great favour (and farmers a great disservice) by moving it across the country so quickly. It might seem that this is a lot of fuss about next to nothing, but having lived in the UK through the Foot and Mouth epidemic in 2001, I will do everything in my power to minimise the chance of that happening again. Ever. Anywhere. If any of this fleece contains dried dung, I’ll remove it carefully and dispose of it safely. Traditionally spinners use it as mulch, but I’ll bury it deep in the bean trench or compost bin where it won’t surface for at least 18 months. If I didn’t have a garden I’d put it in the non-compostable rubbish. I don’t want birds or other animals moving dirty fleece out into the wider environment, just in case.

The rolled fleece is intimidating. Where’s the way in? Fortunately I know that the British Wool Marketing Board (hereafter BWMB) approved method of rolling fleeces is staple side up/cut side down, sides to the middle, roll from back end to front, pull the neck out into a long strip and wrap/tuck it under itself to hold the roll closed. Here I’ve just found the bit of the neck that’s tucked under.
Unrolled it doesn’t look like a sheep to me… I wouldn’t want to meet whatever that came from on a dark night! For reference the tape measure has 12″/30cm extended. If you could look closely, you’d see that the cut surfaces are on top, folded one over the other BWMB-style. You can tell because the cut surface, close to the lamb’s skin, is relatively clean, a beautiful cream tinted gold with drops of lanolin. After I unfold one side of the belly I can show you what I mean:
Furthest from the camera, beyond the tape, the upper surface of the fleece is greyer, dirtier, with the tips of the staples gathering into pointy bits. This side of the tape you can see the underside, paler, cleaner, creamy in colour, with drops of golden lanolin, and the staples breaking naturally into rows. If you ever had long hair, you may remember that even after it was combed into a beautiful flowing sheet of hair, it would break/clump into long locks. Fleece is the same, clumping naturally into what are known as locks in longwools and staples in fine wools. One thing I can’t show you on this fleece is what are known as second– or double cuts, short (1-1.5″) tufts on the underside of the fleece that result from the shearer cutting a bit high, then going back over the same area and cutting lower down. The sheep looks tidier for this, but those second cuts must be removed or they can form nepps when you process the fleece.
Unfolded, with gentle reminders from me that sheep have four corners, a bottom, two sides and a head, it looks like this: a very long lamb, but a lamb. The neck, stretched long, is nearest the camera. I know from my reading that the finest, cleanest, longest-staple is likely to be the base of the neck, the shoulders and down the back. The legs are likely to be muddy and have more VM (vegetable matter). The backside or britch is generally coarser, stronger wool: sheep, being sensible animals, stand with their backsides into the wind and rain so the britch bears the brunt of the weather. If it’s not properly skirted, there may be dried dung at this end, too.
Here’s the edge of the belly. It’s generally discoloured by dirt, there’s some VM, some of the staples are stuck together with dark glossy stuff that I think is dust and dirt and grease. At this point my supervisor arrived…

This is the middle of the britch, the backside. It looks surprisingly attractive, relatively clean, but the soft skin of my wrists can feel that this area is coarser than the middle of the shoulders. And there seems to be black grains of dirt and lanolin buried deep in the staples. What does the good bit look like?
The staples are thinner, with more and finer crimp than the britch. There’s no dirt at the base of the staples and, when I hold my wrist to the surface, there’s no prickle at all.
Here’s a staple from the britch (above) compared with one from the middle of the shoulders (below). With luck you can see the dirt at the base of the britch, the more obvious, fine crimp, and the greater length of the shoulder. Both have lamb tips, the tightly twisted ends of the animal’s first fleece. These may be relatively dry and fragile; if so, they could break away to form nepps when carding. I have to remember to check that at some point.

So it’s decision time. I have a reasonable idea of what I’ve got; what am I going to do with it? Because I want to be able to send nice clean fleece to friends, encouraging them to buy British Shetland, I’m going to put the leg fleece and more of the discoloured belly fleece to one side. I think it will clean up reasonably well, and would spin into a softish sturdy yarn. Here’s the sort of thing I’m removing, plus some of the lanolin- and dirt-matted locks above it.

You should find that the fleece rips apart cleanly and easily down natural partings between the staples. If it doesn’t, the fleece may be cotted, matted and felted on the sheep before it was sheared. This is a fatal flaw for a spinning fleece unless the staples/locks are long enough to be spun after the cotted areas are cut away.
Here’s the fleece with the legs and belly edges piled on a sheet of newspaper, and my best guess at a dividing line between britch and ‘the good bit’. It is still a bit of a guess for me, so I was pleased to see this
when I flipped the edges back. The good bit is on the left, the britch on the right. Can you see that my division by fibre quality matches the cleanness of the underside? Here’s a close view of the cut surface of the britch just to the bad side of the dividing line
You can see the dirt driven into the fleece by the wind and rain. Sensible sheep, not putting their heads into the weather. All that’s left to do today is roll and bag the three different bits of fleece separately, each labelled with supplier, date and breed.

Speaking of sensible sheep coping with bad weather…
On the left, a sample of the best bit of a Herdwick fleece; to right, the britch. Herdwicks are seriously hardy sheep, bred to deal with the worst weather. Their wool is best used for weaving and commercial carpet production.

I can vouch for the fact that it makes glorious, beautiful carpets and rugs because I bought one at Woolfest. Handmade. I’ll post a picture of it next time, together with an overview of our two days of adventure in Cumbria.

