Channyn's Tweed

I imagine that there are people out there who devise a fiber concoction completely in their heads. "Hmmm, I'll put 2 ounces of this and 1 ounce of that and blend it all together, and bingo-bango-bongo, perfect fiber will be born." I, unfortunately, cannot develop that way. So instead, I try a little something, spin it up. Add some more of something else, remove something that I don't like, decrease the quantity on something that is nice but not in that quantity, and eventually I get perfect fiber for perfect yarn. Perfect, of course, being in the eye of the beholder. So I thought today I'd show you the evolution of yarn that we here at the house are calling "Channyn's Tweed".

I started with fiber provided by my friend Denise. She had come for a dyeing day with 10 pounds of fiber. Part of it was a lovely soft white wool, and the other was a bit harsher brown wool with some alpaca blended in, which came from a sheep she raised named Barbie. I had never tackled overdying (dying over another color) before, so my namesake's fiber was interesting. We separated it into 2 pound piles and dyed it with dark dyes - a dark blue, a maroon, a forest green. And then my friend Channyn said that she really wanted to see those dark colors blended into a tweed. So the recipe she wanted was 70% of something, and 10% each of three other colors.

This is the brown Barbie before we dyed it. It looks lighter in the picture than it looked in person. You can see it is nicely processed, which means it has been thoroughly cleaned and carded. This makes dying so much more consistent, because the dye doesn't have to fight with junk in the fleece.

This picture shows the two fibers that we were working with:

The maroon, dark blue, dark spruce green and purple are overdyed brown. Pink and aqua are dyed white Cotswold.

The dark blue is the most outstanding result, to me. We would never have gotten such a deep blue from dying white. And the purple is interesting. The brown shows through in interesting ways.

So for Channyn's Tweed, I took the maroon, the blue, the green and the purple. I used 70% maroon, and 10% each for the other colors. Channyn's inspiration was a blog called Brooklyn Tweed. This site is very interesting. If you follow their link, you can see how they create the tweed yarn that they sell. It really is quite fascinating.

Anyway, Channyn wanted a yarn that would have a dominant color and then flecks of other colors peeking through. And Channyn did not want any namby pamby bunny fiber in her yarn. I love angora, because it makes things soft, but Channyn correctly points out that you lose your intricate patterns in the bunny fluff. So, I carded up one batt of Channyn's Tweed. She's been too busy to see it in person, and I don't want to risk making fiber she doesn't like, so I can't go any further until she approves or proposes an alternate fiber recipe.

 So, the question is, will it suit Channyn? I could always blend it more by putting it through the carder a second time. Or we could choose a different dominant color. Or, we could blend a different type of fiber in. I have mohair, silk, alpaca and angora. So, we'll just have to see what Channyn says. In the meantime, here's what it looks like spun up. Personally, I think I got the whole "flecks of color" thing to work, but it will be up to Channyn to decide:

 

Frosting Buckets

When I was growing up, the best gift was a homemade one. So you can imagine the unbearable pressure placed upon my husband and son when a holiday comes up. They gently try to pry from me some hint of the elusive perfect gift. And they get nothing but flack back, because Momma wants something homemade. Or, if it cannot be homemade, then something that was obtained at a garage sale for an amazingly ridiculously low price. Yes, I am beyond the age of wanting jewelry. Flowers are frivolous unless purchased from Aldi's for $3.99. One of the best gifts my boys made ev-er was when they made me fudge for Mother's Day one year, and to avoid having to go to the store to get a card, they wrote the card in peanut butter across the top. Now, that, I tell you, is the true measure of their love and inventiveness.

So as we approach the holiday season, I've decided to tell them, in clear and certain terms, of the perfect gift. I'm even including a picture and instructions for how to obtain it.

 

I want frosting buckets.

That's right, you heard it here first. I want Walmart Frosting Buckets. My cousin Michelle brought a couple over as we were preparing to do a dying project. I looked at the label and was astounded that Michelle's family could possibly consume so much frosting. It's a five gallon bucket, after all. But Michelle says that if you go to a Walmart with a bakery, you can ask if they have any, and if they do, they give them to you for free. So, dear friends and family, that is what I want. I want frosting buckets. Cleaned out of frosting residue, preferably, but don't let that stop you if you have a chance to get me some. 

