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!

Camp Verde, AZ

A few days ago, my family stopped by Camp Verde, AZ to visit my in-laws. On our way out, the kids asked if we could pause for a moment or so by the river near the house. Running water and trees? I'm so there. So I snapped a few shots along the way.

  

And, since this is sort of a crafting blog, here are a few of the items that I made for Christmas presents. The first is a pair of socks that I cranked out on my antique sock knitting machine. I was really proud of the way I got the stripes to match up on these!

And this is a necklace I put together for my daughter. The pendant is one that I bought from an artist last summer at Fibers Through Time. I made the chain from copper wire, using the Viking Wire Weaving technique. (Look over to the left there in my 'popular posts' for the link to the tutorial on how to do that.) I was really pleased with the way this turned out.

Photography, roses, cattail fluff, and serendipity

This is the picture I was going for today, for my 'picture a day' project. I have roses growing around an itty bitty pond in my front courtyard. The pond has a few cattails that have decided to grow in it, and my kids love playing with the cattail fluff. They'll grab a handful and just blow, making all sorts of dancing bits of fluff fill the air. So, my daughter thought it would be pretty to have the fluff fill the air around the rose. Both she and my son had a great time blowing fluff for me, and we eventually got the shot.

But...I looked over, and spotted something else just as cool. So I kept shooting, but changed where I was aiming without my son being aware of it. Is this not an awesome shot? I so want to title it, "I DO believe in fairies!!" It looks like he has a glowing creature cradled in his hands. I love it.

So, what did I learn today? Remember to look all around you! Sometimes the coolest capture is not what you're focused on originally.

Juggling balls and restocking the shop

Now that most of the Christmas crafting is done, I'm starting to pay attention to my poor neglected Etsy shop again. My stock there has been dwindling down, and it is time to do something about that. So today I started taking photographs of some of the juggling balls sets that I had lying around. They had been in a little craft store, but unfortunately it was a victim of the struggling economy and closed its doors earlier this year. So I had some back stock.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/118381201/juggling-balls-in-green-blue-and-yellow

https://www.etsy.com/listing/118383303/juggling-balls-in-green-purple-yellow

https://www.etsy.com/listing/118383887/juggling-balls-in-red-green-and-white

https://www.etsy.com/listing/118384637/juggling-balls-in-blue-and-yellow-wool While I was updating, I got a request for a custom set of juggling balls, in blues and greens. I figured while I was at it, I'd make up a whole batch of a half dozen sets in some of the more popular color patterns. So, before dinner I spent awhile wrapping golf balls in wool roving.

After dinner, I rolled up my sleeves and got into the physical part of the process. I coat my hands with a drop of the dish soap, pick up one of the proto-balls, and soak the bundle under some hot running tap water. Then I toss the ball back and forth between my hands, rolling it around and around, until the wool shrinks down and velcros itself together. Once I had them all well felted, I threw the whole lot into the dryer to tumble around for a final hardened finish. Man, that many golf balls in the dryer are loud!

I'll be taking more pictures and getting these up in the shop over the next few days. Time to re-stock!

Beginning to look a lot like Christmas

The Christmas cards are mailed, the packages to distant family are shipped, and today the family took the afternoon off and we put up the tree together. Yes, it really is as tall as it looks! I have to stand on a step stool to decorate the top branches, and I still can't reach the star. My son can, though. How did I get to be the tiny one in the family? I can remember the days when I used to be big... Anyway, there is still some shopping to do for the in house folks, and maybe some more cookie baking to do. We've already gone through a batch of my great-great-grandmother's cookies. They were fun to make with the kids (kids = young adults at this point, but they are still my kids!), and made a lovely late night indulgence the other evening with a bowl of peppermint stick ice cream and a hot mug of licorice spice tea.

I have a few more projects that I want to finish up (pictures after Christmas), but now that the tree is up I can pretty much relax and enjoy. I do so love this season!

Daily moments and Chrismas presents

I'm going to pop some filler pictures in here, that I've been taking for my 'picture a day' project. Now, if you are one of my close relatives, don't scroll down past these pictures until after Christmas. The rest of you? Wander on down to see what I've been up to as you choose.

So...
I've been putting the lights on the Christmas tree...

And enjoying the roses blooming in my front garden...

Noticing the textures in the orange grove near work...

And enjoying quiet moments in the studio. (Actually this is my son holding his trombone behind the candle. But it counts as quiet because he wasn't actually playing at the time.)

Annnd..... (Relatives all gone yet?)

Very busily weaving 6 sets of 4 napkins for my extended family. This started out as white 10/2 mercerized perle cotton for the warp. I hand painted the warp with four colors of brown/rust/cream, using the method I showed you all in this post: http://tangibledaydreams.blogspot.com/2012/09/tutorial-warp-painting.html . Then I used solid colors of 10/2 cotton for the weft, making it so each set of napkins was unique. Total time in the project was 30 1/2 hours, which means these napkin sets are too labor intensive to make for sale at a reasonable price. But they'll make lovely Christmas presents, don't you think?

And this is why I haven't been posting much recently. My family reads my blog here, and I didn't want to post process pictures of their presents and spoil the surprise. But I figure they can stand it for one post a year. 

Everyday Beauty

I'm working on Christmas presents right now, which means that I can't show you all what I've got going on in the studio until later on. So, instead, I'll be posting some of the shots from my 'picture a day' project.



Sometimes, the moments of quiet ordinary beauty can be breathtaking. If we stop to notice them.

(This is simply the sun shining through onto the table while I was making a fresh batch of sun tea.)