Is one extremely long post once a month equivalent to four much shorter posts? That’s not a real question! Honestly, if I had more time I’d post more often, but it does take quite a lot of time to write this much. Perhaps I should try limiting myself to 140 characters :-)

Anyway. His ankles are still not allowed to walk, so last Saturday he cycled 80k while I walked 13.7 miles. More accurately, he cycled, showered, painted the shelves, ate lunch, then sat and relaxed while I walked 13.7 miles. 5 1/2 hours. For some reason I don’t entirely understand I am considering trying the C25k – or rather, I tried it and discovered I am utterly, completely rubbish at running for reasons that impact (literally) my walking and posture. I have some interesting foot alignment issues that my sports massage person is working on, and the walk was intended to test some theories. And I needed to see some features in one of the parishes. So… would you like to come for a walk?

Here the cross-field path leaves the road. The stripes of bright autumnal colour mark places where glyphosate has been used to clear the path (cross-field paths are supposed to be clear ground for walkers), and to kill everything in a ‘sterile strip’ around the field margin. Striving to drive forward from the hips, powered by the glutes, with a mid-foot strike rolling to push off and up from the ball of my foot (instead of hammering my heels into the ground) I stride off, totally distracted by paying attention to my feet. Try it. I dare you.

Another farm management photo. The crop is to the right, sterile strip just visible. There’s a ditch hidden in the trees and this wide uncropped field margin is intended to protect the water from agrochemicals, runoff and sediment washed down the field.

Eggshell fragments are scattered across the path. I don’t do egg ID; I thought these might be wood pigeon eggs, but those are white. What is interesting is the moisture around the eggs and the smear of yolk visible against the shell: these are signs that the eggs were broken open and the contents eaten, rather than dropped by one of the parents to clear out the nest. I doubt it was a mammalian predator – this is the middle of the field – so it was probably a bird that dropped the eggs to break open on impact. I’m guessing this because there were no signs of beak penetration or chipping away at fragments.

Spring Greens! Every year I enjoy watching the shades of green change, from the acid bright greens of spring to the deep glossy greens of high summer and, finally, the tired dusty brown-edged greens of late summer.

Lilac is one of the scents of my childhood summers. They were everywhere around the town where I grew up, but those I remember most clearly had gone wild in what were once the gardens of abandoned farmhouses hidden in the woods around the town. We were strictly forbidden to visit these places – tales were told of Bad Men, of concealed wells, of children who disappeared forever or, worse, reappeared as ghosts – but still we dropped our bikes on the roadside and explored the lilac-scented ruins on endless summer afternoons. Oh, and the building across the road is a traditional pub, the Pig and Abbot.

This is a view into the moat of a medieval moated manor, one of many I encountered on this walk. Tourist brochures suggest that moated manors are quaint or impressive half-timbered houses surrounded by a well-maintained rectangle of water, all set in beautiful lawns, but the majority are much less impressive unless you know what you’re seeing. Like this, many are completely overgrown by secondary woodland. Here’s an excerpt from Google Maps with moats marked in blue regardless of whether or not you can see anything on the ground. It was a very different landscape 500 and more years ago; the modern villages existed, but there were additional settlements – and these manors – outside the modern village boundaries. Note the village of Croydon at the top right, with moats to the north of it and a track leading south of the village to two more moats. Also, you may remember a walk to the Deserted Medieval Village of Clopton, which is the patch of green (with two more moats) across the road to the west of Croydon. Just to the right of that very dark field.

The path is marked by a tractor driven across an entire field of glyphosate autumn. I hate this: it’s spring, this should be green and full of life. But there is some life here; although there’s relatively little food available, sparsely vegetated ground is what some birds prefer for nesting. A lapwing was displaying to my right as I took this picture, so I tested the zoom to its limit…
It’s just about in the centre of the image. Lapwings are wonderful birds. The individuals are pretty, but it’s the flocks I love best: their wings are largely black, but with large white patches on the underside. As the flocks swirl the white patches flash like laughter against sullen winter skies.

Looking back across the valley over the mound of the Bury, the moated manor at Clopton, with trees growing in the moat.

The car is usually parked in this gravel area when I walk to Clopton, but this time it’s nearly 7 miles away! The white objects seem to be junked refrigerators and freezers, possibly left to leak their refrigerants until they can be disposed of without paying for storage and disposal of freons. Grrrr. Cross the road and head down the High Street…

And find leafprints preserved in the thick paint marking the edge of the road! So well-made that it’s possible to identify the species – this is elm, with a serrated edge and asymmetrical base. For some reason I find this absolutely charming. Small things amuse small minds, perhaps :-)

Croydon High Street on a quiet Saturday afternoon. It’s just the one road, lined with houses. A couple of footpaths run north between the houses and up the hill

to one of the things I was hoping to find.

It doesn’t photograph at all well, but fortunately someone’s built a fence to show the undulations of the ridge and furrow of medieval arable preserved beneath this pasture. It’s a feature of medieval farming in this area, and farmers created it on purpose by ploughing their strips of land in the same direction year after year, with the plough shifting a little more soil from the hollow up toward the ridge every year. No one today is certain why this was done, but the usual theory is that it improved drainage on heavy soils: water ran down the ridges into the hollows.

Here’s the mound of yet another moated manor house.

And, down the hill, this is All Saints, Croydon. A classic small church for a small village. The original nave, the main part of the church, is built using a wide variety of stones that would have been found in local fields – not a lot of money here in the 13th and 14th centuries. And perhaps they didn’t choose the best location or the best architect: one of several large brick buttresses is just visible between the entrance porch and the chapel, and those large black crosses on the tower are not windows, they’re the fixings for metal bars that run across the tower to stabilise it. The brick chancel was built in 1684, replacing the ruinous original.

In the centre of the village I thought I could smell sheep, and there they were. The hillside behind them is the site of the medieval village of Croydon, now only earthworks, but (frustratingly) there is no public access.

