Tag: spinning

Learning Curve

Spinning wheel

These past couple of weeks I seem to have been on a learning curve for all sorts of things. I’ve been trying to sort out the spinning wheel at work, which seemed to be going really well! I’d identified it as being a 1960s/70s Ashford Traditional, found a diagram to help me set up the brake band for the bobbin, and oiled it to within an inch of its life. It now treadles beautifully, and the flyer is very smooth… until I start trying to spin. Whether I’m trying to spin my own yarn or just wind readymade yarn onto the bobbin, as soon as I put the slightest tension on the yarn, the flyer stops turning. I know it’s a question of getting the tension for both the drive band and the brake band in balance with one another, but I just can’t seem to get it right! Very frustrating.

Bootlaces

Last weekend (the weekend before? I forget), I made some bootlaces. This involved a great deal of swearing at offcuts of bias tape and various feet on my sewing machine. I finally managed to get the stitching even and without danger of slipping off the edge of the laces (the blind hemming foot turned out to be the thing I needed!), but then I mucked up the aglets.

Bootlaces

I bought the lace tipper originally to put the metal ends onto corset laces. Then I stopped making corsets, so it’s been in a drawer for the longest time. I made some hand-folded bias binding for the Etsy store, and when it didn’t sell (despite a lot of people having favourited it – I think they all went away and made their own!) I thought I’d repurpose it to make pretty bootlaces. I’ve made laces with sewn ends before, but metal aglets are obviously much more durable.

Can I get the dratted tool to work right? No, I can’t. These laces were just too thick, so I trimmed them down… and didn’t manage to catch the trimmed part inside the metal. The instructions say that one side of the tool is bigger than the other, but it’s not marked in any way, and I genuinely can’t see so much as a millimetre of difference between the two. The laces are getting shorter and shorter as I cut the tips off and try again, and I’m not sure now many more little pieces of metal I can afford to waste!

So, the bias binding’s back in the Etsy store, along with the first batch of vintage buttons. Now I’m off for a quiet little lie down as, on top of everything else, I’ve somehow managed to put my back out again!

On the plus side though, I’m very excited to report that my hat blocks from Guy Morse Brown have been made, and will be arriving this week! I expect another learning curve to follow shortly…

Shopping Spree: Skulls, Skeins and a Spindle

Handmade polymer & gemstone earrings from Honey & Ollie

Look what arrived today – my lovely new earrings from Honey and Ollie! They arrived super quick, all the way from California. So quick that I wasn’t expecting them for about another week! As a recovering goth, I’m still irresistibly drawn to Things With Skulls, and these were so pretty that I couldn’t resist.

Handmade polymer & gemstone earrings from Honey & Ollie

The skulls and flowers are made from polymer clay, with sparkly little gemstones dangling at the top. The findings (all hand made) are copper, which complements the stones beautifully. The hooks are a really lovely shape too, and they stay in place very securely. Despite being quite big, they’re really light to wear, and I’m definitely going to be adding more Honey and Ollie pieces to my wish list.

Handspun and hand dyed yarn from The Outside, with hand carved drop spindle

This is my little haul from the Museum of English Rural Life‘s Traditional Craft Fair.

All from The Outside, on top is a hand-carved drop spindle. It’s made from yew, and it’s a bottom-whorl style. Excuse the red acrylic leader, I was so keen to try it out that I grabbed the first thing I could find! Once I’d figured out how to do a half-hitch to hold the yarn in place, I grabbed some fluff and started to spin straight away. It’s a lovely spindle, and I’m really happy to have one of my own instead of having to borrow from work. Now I can practice at home, and make as much wobbly, lumpy yarn as I like!

Handspun and hand dyed yarn from The Outside

Speaking of yarn… this is neither wobbly, nor lumpy. It’s handspun from blue faced leicester wool, and it’s lovely and soft. The vibrant colours are all from natural dyes, and this should be just enough to make a pair of rainbow-striped mittens.

The colours, from left to right, are:
1) Weld & madder
2) Weld
3) Weld & woad
4) Weld & woad dipped in madder
5) Woad & weld
6) Woad
7) Cochineal (orange oxidised to blue)

I had a lovely chat with Romilly about dyeing, including planting up a dye garden and not being afraid of mordants. There is definitely going to be some experimentation with colour and fluff in my future! For now though, I need to practice my spinning, and think about the perfect pattern for my new rainbow-coloured mittens.

My first handspun yarn!

Plied handspun yarn

Well, it took me long enough, but today I took my singles off the drop spindle, and turned it into yarn! I wound it off onto a plastic bottle which took the place of a nostepinne. I was then able to use both ends of the same yarn, and ply them together with the spindle.

My first handspun!

And here it is – my very first ball of handspun yarn. A whole ten grams of thick-and-thin, funny-coloured, badly spun, badly plied hand made yarn!

Little Mikey's Monstrous Scarf

I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to knit with such a little amount of yarn. (I wasn’t able to spin any more because the spindle needed to be emptied before the spinning workshop that’s running next week.) It turned out that Little Mikey was in need of a scarf, so I thought my monstrous handspun would be the perfect yarn! I used my Simplest Scarf in the World tutorial, with two 5mm needles and one 12mm. It came out just long enough, and I’ve saved the last couple of inches of yarn as a memento.

I have to say that ticking the “my handspun” box on Ravelry was very satisfying. I hope I’m able to make a lot more!

Learning to spin

Spinning wheel

A spinning wheel was donated to work recently, but it wasn’t needed as part of the collections, so it made its way along to me. As Learning Assistant, it’s now my job to learn how to use the wheel, so that I can eventually demonstrate and teach it to other people. Gosh, it’s a hard life sometimes, isn’t it?!

