Leigh's Fiber Journal

Sunday, March 30, 2008

A Little More Shetland :)

I'm still knitting, so there's still room for more yarn! And here it is, recently given to me by Cathy and Tina.

The one from Cathy is black Shetland lamb fleece. It is sooo soft and sweet. The little guy's (girl's?) name is Truffles, and being black, it's hard to get a good photo or scan of it. It's full of baby waves and curls, the tips being just a teeny bit lighter than the body of the lock. From the tips (which look like they've never been cut) and the texture (which is extremely fine), I'm guessing it's a first shear.

This fawn roving is from one of Tina's own Shetlands. It is beautifully soft and with a lovely light luster. From pulling out a few fibers, they appear to be three to four inches in length. I'm intrigued because compared to my other light fawn sample, this one is a little different, so it will definitely be featured in my Shetland Sampler Cardigan.

And then there's this glowing green......

... also from Tina. I only pulled out several locks to photograph, but there is actually quite a range of greens in it: from almost blue to pale cool to mostly neon. I'm not sure how she got the fantastic color, but I can tell you that it is exceptionally silky with a gorgeous luster.

So, since my wheel is still empty while I experiment processing the Polwarth I'm going to get it spinning some of these samples!

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Rats! A Knitting Boo Boo.

I've been knitting happily along on my Shetland Sampler Cardigan, when I looked back and saw this

I looked to see if I had somehow dropped a stitch somewhere, but couldn't find it. The rest of the pattern looks just fine.

So what would you do? Frog 3,252 stitches, or individually pull out 20 stitches, one at a time like a ladder, correct it, and then crochet the stitches back in place???

You can see which one I chose to do. :p

Monday, March 24, 2008

Steeking So Far

By Leigh

I've finally made enough progress on my Shetland Sampler Cardigan to post a photo.

I have to admit that I had one false start; there was a problem with gauge. It seems that my back-and-forth gauge is not the same as my in-the-round gauge. In an email conversation with Peg Arnoldussen, I have learned that my style of knitting is most likely the culprit. I knit continental style, holding the yarn in left hand. Evidently, this often results in a tension difference between knit and purl stitches. I've been aware of this for a long time, but never realized what the problem was!

The COWYAK is knitted in yellow (I changed colors when I made my second start), and the natural Shetland color sequence is somewhat random; trying to plan where to use my 15 Shetland yarn colors of varying amounts is more than my poor brain can handle. I felt that I was doing good just to calculate how much I need for the ribbing! What I am doing, is using the colors for which I have the most yards for the larger color sections. Hopefully by the time I get to the end I will have had enough of everything!

And the steek? So far I love it! Of course, I haven't had to do anything scary with it yet, but I like knitting it in.

It is placed where the opening of the cardigan will be. All yarns are added and cut off there. Since the steeks will be secured with machine sewing, I won't have any ends to weave in! For that reason, I am leaving my yarn ends fairly short. I'm not sure how practical this is, but to me it means less waste, and that is important with handspun. I find that I have to snug some of them up when I start a new round, but so far the whole thing seems to be holding together fairly well.

I'm a slow knitter so I don't suppose progress will be very rapid. However, I really enjoy stranded knitting, and this project actually isn't too rumply, which is encouraging. My goal is to finish it by next winter; Good Lord willing and the creeks don't rise.

Related Posts:
A Shetland COWYAK - Casting on with waste yarn.
Shetland Sleeve Update - A look at checkerboard steeks in progress.
Wound Neck Steeks
Sewing & Cutting the Steeks
Shetland Sampler Cardigan Complete!

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Multiple Tabby Sampler Off the Loom

My first multiple tabby sampler is off the loom. I've even got it washed and dried. As promised, here is the draft, albeit in an abbreviated form.

My warp yarn was 8/2 unmercerized cotton.
Each 20 end threading block is one inch wide, so the sett is 20 epi.
I used a different warp color for each block, rotating through the colors of the rainbow.

The tie-up is standard.

The treadling changed after each 20 picks.
My aim was 20 ppi, though I was kinda inconsistent with this.
My weft yarn was also 8/2 unmercerized cotton.
I used a different color weft for each sample.

Purple weft

Blue weft

Green weft

Yellow weft

Orange weft

Red Weft

Marie asked about the inspiration for these, and I actually got it while I was weaving the M's & O's dishtowels. While using different color wefts with the red warp, I thought that I would like to weave my next project in a color gamp. (For a good definition of gamp, click here.) Once I decided on the multiple tabby weave I changed my mind however, because I realized that the skips wouldn't create an even blending of color. So I decided to do a series of samplers, each with a different color weft. As you can see, the weft color does have a dominating effect on the overall fabric. I like that however with this weave.

Actually, these were never intended to be samplers in the traditional sense. Sharon calls them "samples with usable results," like all my dishtowels! For a color series, however, I thought for my samples with usable results, I'd make napkins. Their size after washing and drying is 15 by 17 inches. As napkins they would be a little smaller after hemming. I've never made napkins before, so I'm not sure what a good size should be. But I'm willing to give it a try.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Next Spinning Project - Polwarth

By Leigh

Now that I've started knitting with my handspun Shetland, I need to get another project on my spinning wheel. About a year ago my friend Heather from Canada, sent me a lovely Polwarth fleece. (That post, complete with photos of my cats' snoopervision, is right here.) That fleece has remained on my mind through several other spinning projects, but the time has finally come to get it out and spin it.

When Heather first sent me the fleece, she told me that she had gotten it because it was too tender for commercial processing. However, she had still found it to suitable for handspinning, especially as it is a lovely fleece.

The details:

Staple length, 4 to 5 inches
Staples tender about midway in length
Staple shape, rectangular
Color is a fairly consistent brown as you see in the photo
Tips, some sunbleached
Crimp, ranging from 5 to 10 crimps per inch
Luster is low
Hand is fairly soft

Tenderness is a weakness in the fiber which causes random breakage. If you take a close look at the staple on the left in the above photo, between the 2 & 1/2 and 3 & 1/2 inch tape measure marks, you may be able to see a band of slightly lighter brown. When these banded staples are gripped at either end and firmly snapped, a crackling or popping can be heard rather than the "ping" of a healthy staple. With enough force, the fibers of a tender staple can be broken at the area of tenderness.

I've got about three and a quarter washed pounds of this fleece and have looked it over pretty closely. Interestingly, only part of the fleece appears to be tender; there are some very sound locks in it as well. This puzzles me, because from what I've read about the causes of tenderness (poor nutrition, stress, parasites) it would seem that the entire fleece should be consistently tender, which it doesn't seem to be the case here. Even so, it is long enough to still be spinnable, even with breaking.

The biggest challenge will be in deciding how to process this fleece. It is likely that it will break during carding. Even so, the fiber will still be long enough to spin. A potential problem would be really short bits breaking off, which would later become pills in the yarn and anything I made with it. So I think I will experiment with processing before deciding how to deal with it.

And before I forget, while I was researching tenderness, I came across several useful fleece evaluation resources I'd like to pass along:

Handspinning Fleece.pdf by Joanne M. Hiersch for the spring 1988 Blacksheep Newsletter
Wool Assessment from the Shaltz Farm website
Notes from Judith Mackenzie’s Class on Fleece Selection and Grading for the Icelandic Sheep Breeders of North America

Now, I'm off to see what I can do with that fleece.

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