One can't help but wonder what it is about frosting buckets that has tickled my fancy so. Well JUST LOOK AT IT! With its lid on, you can stack them. It has a handle. You can't tell from the picture, but the plastic is a bit on the transparent side, so you can sort of tell what's in there. And so, with my stash of frosting buckets, I dream of storing my fiber inside neatly labelled frosting buckets. They are a perfect size for putting on shelves. They can be easily carried. It must be so clear now to anyone who looks at them that the frosting bucket is the most perfect containment system ever devised by man. 

So. If you REALLY love me. And, I think you do. Please go to Walmart and charm their bakery out of frosting buckets. And then steel yourself, because you are going to want to keep the frosting buckets for yourself. But you have to give it up. You have to give me the frosting buckets. It's that simple. And please don't forget the lids. I'm nothing without the lids.

I think my friend Hope thinks that if you're going to have an obsession with frosting buckets, then the least you can do is make them look purty. So here is my ode to Hope:

 

Please note that I thought myself terribly clever when I decided to include a sample of the fiber on the outside of the bucket.

He Gasped

When I was dating my husband, I brought him to my parents' house for a family dinner. As we were sitting at the table, someone said something so amusing that he laughed. With industriousness. My brother commented afterward that he had never seen anyone laugh so hard that the dishes shook in the china cabinet.

So making my husband laugh became an important goal in our relationship. Occasionally I pull it off, and, of course, I am very, very proud.

It was not until 20 or so years into our marriage (yes, it is true, I have no idea how long we've been married... the calculator is too far away for me to reach it easily), that I first heard my husband gasp.

It was Christmas-time last year, and my Mom was in the hospital. When my parents were in the hospital, I generally collected up my computer and whatever project I was working on with fiber and slept, awkwardly poised in a chair with a blanket around me. So Christmas day came, and my husband and son came to see us at the hospital, and I was very excited, because I had finished making a hat. Hat #2, we'll call it.

There were some issues.

Hat #1 was my first attempt to use circular needles and double-pointy needles. I got through the hat quite nicely. At the end, my mother said I needed to use double-pointed needles, or whatever you call them, so I worked my way as far as I could before the needles started falling all over the place. I didn't want to bother my Mom with pesky details, so I took a darning needle and darned the top of the hat. I think my friend Channyn would be appalled. It looked ok to me, though. I figured I'd learn the fine art of finishing on the next hat. Here's Hat #1:

If everyone would agree not to look too closely at the top, we'll be just fine, thank you very much

But back to Hat #2. My friend Edie had taken some yarn that I made by plying homespun orange and pink wool with some fancy brown commercial yarn and made a sample so I could see how it would look knitted up. It looked good to me, so I thought I would make it into a hat. If you look closely, you can see her sample has a strand of hot pink, a strand of orange, and then this brown commercial fancy yarn that I suppose you might call eyelash yarn:

So my husband and son showed up at the hospital on Christmas morning, and I was a bit bleary eyed from a night sleeping upright in a chair. I got all excited and said, "Oh HONEY, you have to see the hat I've just finished. So I ran into the bathroom, plopped it on my head and whirled around.

And that's when he gasped.

Something I've never heard him do before.

In something like 20 years. Maybe 25, if you count the 5 in which he claims he was dating me.

OK, so, admittedly, the hat was too big for my head, had four double pointy needles hanging off the top, and strands of orange and brown flopping out from various parts of it, because I didn't have scissors or a darning needle....

So for his punishment, here is my Sweet Sweet Patookie, wearing Hat #2, which fits him quite nicely, if you ask me. My friend Channyn picked up all the dropped stitches and finished it off, presumably to keep me from getting out the staple gun to make the top all tie together:

For what it's worth, yes, I do know it looks awful.

Too Hot to Handle?

I finished my first round of wild yarn using the fiber from the Central New York fiber fair. It seems my efforts to learn to spin thin have taken such an effect that making lumpy bumpy art yarn was more difficult than I expected. You'll recall from my blog entry Inspiration / Perspiration that I was working with some wild fiber with lots of blues and sparkly stuff in it. I made up that yarn, and thought, "well heck, this needs a little more somethin' somethin'." So I dug around in my bins and found a coordinating commercial yarn, and then found some commercial eyelash yarn (my sweet husband saw the eyelash yarn and wanted to know if I had taken to cutting up my Dad's old silk shirts, but nope, I haven't gotten that far yet). So I plied the coordinating turquoise commercial yarn with the art yarn, then tied pieces of the eyelash yarn in every 12 inches. My friend Denise says I can ply the eyelash yarn in instead of tying it, so I will look into that for another project. It might be more secure to ply it in, because it will slip around a bit tied in the way I did it.

