Iris Inspired

Eager to extend our fiber-filled holiday for another day, Oogy and I set up one last dye pot.  She had leftover dye in colors Cranberry and Lilac, which were not enough for a full pot by themselves, but together were likely to yield some medium dark roving and yarn.  Now that I'm back to Reality, I am continuing my quest to spin thinner yarn, using the roving from that pot.  As I'm spinning away, I look out the window, and it slowly occurred to me that the roving that was nicely loading onto the bobbin was the EXACT color of the irises in my garden.

We're looking out at the iris patch

These plants are all over my yard.  They surround the house, and even the ones I threw out last fall have taken up residence and established their own flower bed.  They are growing in 2 neighbors' gardens, and a number of friends in the area have adopted them over the years.  I planted them here about 10 years ago.  I got them from my dad, who got them from his aunt who was growing them in Vermont.  She got them from my grandmother, who grew them in Connecticut and gave them to my aunt when she and my grandfather moved to Florida in the mid 1960s.  I'm sure half of Florida is covered with them, too. They are still in VT, and in all of my siblings' gardens in CT.  I think of them as legacy flowers, a link to my grandparents and my beloved great aunt, and now my dad, all of whom have left this world and are probably growing irises in the next one.

Having discovered this resemblance to the irises, I have added some yellow fiber I had sitting around to the roving and will spin separately some green roving, which was also waiting patiently for me to spin it.

 

Let me know if you'd like some irises...

Second Yarn Respite This Month

It's feast or famine, it would seem, in the spend-time-with-yarn-pals department.  For most of the spring semester our campus knitting group consisted of me, or one or another knitter, but rarely all of us together.  Even when we could all make it to lunch on Friday, it was just the three of us.  After eating my lunch and knitting alone a few times, even I gave up.  Then, there was the beginning of May and the wonderful trip to VT and NH with a few yarn pals.  It was so great to put some distance between work and yarn, and to enjoy the company of a few great pals.

The fruits of our labor hanging out to dry.

I barely can handle the joy of a SECOND yarn pal adventure, this time further afield to visit Oogy (her blog name; I call her another name that is Top Secret). Day 1: knit.  Day 2: knit some more, and dye roving, skeins, and sock blanks with Oogy's pal LW.  Day 3: Knit even more, dye more roving, skeins, and sock blanks, AND spin outside.  Day 4: Knit, dye, spin (inside because it's raining), repeat.  Don't worry, we've also had plenty to eat and drink.

caked sock blanks and twisted skeins

Deck Spinners

Spinning goal: make thinner yarn.  Pictured on the right is a hot mess on fire of over-twisted 2-ply yarn. 

I discovered that to make fingering-weight yarn I needed to 1) change the drive ratio, which alone yielded the twisted nightmare on the right,  and 2) change from double drive to scotch-tension, which fixed the problem I was having with the bobbin failing to pull the yarn in. 

My usual DK/light worsted-weight next to something closer to fingering wt yarn.

I suppose it's time to return to Real Life, with batteries fully charged, at least.

Yarn Respite

There is a typical "pattern" that I follow for blog posting: before a semester and then at the other end, when all that's left is to grade papers.  So here we are, at the other end of the Spring 2019 semester.  It began rather harshly with a significant family loss, so from January until May, I've been bimodally immersed in either family matters or academic matters, with not much time left for yarn matters.  Luckily I have multiple projects that require only modest attention, and those have sustained me.  But now! Now it's time to play with YARN.

There is no better way to inspire yarn playing than to visit a spinnery.  A few of my yarn pals and I spent a recent weekend in Putney, Vermont, to get away from reality and catch up with each others' hectic lives.  This included a tour of Green Mountain Spinnery.  Oogy and I had toured GMS several years ago and found it fascinating, so I suggested to these pals that we do the same.  It was a hit.  We also traveled east for about an hour to visit Harrisville Designs, but that's a story for another post.

Welcome to Green Mountain Spinnery, Putney, Vermont, USA

We stayed across the street at the Putney Inn, which made visiting the Spinnery rather easy. It was a Saturday, so the machines were not functioning.  They were whirling loudly when Oogy and I were there, which made it interesting to see at a distance, but not possible to get too close, for safety reasons.  It was also much easier to hear our guide when the spinnery was on pause.  Their website has a virtual tour that provides lots of interesting details, so I'll only supply some highlights here.

We started in a series of rooms that were filled to the ceiling with fleeces that needed to be processed.  It smelled rather nice, if you like sheep odor.

Clean wool starts here...

After learning about the scouring and picking process that yields clean fluffed-up wool, we examined the carding machine.  I have a drum carder at home that produces little batts of wool for spinning, but this machine is like 4000 of those.  If you look closely you can see the nail-like spikes that catch the wool and convince each strand to line up with the others. 

...then makes its way through here to become roving.

Then there is the most important step, spinning. It was very interesting to hear about the challenges of making sure the resulting yarn is the correct weight and is twisted consistently.  It eventually becomes the yarn that is so enticingly displayed in the little store.

I was united with a few skeins of 100% wool fingering weight in color moorit, and a skein of white Simply Fine fingering weight 40% kid mohair and 60% fine wool.  They are coming together quite nicely in a poncho.

It's raining, so I can't mow the grass.  I guess I'll have to spend the day knitting.

I did a small gauge swatch, which turns out to have been a total waste of time because the emerging project is much larger than expected.  I had only a vague notion of how the poncho would come together, so it's been easy to abandon that plan.  Another plan is forming slowly as I knit.  I'm using Elizabeth Lovick's The Magic of Shetland Lace Knitting to combine multiple lace patterns.  I'm doing the lace portions in white, and intermittent blocks of moorit in stockinette.  So much fun!