This is another of the things I came to see. The gate in the hedge marks the entrance to what in 1750 was Croydon Lane, running south from the village between the two moats I mentioned earlier.

Today it’s just a footpath, but there are indications that it was once a more important route. It’s difficult to see in the photo, but the path is at least 18″ lower than the ground to either side, worn down by traffic over many years. I’d hoped for significant old trees on the banks beside it, or signs of traditional managment such as multi-stemmed trees growing from old coppice stools, but judging by the dense growth of young elms, the old trees may well have been elms that died of Dutch Elm Disease many years ago.
Here is what may be the remains of one giant, slowly returning to soil beside the path. My watch is sitting on the map to give some sense of scale.
One of those two moats stood inside the ditched enclosure marked by trees in that photo. It’s also possible to see the height of the field surface compared to the track of Croydon Lane.

Croydon Lane originally continued straight ahead, across this field of Oil Seed Rape (canola to North Americans) to the line of trees (the footpath did, too, until relatively recently). The second moat would have stood to the right of the line of the Lane.

The path beside the trees is not walked frequently :-) Here’s a closer view of the vegetation:

I was wearing shorts. The keck (that’s what my husband, born in Lincolnshire, uses as a generic term for all white umbellifers) is just a nuisance, but nettles sting and the sap of hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium) causes photosensitivity: it disables the skin’s response to sunlight, resulting in sunburn. It’s not nearly as bad as some of its relatives, such as Giant Hogweed and Cow Parsnip, but still… I walked carefully here.

And then a mystery to occupy my mind for the rest of the walk (instead of fretting about how my feet were hitting the ground): there’s my watch on the ground in the middle of a field of field peas, next to something white.

It’s a fragment of shell. A very waterworn fragment of shell, but it’s still got some sand cemented to it with what looks like white mud. In a pea field, full of silt and clay. Next to a stream, admittedly, but the stream is full of silt and clay and besides which, that thick large shell is from a saltwater mollusc. Why is it here? Perhaps it’s in some way related to the Roman villa site about 2 fields over. Or perhaps it’s much, much older, about 95 million years older, eroded out of a lump of chalk. That would explain the white mud. Debating the matter in my head occupied me nicely until the SMS discussion about whether or not he’d meet me at the pub about 15 minutes from home. In the event I opted for a shower first and after that I was too tired to move. Except to eat our well-deserved dinner!

Have a picture of some fibre. It’s a promise: I have an entire post sitting in my head about how that became this

and why it’s much better than this:

But now it’s time for lunch.

Crumbs, it has been a while. But I haven’t been idle. First and still foremost in my mind is the story of the 2010 Ravelympics. For those who don’t know it, the lighting of the Olympic torch at Vancouver not only marked the opportunity for athletes from across the globe to strive for gold; knitters and spinners across the globe also set off on personal journeys to try to achieve their own goals. I find a challenge like this can spark my competitive spirit to achieve far more than I might otherwise manage. This year I set myself a goal that seemed both possible and ludicrously impossible: to spin cotton for warp and weft, weave and finish a bag inspired by Sara Lamb’s book Woven Treasures. Doesn’t seem unreasonable to you? Although I’d taken Stephenie’s Cotton class at SOAR last year, I’d never spun more than a few metres of it at any one time, I’d scarcely done any plying, I’d never spun for weaving… I’d never woven a project, I’d never used a rigid heddle loom, the Flip double heddle loom I planned to use wasn’t even in the country when I ordered it, I’d only sleyed (the term for putting all those threads through the right holes and making a warp) a warp once in my life, and that had to be cut off the loom… this was a big deal for me. The only thing I did before the Olympics began was assess the cotton stash (acala sliver and a box of naturally-coloured cotton slivers, both from Cotton Clouds), spin about 10m of acala sliver, make 2-ply and 3-ply, and solicit opinions from some weaving friends (including Sara Lamb) on Ravelry to establish which of them was most likely to be a ‘good’ weaving yarn.

I did not fancy staying awake past midnight to start spinning as the torch was lit, so I began on Saturday morning, UK time. I spun and I spun and I spun. I spun in the morning and the evening. Cotton needs a lot of twist, and having read that weaving yarn needs even more, with the Suzie Pro at the highest ratio on the high-speed whorl, I treadled like mad. My husband was so impressed that he counted: when plying reasonably fast, my right foot hit the treadle twice each second, 120 rightfoots/minute. And still I had to hold the forming yarn back for a count of 7 treadles to get what looked like sufficient twist, and even after that I ran the 2-ply back through the wheel to add more twist before I warped. I learned that the willful, twisty singles becomes much more biddable if allowed to rest on the bobbins for at least 24 hours before plying, and the plyed yarn is happy to take more twist if it too is allowed to rest. It’s very obedient, is cotton. I like it. It’s completely different from wool/animal fibres, and incredibly satisfying to spin.
The end result was an unknown quantity (but I hoped ‘enough’) of 2-ply cotton, still lively with twist, in five natural shades (those colours are not the result of dyeing: the cotton has been bred to produce them). I should have spun more of the pale brown to start with, as I ran out and had to spin more while warping the loom.
After plying, warping. And at this point things went downhill faster than Amy Williams. In order to produce a warp-dominant fabric of the stiffness I desired for the bag, the 2 10-dent heddles (ie loom set up at 20 ends per inch, epi) had to be threaded 1,1,2 to get my 27 epi. I discovered that, while I find reading a lace chart to be easier than falling off a log, my brain does not do well at warping a loom. It took me three days, during which I went from thinking “I’ll just whip through this” to “Oh, no, I’ll just do it again” to “AAaaaaaaaargh” to “Wood burns. Cotton burns. I have a fire.” In the end I found the still, quiet space beyond despair, where my stubborn lives.

