Blending colors on the hand cards for variegated yarn

I've been experimenting at the spinning wheel the past few days. Last week I picked up three colors of wool roving from my local fiber supply store. Then, inspired by a post by Cecelia Yarnell that I had seen a few months ago on the FaceBook spinning group, I decided to break out the hand carders and try blending the colors together.

So, first I broke off lengths of roving about the same length as the hand carders. That gave me a more or less consistent amount of wool to work with.

Then to blend, I'd break off a bit of each, and swap them.

By trading bits in different proportions and blending them together, it should give me a gradual transition from one color to the next in the finished yarn, right?

So, I spread one color onto the cards...

...then evenly layered the other color over the top.

After several passes back and forth on the cards, the colors were blended nicely together. The more passes back and forth, the more blended the fibers got. Then I rolled the fiber off of the cards into a rolag, ready to pre-draft and spin into yarn.

I laid out the rolags of wool in the order I wanted to spin them, pulled out my spinning wheel, and had at it. I started with the green, worked my way through the turquoise, and ended up at the dark blue.

After spinning that much up, I found my bobbin was only about half full. So I carded up another batch, and went back the other way. Once my yarn was spun, I Navajo plied it to make a balanced and strong 3-ply yarn. Navajo plying kept the color variegation pure, so the final skein would be solid colors blending gradually from one color to the next.

I wet the finished yarn in hot water, and hung it to dry over night. That set the twist and fluffed up the fibers a little bit. You can see here how nice the Navajo plying turned out. I'm really pleased with that, since this was my first time really to try that technique. (I learned from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgNkkt5xLZI )

And here is the finished yarn, wound into a center pull ball. I'm really tickled with the way this turned out. This skein is about 160 yards of worsted weight 3-ply wool yarn. It has been promised in a trade to a lady who does crochet work. I'm looking forward to seeing what she makes of it! And, I'm also planning out my next spinning project using this blending technique. I can foresee a few skeins of a nice soft, bulky yarn using a similar variegation. Don't you think that would be beautiful woven up on the triloom? I've got several projects ahead of that one on my to-do list, but I'm looking forward to when I have the time to try it out!

Wet finishing singles hand spun yarn

Yesterday, I posted the above picture of a skein of yarn hung to dry with a bit of weight on it. I got another bobbin full spun up today...



...and figured I'd show you why I do the step about wetting the skein in hot water and hanging it up. I'm making single ply yarn for a historic weaving project, and single ply means the yarn is by no means balanced. Given the chance, singles fresh off the bobbin will cork screw up into little tiny twisty springs!



See that? Those skeins are wound to be the same length. But the one on the left is the fresh batch, and the one on the right was soaked down and hung to dry overnight. Makes a difference, doesn't it?

If I wanted my yarn even smoother, I'd put it on a niddy-noddy and suspend it over a pot of steaming water for half an hour. But I just want to make the yarn manageable until I get around to dyeing it, so this treatment is enough for now.

Tutorial: First try at wool combing

The fleece I washed the other day was dry tonight, so I started experimenting with how to process it for spinning.

The Icelandic sheep's fleece has a longer overcoat, called the tog, and shorter, finer undercoat, called the thel. I'm thinking that I want to take advantage of these two different kinds of fiber. I'd like to use the longer tog for my warp thread, and the shorter thel for the weft. But how to separate it out? Here's the experiment.

First, I pulled at the butt end of the lock, where it was cut off of the sheep. There were some very short fibers there. I pulled those out, and put them in a 'felting' pile.










Then I loaded the butt ends of the locks onto the wool combs, filling about half way up the tines.







Holding the Viking comb in one hand, I brushed the other comb sideways through the locks of wool, first away from me then (carefully!!) towards me. This opened up the locks, and transferred them onto the moving comb.



There was some short nubby wool left on the comb. I pulled that off, and put it in the felt pile. Then I switched the full comb to my left hand, and started the process over again.






After a couple of repeats, the wool looked like this. That is quite a difference from where I started!







I pulled the tips of the wool into a point, and started pulling. I'd pull my fiber out a half inch or so, then move my hand forward and grab from the main bunch again.










This had the effect of pulling out a long, continuous roving. This is ready to spin from now. The current plan is to spin this on a reproduction Medieval drop spindle, worsted style. This should give me a fine, strong warp thread.





I stopped pulling the fibers when the bunch left on the combs were only an inch or so long. I figured that would be the thel that was left there. I pulled that off the combs, and ran it through my carders









Here's the rolag off of the carders. The current plan is to spin this wool on my antique Great or Walking wheel, using the long draw. This should give me a fluffier yarn for my weft.









And that 'felting' pile? When it got big enough, I went to the bathroom sink and made a felt ball for my cats to play with. They love these!

The next step will be to spin up the couple of combs full of wool that I processed this evening, and see what the resulting yarn looks like.

Tutorial: Washing Fleece

A few weeks ago, if you recall, I was up camping in Utah. When I came back, there was a bag full of raw wool waiting for me in my studio. A dear friend had dropped by while I was gone, and played Fleece Fairy for me. Poof! Have a project. Since then, it has been sitting under my spare loom, just kind of looking at me reproachfully as I ignored it to play with the triloom. Today I was at a break point between shawls, so I decided to start processing it. The first step is to wash the fleece out. Here's how I did it:


Here is a shot of the raw fleece. Sheep are very dirty animals. Their fleece is full of a grease called lanolin (you can find it as an ingredient in hand lotion), and they roll around in the pasture. And, well, they poop. The first thing you do with a fleece is discard the pieces that are too filthy and matted to deal with. This fleece had been pretty well picked over before I got it, so there wasn't too much in the way of dung or twigs to pick out. But I took it outside, and as I grabbed handfuls to wash I shook them out to get rid of bits of bedding and dirt.


I took the shaken wool, and loosely stuffed three lingerie bags with it. I have more fleece than will fit in the bags--this is going to take several batches to clean it all. I took the bags inside, and then filled my top loading washing machine with hot water and four capfuls of Synthropol. After the washing machine was full, I turned it off and gently dunked the bags in to the water.



I set a timer for ten minutes, and left the bags to soak. Soak only, mind you. Wool will felt with heat, water, and agitation. I had the heat and the water, so I needed to avoid the agitation. After ten minutes was up, I came back. The water was absolutely filthy. Ewww!



I put the washing machine on spin cycle, and let it spin all the water out. The bags were pushed against the sides of the machine, but they weren't agitated so it was a safe move.






There was a residue of dirt and grease left inside the machine, so I wiped it off with a paper towel before the next step.







The paper towel came back caked with mud. Did I mention that sheep are dirty dirty animals?







I filled the machine with hot water again, but didn't add soap this time. The bags went back in the water to soak for another ten minutes.This is what the water looked like this time around, before I used the spin cycle again.





There wasn't as much dirt on the paper towel this time, but it was still pretty dirty. I decided to do another ten minute rinse soak.







After the second rinse, the water was clear, and the paper towel had almost no residue. I thought about doing a third rinse, but my plan for this fleece is to make felt out of it. That means I'll run the fleece through my drum carder, which will get out a lot of the remaining dirt and vegetable matter. Then, the felting process with its hot water and soap should take care of the rest of the cleaning.


So, I took the wool and laid it out on a rack. This is it still wet, but you can see what a difference there is from where it started! That sheep was white after all. The wool will take a couple of days to thoroughly air dry. I figure I'll clean a batch of wool every couple of days, and the fleece should be ready for carding next week.