So, I started with this:

And ended up with this:

What can you do with bulky colorful yarn like this? I say, hat, scarf, or purse. A hat would be pretty wild looking. There's only about 68 yards of the final yarn. I have leftover eyelash yarn, and then leftover commercial blue yarn. It would be interesting if you could come up with a project that would use all the yarn, including the leftover yarn. So if you've got a vision, let me know. In the meantime, it's into the apothecary jars for this!

Inspiration / Perspiration

Last weekend I got a bee in my bonnet when I saw something on Facebook about a fiber festival being held in Bouckville, NY. The CNY Fiber Artists & Producers were putting on an event, complete with lots of free demos and lots of tables under tents. Bouckville is near Oneida, where some friends of mine live, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I'm not good at estimating, but they had 7 or 8 really big tents and at least 40 different vendors. I concluded it was well worth the trip, and I'm putting it on my list for next year.

So my original plan was to meet up with my friends at the fair, but then I thought, maybe I can kill two birds with one stone and do the festival and then go do crafts with my BFF Becky, who LOVES to do crafts. So I scoured the festival for my inspiration, blissfully found and purchased it, and then headed up to Oneida to see what could be done there. Oh, and I've taken to toting complete craft projects around with me, because you just never know when you'll find a like-minded soul who's in the mood to do some creating.

So I concluded that the most inspirational fiber came from a place called Spin-Culture, owned by Eleanor Thomas. You can spot more of her treasures on Facebook and Etsy, and she has a blog at http://www.myspinculture.blogspot.com/. Here's what caught my eye:

Wild, don't you think? For a brief moment, I wanted to slap my head, because my latest project is... well, it's GREY. Not hot pink and gold and orange and glitter. Grey. So, we'll call this my first round of inspiration for the day. One must be sure to reward inspiration, so I bought two rounds of this lovely fiber:

 

Stay tuned to see what lovely yarn this turns into. If you look closely, you can see lots of firestar, strands of sari silk threads, and short pieces of yarn. I saw another booth that had pieces of silk tied into art yarn, which made me think that since I have a ton of my Dad's old silk shirts, I might be able to come up with some really interesting concoctions.

After the festival, I moved on to Oneida, where I got my real workout. I showed up with t-shirts and pillowcases, already batiked with a tjap imprint of a fish that I've been using a lot lately. I brought along my carcinogens - dyes, urea, baking soda, paint brushes, and eye droppers, and set to work with my friend Becky on batiking. Now, you'd think that we'd get through maybe one or two shirts, but Becky was UNSTOPPABLE. We did every shirt, every pillowcase. And they all came out different, because she has a real eye for color, and she's the ultimate partner in crime, because she builds on ideas and adapts them and improves them. The results were amazing!

That's me, Becky, and Becky's mom, Cathy. If you're wondering why my hair is standing on end, it's because Becky worked me so hard!

Becky is also on my list of things to go back to. I'm thinking silk batiking... or maybe it's time to teach her to spin.

If I Were a Moonshiner, I'd Make Very Smooth Shine

Nope, I don't own a still. But I do like things smooth, so this week I've been working on my e-lectric Patrick Green Drum Carder, making up some exceptionally smooth, soft fiber.

Let's start with my recipe. I filled up my little green produce cartons with half an ounce of dark black alpaca and half an ounce of super super soft angora. Look how shiny the black alpaca is.

You might wonder how I decide how much yarn I'm going to make, and I have to admit, I follow a pretty simple rule of thumb on that. I find my fiber and I consume it all. So in this case, I had 3 big hanks of this black alpaca, so that's how much alpaca I carded. I have tons of the white angora, so I just consumed what I needed to deal with all the alpaca.

I experimented a little on blending and tried putting all the black down and then all the white, but I didn't like the effect, so I settled on this - lay down some alpaca, top it off with angora, and lay another layer of alpaca on top. It goes through the carder easier if you don't have the angora all by itself.