I drew a little diagram showing how each end (length of yarn in the warp) should be threaded through the slots and holes of the 2 heddles; fortunately there was a ‘repeat’, so I didn’t have to do this for the entire 200-odd ends. And then I spent an entire day hunched over the loom, counting, hooking yarn through holes and slots, counting again. Finding an error, going back, counting again. The next morning I started to weave… and found the sheds were not clearing (raising and dropping the sheds lifts and drops various warp threads, forming a gap between two ‘sheets’ of warp threads in which you place the weft thread). My one other loom-weaving project FAILed because the warp became worn and stuck to itself, so I assumed this was the problem. Especially as I now remembered being told about ‘dressing’ cotton warp to make it less hairy and easier to weave. So I ran downstairs, made a gelatin dressing, painted it onto the exposed portion of the warp and set the entire loom on the bathroom radiator to dry.
Because I couldn’t afford to waste any time, I’d already warped my TWinkle (Tablet Weaving Inkle) loom to make a tablet-woven band to form the sides and straps of the bag. I’ve done a little more TW, so was much, much happier with this… almost able to relax and watch the pretty patterns form.

For those who’ve never heard of tablet weaving, the above shows how a set of square cards with holes in the corners creates a shed through which the weft is passed. After each pass the cards are rotated either forward or back, which changes the threads in top and bottom holes, forming the pattern on the band.

And then the warp on the Flip was dry and I tried again. And noticed that the lively cotton had twisted while I was sorting out the warp, and it was those twists holding the warp threads together and preventing the shed from opening properly, not a sticky warp. So I forced the twist back, out of the way, and…
began to weave, fast! And it was quite fast, once I established a rhythm. Perhaps I would finish in time after all.
I cut the cloth and band from the looms, washed them in warm water, and ironed them dry.
And realised I’d woven about 2′ more of the fabric than I needed. Never mind. I’d bought lining fabric to back my handwoven cotton, and now began the (for me) extremely arduous task of sewing the lining to the woven fabric. Remembering to include a strip of leather to form/strengthen the bottom of the bag, but forgetting to sew the ends of the band in. The first time. I remember thinking how much hassle it would be to disinter the sewing machine from under the yarn stash behind the chair in the front room; four hours later I was thinking I should have thought harder. At least I managed to keep the bloodstains on the brown of the band instead of hte cream, where they’d show (I am utter rubbish at sewing). A friend had given me some beautiful fine, soft leather to finish the top and flap of the bag; sewing that gave me new respect for her and anyone else who sews leather. Although apparently there are needles designed for sewing leather. Who knew?

At any rate, I finished the bag with about 8 hours to spare. I could have used this time to properly finish the ends of the band/handle, but needed to actually use the bag for a while before deciding the best way to do this. So I submitted the photos to the Finish Line, and sat down with a large glass of red wine in celebration.

I can keep the spare flyer, oil, allen key, wrench and other odds and ends close to hand while spinning on the Suzie. And I can admire my medal.

And we can wash our faces. With the very small washcloths I’ve made from the leftover fabric! I wanted desperately to see what happens when I finished the cotton ‘properly’. Cotton sliver contains oils and waxes from the plant itself, so is usually boiled with a little washing soda to remove these and make the fabric softer and more absorbent. I didn’t want a soft, absorbent bag, so I didn’t boil that fabric. So I didn’t see this until today:
The brown liquid is not coffee, it’s the water in which the flat cloth under the bag was simmered for 30 minutes with a drop of dishwashing liquid and a tsp or so of washing soda. Which famously changes the colour of the natural cottons. You can’t clearly see it in any of these shots, but the tan/yellow-browns of the unboiled bag and band have lost the yellow tinge, becoming almost dark milk-chocolate. The most striking change is in the green, which was a pale sage green and is now a dark olive.

I have to say, it’s better than a medal. I can’t describe the feeling of satisfaction or fulfillment I feel when I handle this fabric: I have made cloth. Woven cloth. If I made more of it, we would have clothing.

On the Ravelry group where I seem to be living at the moment, there’s a thread for the ‘Year of Making Stuff’. In it we egg each other on to greater feats, and enthuse, and feel inspired even while turning pale green with jealousy at some of the items some of us make. We’re all making beautiful things, and learning new ways to make beautiful things. Sara Lamb’s book Woven Treasures: one-if-a-kind woven bags inspired me to try pick-up weaving. It’s a folk weaving technique, the sort of thing people have been doing for thousands of years to enrich their lives by making everyday objects a little more beautiful. As I reached into the sewing box to find a needle to finish the ends of the band I was struck by the way I took those needles and my other odds and ends for granted.
I don’t know what brings these thoughts to mind. They’re not random, they’re always related to something I’m doing. Usually something that people just like me, my ancestors, have been doing every day for longer than I can think about. Baking bread, boiling water, spinning. I am so fortunate. I don’t have to grind grain and gather wood to fire an oven for 3 hours to bake bread for an entire household for a week; I just buy flour and turn on the oven. If I want a hot drink, I turn a tap to get fresh, safe water that boils in minutes at the flick of a switch. If I want a needle, I take one from the packet I bought more than 20 years ago in Canada. For 60 cents I had 50 steel needles, incredibly sharp and fine, suitable for a variety of uses. I still have lots because I sew as infrequently as possible (I dislike fine sewing, so it’s just as well I can buy ready-made clothes). By contrast, a thousand years ago, this one needle would have been someone’s prized possession. Most people used bone needles. Even in the Middle Ages, metal needles were nothing like those in the packet I take for granted. Not to mention the crochet hooks, the scissors, the safety pins and dressmaking pins so cheap they’re used in packaging the clothes we buy. To be thrown away, or sworn at when an overlooked pin finds its way into flesh as well as cloth.