The wheel was dropped off to the museum while I wasn’t there – I came in to find the wheel itself, and a bucket of bits. The bucket contained the flyer, a couple of bobbins, the drive cord (broken), a niddy-noddy, and a knob that I haven’t discovered the function of yet. If anyone can tell from the photo above where there isn’t a knob and there ought to be a knob, please let me know!

First yarn

The piece of leather attaching the pedal to the drive shaft had split, so Fred (the Conservator) very kindly replaced it with a whole new piece for me. Once that was done, and I’d tied a knot in the drive cord, I could start to spin! I practiced just treadling for a bit, until I could do it without the wheel swinging backwards all the time. I came to add my own fibre to the yarn that was already wound around the bobbin, and discovered that I didn’t have an orifice hook – hence the straightened paper clip above!

I’d thought my first attempt at spinning was going rather badly, until I took my first metre and a half of yarn off the bobbin and plied it back on itself. Obviously it’s extremely uneven and wonky, but it’s got twist in it, and I’ve made yarn! Admittedly it took several attempts to get this far, lots of wondering why the yarn wasn’t winding around the bobbin, and adjusting the tension, and wondering whether it was too tightly spun, and losing control of the wheel with my feet while I was trying to draft with my hands.

I’ve emailed the local Spinners, Weaver & Dyers to ask for a bit of help, so hopefully I should be on my way to learning to spin really soon!

Learning to spin

Spinning!

Look! I made yarn! I started with fluff, and now I have yarn!

Yes, I am exactly as excited as that made me sound, if not more so. Yarn!!

So, yes, anyway. I borrowed the drop  spindle from work, months and months ago, along with a bit of leftover fibre from the felting sessions. I thought it might be handy if I could teach myself to spin, given that there were a bunch of spindles right there not being used. I found a couple of books, read a couple of magazines, and gave it a try. But it didn’t seem to make sense, I wasn’t able to make yarn, and I got a bit cross and shoved it all in a  bag and pretended I wasn’t sulking about it.

Fast forward to last night, and I went along to a local knitting group where Felix very kindly taught me how to spin! It turned out that what I needed was a person to demonstrate the principles, and then it turned out to be really easy!

Of course, the little bit of yarn I’ve made so far is terrible. It’s inconsistent in thickness, lumpy in places, disastrously over-spun, and almost certainly useless. However, I am assured that this is widely considered to be Art Yarn, and that I should make as much of it as I like until I start to get the hang of consistency. Usually I would be upset at the prospect of making an increasing amount of crappy yarn. Thankfully I’m so excited about having learnt this new-to-me ancient method of transforming fluff that I want to make as much of it as I possibly can!

As you might expect, I’m already coveting new fibres and new tools. I’m currently using a cheap MDF spindle, and spinning merino tops. That’s great, I’m making yarn… but trying out Felix’s lovely little walnut spindle with a little bit of fluffy Estonian wool was something of a revelation. Felix also suggested that I might want to look up Hilltop Katie on Etsy, and now I’m having a really hard time trying not to buy one of everything. Her beginners’ kits look like a great place to start.

I can’t go back to the knitting group next week, I’ll be at work. But the week after, I’d love to be able to go back and show them a whole  spindle full of Very Artistic Yarn!

Having a go at weaving.

Today Paul and I went to our local Fun Day, organised by the Lions Club. We go every year, primarily to see the ferrets. The Hants and Berks Ferret Club bring lots of ferrets with them, and they have races, which are hilarious! The ferrets run through an obstacle course of pipes and bridges and seesaws. Last year we managed to place a bet on the slowest ferret of all – he stopped half way through the race to have a nice long drink from the water obstacle! Today I got to cuddle a ferret called Zorro. He was adorable, although extremely wriggly. Thankfully he (and his owner) didn’t seem to mind when he squirmed right out of my arms and landed on the floor!

We have a pet rabbit, so there’s no way we could keep a ferret at the same time. It just wouldn’t be fair to the rabbit to bring a predator into his home. In the meantime though, we’re quite happy to visit the Hants and Berks Ferret Club when they’re in our area.

After playing with the ferrets I headed straight for the crafts tent, where there was a weaving display set up. I was immediately overcome by the wool fumes, and as soon as I’d picked up a little skein of wool for a squish, I was encouraged to have a go on the makeshift looms.

Lower Earley Fun Day - weaving

Here I am, a couple of rows in. I believe I was doing weft-faced weaving, as the warp threads would have been completely hidden if we’d been packing the rows together tightly enough.

Look at the little boy opposite me, in the football shirt. He has the most intense look of concentration about him, and he was weaving away for ages!

Lower Earley Fun Day - weaving

Here’s my finished bit of weaving!

I really enjoyed doing it, and am very tempted by the idea of buying a little table loom of some kind. When my hands won’t allow me to knit any more, I think a little light weaving would be an interesting way to carry on having fun with yarn.

Paul took the photos on his new iPhone, and he was checking his email as I was weaving away. Something of a technology clash going on there! It worked to everyone’s benefit though, as one of the ladies in charge of the weaving demonstration has asked us to email the photos to her, “to demonstrate that anyone can do weaving”.

We chatted a little as I played with a piece of lovely soft roving which matched my hair. As soon as I picked it up, it seemed totally natural to twist it between my fingers. I think perhaps I should back away slowly from the idea of weaving, before I find my house filled with roving and a drop-spindle.

Never mind ferrets – please can I have a sheep?