Here's how it looks all carded up, before I pull it off into rolags:

And here are the rolags. Not all of them... by the time I took this picture I had already started spinning up the yarn:

Living in a male-dominated house, I do have to make some concessions about how best to display my completed work:

Here's how it looks as I'm spinning it. It is sooo soft. Very soothing for the soul.

And here's a closeup.

At this point, all the yarn is single ply. I could ply it to itself, but I'm thinking of making up a batch of 75% white angora, 25% white wool. Let me know what you think!

Indulgences

In order to get through life, I've concluded, you have to have rules. And if you have a fiber fetish, then you have to have some serious rules. Like, everything has to be sealed in a container to keep the moths out. And, only take cash to fiber festivals.

So a couple of weeks ago I convinced my Sweet Patookie to be my Wingman and go along with me to the annual Shepherd's Market in Rush, NY. Wisely forgoing the credit cards, I scoured the house and found $6 in my coat pocket and $18 on the floor next to the couch. Unfortunately, I got a little hungry on the way, so we stopped off and bought a bagel, leaving me with a mere $22.

What to buy, what to buy? Well, the rules are:

1. Whatever it is, it must be soft
2. It must be a color combination I don't already have, since I do a lot of dyeing myself.
3. It must cause my Wingman to put his damn phone down and contribute some enthusiastic Wingman chatter.
4. It cannot be for more money than I have.

Ultimately, we found this:

 



Our vendor, Black North Fiber, from Hilton, NY, was kind and gave me 6 ounces of this luscious concoction for $22. It is 40% Wool, 40% Dehaired Cashgora, and 20% Alpaca.

Another of my rules is that new purchases do not become stash. They must be immediately consumed and pickled. So from the 6 ounces I ended up with 3 single ply balls:

 

There's a lovely dark purple vein going through all the green-ness, so I thought I'd try to make a complementing yarn to ply with it. I had purple angora and purple wool in my stash, so I carded up 50% wool, 50% angora and got a lovely super-soft single ply from that, but it is light purple, not dark purple, so I can't quite convince myself to put them together:

  

Nope, that just doesn't do it. See that other color in there?

 

I thought maybe this luscious pygora that I bought from Pat Gesler at Firefly Farm, but even that isn't quite pulling on me. 

So, for now, back into the jars it goes. What do you think?

Fish Aren't Manly

oh sigh. Today I decided to use my gen-u-ine Indonesian tjap, which came off E-bay and arrived coated with gen-u-ine Indonesian dirt crusted all over it, to make a batik t-shirt. So I set everything up, got my wax to heating, swept off some of the dirt, and plunked the tjap into the hot wax. Then I plopped it on the t-shirt, and nothing happened. Goodness. So I stuck the tjap back in the wax and waited patiently (big lie) and then tried again. And this time, the wax was hot enough, the stars were aligned, and the wax stuck to the t-shirt. Unfortunately, there was only one shirt. So, well, I did it again. And again. And then I flipped the shirt over and did the back. Too ambitious for a first project? No. But maybe too many fish. I'll let you decide:

I like it. I like it so freaking much. So I took it to its intended recipient, the only size M in our house, and he said, "It's really pretty, Mom. But it's fish. Fish aren't manly."

Big sigh.

I may have wandered down the road to the sad world of rejected art tributes. So the back, I declare, shall be titled "Sad fish."

Not manly. Man. I am one sad fish.

Tomorrow's project: unmanly batik fish on a scarf.

How We Lure Sweet, Innocent Girls to the Fiber Arts

So, a few weeks ago I headed out on a jaunt to Rhinebeck's annual fiber festival. On the way, we picked up Linda Ann, an unrepentent non-knitting, non-spinning Fiber Agnostic. A non-believer of the worst sort. She came along, I imagine, because we promised her wild times. And wild times she got.

It's no easy task to turn a person toward fiber. You have to reel it out slowly. You can't just throw fiber at them and expect an overnight conversion. So we Fiber Tarts approached the task with care. "Hmmm... that's a pretty color. You'd look nice in something made from that." "You know, it wouldn't be hard to find a simple pattern... something reeeeally easy." "Why, you could make something simple with one ball of yarn... we'll just take a peek on Ravelry and see what we can find."