After pausing to consider my good fortune, I did my best to finish the ends of my first pick-up band.
It’s shown here above my first complex tablet-woven band. That tablet-woven band is a sad sight: now a bookmark, it was meant to be much, much longer, long enough to be a belt. But after spending several hours over the course of a week or so getting to grips with the diagonals, I worked out how to make the diamond ‘eye’ at right… and then, for some reason, I had to put the loom to one side. I did make some notes about what I’d done, but by the time I got back to it I’d lost the knack of doing the diagonals, and I think some of the tablets had been rotated by accident. That strip and its warp sat on the loom for the next three years, reproaching me. Occasionally I’d try to work out how to get back to the diagonals, fail, and put it to one side again. Until a month ago when, after another afternoon spent staring thoughtfully at it, turning tablets to and fro, I took Denny’s advice and cut the dog off the loom. I can make another one. It is, after all, the Year of Making Stuff.
And I have been making stuff. There’s been quite a lot of spinning, some of which is being knitted.
The 400m of cashmere/silk is becoming another shawl based on the Rampton Lace Swatch pattern. It’s become overly difficult for a beginner, so that ball of Jo’s red merino/silk will become yet another version, with the complex ending of the green as a variant for more knitters willing and able to keep an eye on the orientation of their YOs. I can’t knit that lace AND remember to write down what I’ve done after wine, or when I’m tired, so I need some simpler knitting as well.
These will be fingerless gloves, a gift for a good friend. Apparently she has an opal ring in exactly these colours; how fortuitous! And when those are finished, I need a hat because the brown one I knitted in a hurry is both too short and too loose. And it’s boring. The last installment of the Socktopus Fibre Academy, ‘Magic Dust’ batts from FeltStudioUK
became a bouncy woollen 3-ply that I think will do nicely. Can you see the firestar in it? My new hat will *sparkle*!
There is of course more spinning occurring; 2 oz of Switzer-land alpaca from SOAR on the Suzie. I’m practicing long draw because after I finish that it will be time to compete in the Ravelympics. My chosen project? Spin cotton warp and weft for a small bag, then weave it on the Schacht ‘Flip’ rigid heddle loom that hasn’t yet arrived. We’re getting close to the wire here. I need to know the grist I need to spin! In the interim, I also have to work out how to crochet a friend’s knitted squares together to make a baby blanket.
When I finish *that*, there’s the Christmas present that arrived last week. I wonder if the fates are telling me to spin that 100g of silk on a spindle?

And there’s another big project hinted at by the background in all these images. To be fair, we don’t have to MAKE anything from scratch, but still…
that’s roughly 34 m^2 of solid oak floorboards to replace the worn and maltreated pine that is our current downstairs floor. Spinning wheel and cat for scale. That’s a lot of work even starting with the boards made by someone else. I’m hoping for warmer weather for the project, because there’s a chance that we’ll have to mess with the central heating pipes and radiators to get some of the old boards out. The snowdrops know the sun is moving north once more.
If by any chance I have time to feel bored, I will warp the loom for another tablet-woven band.

^1: if you don’t know the origin of this phrase, I suggest you obtain a copy of ‘The Princess Bride’ (book) by William Goldman or the 1987 film of the book, make a cup of your favourite warm beverage and settle into a comfortable chair for a pleasant afternoon.

How to identify over-twisted singles: if they wear ruts in your fingers, your singles may indeed be over-twisted.
There’s more to the problem than that, though, and it relates to a second kind of pain. Lesson learned from recent spinning: if a new spinner came up to me holding The Most Beautiful Fibre in the World and said “it’s for when I’m a better spinner”, I’d advise them from bitter experience. Spin it sooner rather than later. Don’t fondle it, allow others to fondle it, don’t carry it around like a security blankie. Don’t make it the very first item in your stash bin, carefully piling other stuff on top of it because you’ll spin that other stuff first, and you want The Most Beautiful Fibre in the World to be there, a treasure to reward you when you’ve spun your way through the dross. Do that and the fibre may still be pretty, but it might not be the nicest fibre to spin.
Exemplar the First. That was two large rolls of ‘Montana Agate’ roving, a blend by Three Bags Full from The Bellwether, bought in my first flush of enthusiasm three years ago. Lovely stuff, a subtle blend of silks and wools. Huge, lofty bags, they were… but when I found them in my Bin of Treasures, they’d been squashed beyond recognition. Fortunately the wool bounced back a bit, lofting as I ripped chunks off, but it never regained enough air to become a pleasure to spin. I’ve become so accustomed to drafting with ease that this took me by surprise; I knew some was over-twisted, but I hadn’t realised how badly until I plied it. The singles were twining around themselves even before they hit my left hand, and it’s the constant forcing back through the incipient tangles to get another arm’s-length on its way to my right hand and the orifice that cut into my fingers. It’s become 345m of 3-ply. Lots of hats and mittens, perhaps.
Exemplar The Second. 60g of cashmere/silk from Chasing Rainbows via Crown Mountain Farms. Bought in that same dangerous spate of enthusiasm, the single most expensive fibre I could imagine owning (hear me and my current stash laughing at my younger self :-). I carried it around for ages, marvelling at its softness, then hid it with the other Treasures. When I pulled it out last month I instantly realised that in my ignorance I’d compressed it badly. It was reluctant to draft as thinly as I wanted, but still I’ve got 400m of soft lace shading from gold to forest to olive green (I’ve tried to tweak that shot to give you some idea of the colours). Eerily appropriate for what should be my next project…

I’ve designed a small lace swatch for the Rampton Project in 2010. I’ve knitted it in handspun red silk, light fingering weight
I’m knitting it in laceweight merino, my very first spindle-spun laceweight:
It’s a variation of the patterns I used in the ‘Teaching Shawl’, most of which are based on various forms of leaf lace. I’m minded to put a lifeline through the current version when I reach the end of the chart, then strike out for unknown territory and a pattern for a different shawl. If I am pleased with the result and can remember what I did, I will chart it (yay! for KnitVisualizer) and then knit it in that green and gold. I’ve just remembered that those are the colours of the U of A. Ah, memories.

