Fiber Fool

Firstly, thanks for indulging my absence last week. It took me until Wednesday to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (I liked it, but that is about all I’ll say on the blog, e-mail if you really want to discuss it in detail) because I was trying to be good and still get my gardening and work tasks completed. By that point I had kind of enjoyed my hiatus from the blog. We were also originally going to be on vacation for a week starting last Wednesday so I decided it was okay to just take a brief vacation from the blog.

It ended up being a very good thing to do. Last week was almost unbearably hot so I didn’t accomplish much in the way of fibery stuff other than to think about it. But I even felt that my brain was par-boiled and I couldn’t think straight anymore. There was no way I was going to cook either. Not even grilling because the grill is on the west side of the house. This week is looking to be improved. Still hot, but not in the upper 90’s with lows barely below 70 so I should be in a bit better place.

Anyway, I seem to have won Deb’s contest to celebrate her 1000th post. I can’t tell you how excited I am to knit with someone else’s handspun!!!! But since I won a contest it seems I should hold one so I can pay the kindness forward. I haven’t decided upon the prize yet. I was thinking perhaps two of my patterns, but I might sweeten the pot a tad too. You just never know :-) Just asking for comments isn’t enough though. I have to make you work a little :-)

I finally finished up my first skein of lace weight for my Spun Stitches shawl last week. I used Abby’s plying technique and that is a fantastic method. I did end up with some inconsistencies, but overall I’m thrilled with the final product. It is in a warm bath as I type.

For the contest I’m asking you to guess the total yardage for this skein. It weighs 3.1 oz. The bobbin is the standard Majacraft “4 oz” plastic bobbin. The niddy noddy here is in the 1.5 yd configuration. The WPI of the unwashed yarn was ~25 WPI. My yardage total will be based on the niddy noddy unless I get assistance in getting a measure from a McMorran Balance (I don’t own one so I’ll need to borrow one or get someone to measure it with one). The winner will be the one closest to the actual measure without going over!

Well, my signing up for Tour de Fleece was awful optimistic given that the later part of July is often the worst as far as heat goes. Not that we’ll hit August and everything will be magically better, but come August usually we actually start cooling off decently at night again. As it has been we’ve been starting the day off with the house only cooled down to 74 degrees. That is plenty comfortable, but it means we climb over 80 by mid afternoon. My brain is cooking! Seriously, I can’t put three words together anymore. I’m not sure if it is directly correlated to the heat or if it is a matter of the lack of sleep due to the heat but it is driving me nuts!

Despite the heat I did finally finish up the second bobbin of lace singles for Spun Stitches. Once they set I’ll be plying them. It also means I need to get moving on making the slightly darker version of batts here too! I need to come up with a method that allows me to card while sitting though as my feet definitely can’t handle standing on the garage floor for the hours it took me to make the first three batts.

A Harry Potter update - the book arrived on Saturday, but at 8:30pm!!! And, there are 4 pages of it that are nearly unreadable!!! DH was very close to done when we absolutely needed to go to bed last night, but we took SIL3 out to dinner for her birthday and she lent us her copy as well so I’ll be doing a bunch of reading today, though perhaps some of it will be at a coffeeshop or something in hopes of getting my brain back.

And because we know it is busy garden time and there is something new everytime you check on it…

We have watermelon! I swear I counted four the other night, but once I went out to take photos I only found two. But isn’t it twee??? It’s so tiny, but you can tell it is watermelon! :-) We also thought we saw some set midget melons, but I couldn’t find those either, but you can tell the plants are going nuts with new growth and blooms! The watermelon vines I swear double overnight, LOL!

On that note, it’s time to do the morning garden chores and then hit Harry Potter!

Like others I did some “training” for Tour de Fleece. Despite sore feet, last Friday I finished my first bobbin of singles for my Solar Dyed Spun Stitches Shawl (no, still no shawl pattern chosen). Yesterday I was antsy. I’m having issues beside my feet and am rather miserable at the moment so I finally decided I was going to spin anyway - bruised feet and cracked fingertip be damned!

To get the second bobbin of singles going I needed to prep another one of the batts that I had made. I recalled getting asked about my technique of preparing the batts so I took photos as I did it last night. I hope you find it useful.

Batts are rectangular pieces of drum carded fiber. They are the width of the carder and the length of the circumference of the drum. There are many different ways to spin from the batts, including rolling it into a tight cylinder and spinning from the end of that. In this case I wanted to turn my batt into something resembling roving. We’ll call the finished product “roving.”

The first step is to orient the batt in the portrait form, that is with the longest side vertical and the shorter side horizontal. Starting in the upper right corner begin to tear a strip of the batt away from the main piece. Be sure to choose a width that is measurably thicker than what you’ll need in your drafting zone to achieve the weight yarn you need. Here it was 2-3 fingers wide and I’m spinning lace weight singles. Continue to the tear until you are near the bottom edge of the batt. Stop when you are roughly the same distance from the bottom of the batt as your strip is thick.

Move over the same thickness as the first strip and start a new tear in the batt, moving upwards and once again stopping before the end of the batt. Continue making these zig-zag rips in the batt until you have formed on long strip of fiber.

From the tearing the strip of fiber will be a bit rough around the edges. There will also be those obvious turns in the strip of fiber as well. If you made your strips sufficiently thick you can now pre-draft the strip of fiber to clean it up and make it more resemble roving. In the photo on the right I made two passes of predrafting. Look how much longer, and nicer looking it is!

The pile of pre-drafted roving is much more than I can get through in one spinning session so I roll it up into a nice ball of roving. I introduce a bit of twist as I form the ball to help hold the fiber together and give it a bit more stability. Below you can see the fiber in its three states - the original batt, the spun singles and a ball of “roving.”

The photos with step-by-step notes can also be seen in my Flickr Set.

I’m soooo bummed! I signed up to be a part of Tour de Fleece this year and I can’t follow through :-( It seems I did something to my left foot over the 4th. On Thursday I thought my big toe joint was out of place, but as the weekend neared and finally arrived I found both feet to feel as though they were bruised on the ball. Walking, standing, and yes, even treadling hurt!

Then, yesterday we did a bit of a Harry Potter movie marathon so I knit, naturally. Well, I ended up cracking the pad of my right finger! *sigh*

I guess you’ll have to look for me at the medical tent!