By the time she was one day in, Linda had made the first tentative step. My friend Denise bought the yarn - the first yarn is always free, you see. And then some knitting needles. You can't get started without some lovely knitting needles. A careful search for a pattern took place, and soon, Linda was on her way.

Note that two skeins were purchased. One might cause Linda to finish up and not pick up the next project. Two, on the other hand, obliges her to think about a second project. Leg warmers? A hat? A scarf? Mitts?

Here's Channyn, demonstrating that yarn looks good in almost any configuration. Why, it practically knits itself. You could just drape it over your shoulders...

 

 



Channyn picked up every stitch Linda left by the wayside.

 

And here's Linda's project:

 

 

All right, Linda, let me know what your next project will be. I can't wait to see it.



The Fiber Nazi is Appeased

Last weekend I drove to Newburgh, NY to enjoy a Ladies Weekend with some college friends. And friends of the college friends. And friends of their friends. We showed up, pulled out wine, cheese and cookies, and gabbed. Yep. That's what we did. We took a side trip to a modern outdoor art exhibit. But mostly we just noshed and chatted in a lovely, positive environment. College plans for children, new jobs and old jobs... it was delightful to visit with my old friends and make some new ones. I can't wait to go again next year.

The best part of the trip, though, was a side junket to Poughkeepsie, NY, where I visited with my friends Lisa and Tina's mother, Katie. Katie weaves, you see, and I had weaving yarn, and a wee loom of my own, so I thought I could convince Katie to take the yarn and perhaps show me how to set up my little loom. I showed Katie my weaving yarn, and she looked at me and said that if I would not make her take the yarn, then she would teach me to knit. How could I turn such a proposal down?

Katie is in the middle of preparing to move, you see, and she says she can't set up the loom any more, as it is too hard to see. After I got home and tried to set up my wussy baby loom, I concluded that there must be people out there who you can pay to do that. My attempt did not go well. I am looking at my project right now and realizing that I will have to pull it off and start over again. And, of course, my scarf is looking rather "tilty". And the middle part is tightly woven, while the rest is loose.

But back to my visit... when my attempt to empty my car of yarn (six big boxes) didn't work out, I moved on to doing my dance of the seven veils. Basically, I brought out the handspun yarn and trickled it in front of the ladies in an alluring fashion. Before long my friend Lisa had found something she had to have, and the next thing we knew, a new knitter was born. Katie agreed to show Lisa how to knit a hat.

The story gets better, of course, because Lisa had heard me whine about my great big apothecary jars full of not properly appreciated yarn, so she took Katie to her home and immediately set to work, and then sent me this picture:

My fiber nazi instincts are appeased by this most excellent rendering made by Lisa. Her reward? She is welcome to look through the pictures on this blog and if there are any yarns that she would like to use to make something else (that she will lovingly photograph), then she is welcome to them.

How I Became My Very Own Fiber Nazi (or, Pickled Fiber in Apothecary Jars, Oh My!!)

I can't knit. OK, I knit. I don't like to knit. The directions look confusing. I fall asleep when I do it, and I look all slack-jawed and drooly. And it's a struggle to get anything to come out in the right shape, and the only shape I've ever tried to make is a rectangle.

So there I was, sitting outside one of the barns at Rhinebeck, spinning, and I found myself explaining to a very nice young woman the story of what I do with my yarn.

Me: "First, I spin it up. Then I put it in a big jar. A big apothecary jar that I bought from Walmart for $10.00. There are many jars. I probably should stop buying jars when I get to about 10, or people will start thinking funny things about me."

Her: "Why don't you knit it?"

Me: "Oh, don't get me started. My knitting is embarrassing."

Her: "So you're a yarn hoarder?"

Me: "Err... well I guess I am."

Her: "You should sell it."

Me: "Nope, can't do that. Nobody would pay enough to cover costs for high end fiber spun on drop spindles. It takes about 8 hours to make a ball of yarn."

Her: "Hmmm... well you could give it away."

Me: "Tried that... nobody sends me thank you notes with beautiful pictures of what they made with it. And when I send something all made up, if they send me a picture, I swear, they throw the thing on and hold their camera in the air and snap a blurry picture. Nope, nobody deserves that yarn, not even me. Pickled yarn in apothecary jars is the way to go."

That, my friends, is how I became a Fiber Nazi. "No yarn for you!"

 

 There's room for six more jars, and then I start looking a little quirky.