There’s been a lot of knitting going on here. Slowly.
That’s my ‘New England’ Luxury Spinners’ Set from Spindlefrog spun as a heavy laceweight 2-ply, becoming a Textured Shawl based on Orlane’s Textured Shawl Recipe (Rav link). I’ve added a texture or two; I keep telling myself the unevenness will magically disappear during blocking. Fingers crossed…

Sam the Ram is progressing, too. Although I was wildly over-confident of my ability to graft k1p1 rib. I may rip that belly graft out and try again. The rest of the spaghetti is, as far as I can tell, on course to become legs at the appropriate points of the body. Only time and patience will tell. It’s still one of the most fun things I’ve done: the shaping of the head, the way the body is constructed are revelatory about the things that a plane of knitting can be made to do.

I managed to get quite a lot of spinning done this the weekend.
The window is blinding white because we’ve got snow. Quite a lot of snow, in fact. We woke up on Friday morning to this
and most of it is still here. It’s COLD. I need a sweater, I’m in a KAL with Lynn – and due to my greed at SOAR, I have a duff right elbow that’s restricting me to about 15 minutes knitting at a stretch. It’s getting better, though. Slowly. I wonder if the realisation that I’m healing more slowly, aching more often, is one of the reasons that I feel so strongly my time is running short, that I have to get everything I want from Life sooner rather than later? This is the only Monday 21 December 2009 that you and I will ever have, Dear Reader. Let’s put it to good use. I am going to do a solid hour of work, and then I am going outside to glory in the myriad shades of blue created by snow and sky.

But I have more than memories.

Spirit Trail ‘Blue Jeans’ silk/cashmere and Spindlewood spindle, 10g, birds-eye maple

When I was trying to decide whether to try for SOAR I spent a lot of time googling for hard information about it. What actually happened? OK, it was clearly memorable, even life-changing, and people had fun and drank a lot, but what did they learn? Having been, I now understand why it’s so hard to describe. Yes, you learn, or at least I did. A lot. I learned about spinning, and fibre: I learned that I really am a better spinner than I thought, and I was able to get a glimpse of just how much more there is to learn. I learned about teaching: I want to be a mentor, I want to give people the knowledge that they desire. I learned about having fun, in a way that I’ve never had fun before because never before have I been part of a group of women old enough to know what they want and young enough to go for it. But it’s exhausting, physically and mentally. My single room was expensive, but absolutely worth it for me, because I was able to get enough rest (bed at 2130 most nights, I am not joking) and get up early enough to get some exercise. Also: Vitamin C and echinacea+zinc. Placebo effect or not, it may have saved me from the SOAR ‘Crud’, which this year turned out to be H1N1 for many attendees.

There’s a group pool of SOAR 2009 photos over on Flickr that’s worth trolling through. What can I show you?
Over the three days of the workshop, Stephenie told us about the history of cotton, the varieties, where they come from and how their physical characteristics affect the processing and spinning of their fibre. We spun cotton from the seed; we ginned seeds to separate the fibre from the seed, we ‘willowed’ and ‘bowed’ the resulting compressed fibre to see how vibration opens it up for spinning. We carded it and made punis (and a lot of very bad jokes based on Canadian slang. Google it :-) We spun our punis and commercially-available Indian punis, we spun top from many cotton varieties and blends. We spun on our wheels (the Journey Wheel was fine), we spun on spindles, tahklis, akhas, southwestern spindles, we spun on box charkhas and banjo charkhas, we spun on bull pups, and a great wheel. While we were spinning, Stephenie passed around samples of handknitted and handwoven cotton to show us what we could do with our handspun.
It’s the item Stephenie didn’t bring that is clearest in my memory: her re-creation of Native American weaving for a museum in the southwest, and the look on her face as she spoke of it.

Much of the equipment we used was made by Alden Amos (the box charkhas were Bosworths, or from India). Talking with Stephanie about textile history and spindles, she brought out a spindle Alden had made for her, and put it in my hands. How can I describe it to you? Have you ever felt that something was perfect, that it could be no other shape? Light and shadow emphasize the perfection of line and, if it’s something you can touch, you HAVE to touch it because, well, you have to. The spindle was not ‘like’ that, it was that. The simple, elegant perfection of the line of the shaft, the grain of the section of wood used as a whorl. I can’t help it, beauty makes me cry, and tears were in my eyes as I handed it back. And then Stephenie gave it back to me to keep. It’s sitting on the desk in front of me as I type, and I look at it and… it still makes me cry. Both for its beauty, and the memories it evokes. Anyway. I also have an AA tahkli. I tried several in the course of the class, and liked this one for its weight and persistance. I can’t think of the right word to describe its insistence on spinning long and fast. Look, it’s got whirlwinds on it!
On Wednesday evening the various workshop groups set up displays to show ‘everyone’ what we’d done and what we’d learned. We decided to emphasise the fact that cotton gets a raw deal: it isn’t difficult to spin provided you approach it with an open mind. We set out samples of the fibres, the tools we’d used, and the skeins we’d spun. We included ALL the waste fibre discarded over the three days (only a double handful), labelled ‘Cotton is NOT difficult to spin’. We enthusiastically demonstrated spinning on tahklis (Avedan and Stetson excel at this) and an ordinary wheel.

Stetson holds/spins a tahkli while the amazingly talented Denny spins cotton from it. Lyn/enallagma9 (centre), Ellenspn (far right) and others watch, bemused by their teamwork.

Stetson I think realised that someone spinning looks a bit… ordinary… sat behind the wheel, so he decided to try something different. At his request I brought the wheel out, turned it so the orifice faced into the room and bent down to adjust something. And the rest is history, recorded on YouTube and the memories of anyone in the room. The purple lump treadling is me; Stetson is the handsome chap who takes a bow after the singles finally gives up the ghost. None of the video and photos I’ve seen so far have caught Denny and the others who were limbo-dancing under the singles, or the moment when my hair got caught in it!

Thursday was a rest day, or meant to be. But the Market opened, which was not at all restful. The queue to get in began to form an hour or so beforehand, most of it being the proto-queue for the Rovings booth. The first five minutes were mayhem; I took refuge in Carolina Homespun, whence I emerged considerably richer in Abbybatts and Spirit Trail fibre. I am not saying how much poorer in cash terms! I then surveyed the field. My goal was to acquire stuff I cannot get in the UK, or that is best chosen in person. It was a great pleasure to finally meet Steve of Spindlewood, and I was thrilled to discover that 10g spindle. A Verb for Keeping Warm was on my list; I tried to buy enough fibre that I won’t be immediately frustrated when I run short. The colours are so, so pretty.

There’s some Spirit Trail in there, too.

I almost forgot to mention the special SOAR blend. Black BFL and silk, 8oz for $15, limit of three per person. I got three.

Also a gift bag from Jimbobspins!

There is a lot more fibre, I mean A LOT MORE FIBRE to be revealed. I’m going to ration it in case it overwhelms you, or inspires fibre-holics to raid my house. It’s currently bagged by colour, and there’s the ‘brights’ and the ‘blues’ yet to be revealed. Also the Rovings black polwarth/silk blend.

Back to what I learned, rather than what I bought or was given!
Friday am was Blending on a Drumcarder with Abby Franquemont. Amazing, intense three hours. Started with chunks of black merino, silver alpaca, and silk, used to teach us how to feed the carder, how to sandwich slick fibres, and how successive passes make more effective blends. Those tiny twists are my plied samples, one from each pass. I’ve rarely spindle-spun so fast… We used a range of carders, from small manual to ‘Judith’s carder’, a huge motorised beast that just ate fibre. Don’t worry about presenting the fibre correctly; don’t put your hands anywhere NEAR it! Just toss the fibre at it like flesh to a hungry lion. I was interested to note that the batts from the Strauch were more finely blended, but wow, it was fast. For the next exercise we were given dyed silk. merino and glitz to blend. Not allowed to choose: we learned that even apparently ugly colours can result in lovely blends. My maroon and mustard merino plus lavender silk ended up looking like lavender-shot mahogany. Rather lovely. But now I want a drumcarder. What do I remember most clearly? Abby’s hand on mine, pressing down to show me how to feed the fibre into the carder. Knowledge passing from hand to hand.

Friday pm was Plying with Judith Mackenzie Mckuin. Slightly less intense, but still… wow. We used millspun singles, Judith’s Rambouillet/Mohair blend, to create 2-ply, 3-ply, and 4-ply. (Judith said my plying was beautiful!) We talked about the benefits of plying and how the structure affects its performance in knitted fabric. And then we played with novelty yarns created by plying. And Judith talked about her work with Native Americans, projects to preserve and pass on their knowledge of fibre.

I don’t have any photos from my Saturday am class, American Long Draw with Maggie Casey. I don’t have any samples, save what’s still on the JW bobbin. That’s because I didn’t stop spinning. I learned… my hands learned that my right hand’s habit of pulling forward was causing slubs: the right hand should do nothing but control the twist while my left hand pulls the fibre back and away. And I did the Beerdrinkers’s Long Draw! From the fold or from the end, makes no odds. Should I wish to, I can now drink and spin at the same time. And I got to watch Maggie’s hands, spinning.

Saturday pm was Handcombing with Robin Russo. Peter Teal’s precision produces true worsted, but it is possible to produce perfectly useable prep by lashing on fibre as it comes, by the handful. Faster, too. And we did it with a range of fibres on a range of combs, from Navajo Churro on Viking combs (de-hair and comb), Polwarth and Romney on smaller combs, down to angora on mini-combs. See that grey skein on the card? That’s hand-combed, handspun angora. How cool is that? And the red stuff is my first pure mohair. Such fun!

But my word, we were tired by the end of it. Saturday evening was Hallowe’en, dinner in costume (I wore my best clothes with button eyes and behaved very properly as the Other Sarah. Which makes no sense unless you’ve seen Coraline) a spin-in of sorts, plus disco/karaoke. Far too loud for me. I went back to my room, changed into my travelling clothes and packed my suitcase bar my toothbrush so I’d have time for a last long pre-breakfast walk before leaving on Sunday. Then I went back to the Great Hall to watch, entranced, as Michael Cook/wormspit demonstrated silk reeling. One of the Sunriver staff leant over his shoulder and I couldn’t help overhearing as he was told he had to clear his workroom within the hour. And I saw his face – he’d been promised the room until Sunday, allowing him to pack all the class equipment. I volunteered to clear it, packing everything onto trolleys (commandeered from the kitchen) to be taken to a different room. When I’d done so (interrupted only by Tsocktsarina’s summons to help give Abby the final installment of the FOAY (Ravelry group) gifts), I was stunned by Michael’s insistence that I accept 2 bobbins of hand-reeled silk, plus 2 empty bobbins, a frictionless clip, and a 3-minute summation of what to do to turn it into laceweight yarn.
I’d had to sit on my suitcase (full of fibre) to close it. I’d already thrown away a pair of old socks in order make space… could I fit these in? Of course I could. So I did. And the suitcase weighed 49lb 8oz on the scales at Redmond Airport on Sunday morning, which is why my right elbow has been Not Quite Right ever since. Very Painful, in fact. But at least it doesn’t stop me spinning.

From Redmond I flew to Victoria, where we spent three days with his family before flying back to Heathrow. It hurt to leave, even more than my elbow, it hurt my heart. Western Canada is Home. I console myself with the thought that I carry it with me in my bones, but I still couldn’t bear the view from the windows on the other side of the terminal, the ones that showed the sea and the mountains beyond which lies Home.

I walked to the Lodge for Registration with some trepidation: I knew *nobody* here In Real Life, only as digital entities on Ravelry and via email. I’d tried to memorise ravatars, but I’m bad at faces, and pictures of someone’s dog or favourite FO are no help at all…

Abby was unmistakable, and gave me the first of many, many SOAR hugs (for which I later gave her the beer I’d brought from England). If someone asks if it’s your first SOAR, and you say ‘yes’, they’ll probably hug you. Inspired by this, I did my share of hugging, to thank Beth of The Spinning Loft for all the stuff she’s sent to me ( OK, I did buy it, but it was all good). Wearing my Camo Laminaria I was stunned when ElizF (on Ravelry), who designed it, came up to me to see mine – the first she’d seen in the wild. Her first time at SOAR too, so I hugged her for that AND the fabulous patterns. I hugged Tsocks, and Lynn (Enallagma9) and JimBobSpins and Sandi. All around me other people were hugging each other, friends who saw each other only at SOAR. And speaking regretfully of those they’d hoped to see who hadn’t been able to attend.

The three-day workshop session was about people, too (as well as cotton). Other students, learning. Our mentor, Stephanie Gaustad, who poured a generous flood of information, skill and experience into the room. The people who’d made the tools we used (Alden Amos’ work is so beautiful that some pieces made me
cry) the people who devised the techniques we learned, who used them to clothe their families. We are part of a tradition stretching back into the mists of time. Stephanie talked of duplicating ancient textiles, and people who’d done similar work spoke of feeling that the original makers were there, present, helping and approving of the effort to keep the tradition alive.

Pass it on, people.

— posted on the move

Mt Bachelor at 0730 this morning. After a brisk walk during which I saw a family of otters in the river!!! And a deer. And a dead garter snake :-( I decided to try the gym. Which was good – but the spa pools afterward are even better. Registration next, then the fun really begins :-)

— posted on the move

Almost there

— posted on the move

It’s usually considered best to start at the beginning and proceed to the end. There’s no end in sight, though. A couple of weeks ago I watched with interest as a friend blended her colours for the Rampton Project 2009 on her Louet drum carder. I eventually asked if I could borrow it, and recently I tried it for myself. I don’t think I’ve put the Romney fleece on record (can you sense my embarrassment? my third fleece?)

From Ashford in New Zealand via Treenways in Canada. Isn’t it gorgeous?
So… I decided to try a Romney/tussah silk blend, just to see what happens. The washed locks were flicked open and spread carefully across the tray thing while I turned the drum carder handle as slowly as possible, then more slowly still. Once I’d built up a layer of Romney on the drum, I lashed a finely-spread layer of tussah
directly onto the drum, then covered it with more Romney. 60g of Romney and 9g of silk later, I removed the batt and fed it through again. I’d have done a third (I tried lashing some silk across the drum, but these strands didn’t blend on that pass, the action just brought them together in a solid strip), but the silk was starting to think about nepps. The end result:
And this is what it looks like on the bobbin:

I like it a lot. I want to make MORE.

Speaking of the Rampton Project, there’s been some progress. Here’s the photo I’m working from, just to remind you.
I chose colours from that photo and tried to match them or at least come close, by blending dyed wool on handcards (see this post for more details). I added white and black silk to some blends, and others have silk noil in shades of green and orange to reflect some of the variation in the colours of the photo. The final list is Dawn Sky, River/Cloud Purple, Grass Gold, Beach Bronze, Islet Brown, Bright Grass Green, Mid Grass Green, Dark Grass Green, Shadow Blue, and Cloud White. The fibre for each was weighed as I created it, so I can blend more to match. Which is just as well.

This is an array of batts based on that photo:
The p-chullo pattern requires 10 colours, and there are 10 in that shot, but after looking at them laid out I realised that the beach bronze (second from right) was too bright, and the shadow blue (fourth from left) was too similar to the river/cloud. So I added some black to the bronze, and lots of black and more magenta to another attempt at the blue. The pattern is written for Berocco Ultra Alpaca, a 3-ply, so I blended 3 batts of each colour. I happen to have some, so I unraveled a length, made a sample card and started spinning.’X’ marks the wrong blue; I have to say its replacement, next to it, is one of the prettiest colours I’ve seen anywhere. This is how to get colours of the beauty and subtlety of the Starmore collections. Also I am very, very proud of the quality of some of that handspun!
I think the effect is close enough to be going on with. I need to think very carefully about the balance of the colours, and how to echo the combinations that stand out in the photo. Next? I have to get gauge, or close to it. First I have to finish this:

Another Aeolian in BMFA Rook-y, like the first. Hand-dyed yarn varies: this isn’t as pretty as the first, the colours are brighter, but I can fix that with a bath in 10 or 20% black dye before I block it.

But before I can finish that, I have to cut the hedge. I’ll deserve an afternoon sitting and knitting after that!