Three Bags Full

It's here, it's here! After a long wait, my wool has finally arrived. You might recall the time a sheep went 'splody on my porch. Well, all of that pretty fiber has been picked, cleaned and shipped back to me for a reasonable fee and is now ready for use for spinning.

Our package arrived yesterday evening. My daughter was heartily disappointed to learn that there was no other mail.. just the box. On the other hand, I was thrilled to not only get my package, but not have to deal with any junk on the side, either. We took it over to a neighbors and popped it open to see what was inside. The processed fleece was returned in the bags in which I had dropped it off. So at first it pretty unassuming.

The clear bag gave the first hint of just what I'd gotten back. Big, round rolls of fiber. I was terribly excited to get the bags open and get a closer look. This is my first fleece and the first that I've had processed. I'm not quite sure what I'll do with all of it, but seeing it clean would give me the best idea. I just can't quite visualize what to make from something that looks quite so disorganized as a dirty fleece.

I dug in first to the two black bags. These were the Jacob fleeces that I separated. Two fleeces became two wraps of fiber, one chocolate brown and the other brilliant white! What surprised me was the width of the roving. I had specified that the carded fiber should be stripped into roving, but I had expected something more like the width of my wrist. These strips are finger-thin.

The other fleece was just as interesting. It started out at eight pounds of lanolin-laden fleece. I was returned five pounds of brilliant white fluffy fiber. This roving is slightly thicker, or at least it seems like it might be. The strips are about two fingers wide. I started spinning some samples and this looks like it is going to be a whole lot of fun.

I'm really glad I did this with free fleece. The prep isn't what I expected and I would have been really upset that I didn't ask the right questions if I had processed something very dear to me (like the several pounds of ultra-fine merino I picked out myself and purchased at Black Sheep Gathering next year... hahaha). That's not to say this fiber isn't dear to me, too, but I don't mind adding a little extra elbow-grease taking them over to ETC to drum-card into bigger batts or just play with an unexpected preparation of fiber. I might even see if I can borrow a wheel from someone and see how they spin up that way!

Caribbean Ocean

Caribbean Ocean
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

Here's just a little taste of the Caribbean, or so I hope. I haven't been there myself, but the color is indelibly inscribed on my psyche by countless cruise promos and posters.

This is the August installment of the Spindler's Monthly challenge, or at least my entry into it. Our theme this go around is "Travel". After almost three weeks of flying solo with the kids, a cruise get-away to the tropics sounds positively dreamy.

I try each Challenge to do something new. This time around, I decided I wanted to spin woolen yarn. And not just semi-woolen yarn, but the best and closest to true woolen yarn I could manage. This means working not from top, but from a carded preparation of fiber, and spinning with the "long draw" technique.

The first challenge was getting carded fiber. Everything I own is what is known as "top" (and is often mis-labeled as "roving"). This is a commercially preparation where all the fibers are combed into alignment in a long strip. Happily for me, the Eugene Textile Center allows drop-in use of its drum carder. For $10 for a half-day, you can card whatever you want (although it did sound as if they wouldn't go for raw fiber, only cleaned materials). I brought in several "cupcakes" of leftover blue wool top, probably merino and BFL. I also included the last ounce of my green silk.

I won't go through all the details of drum carding. There are plenty of other blogs out there written by people with more experience. In short, you break up you fiber into small amounts and feed it into this machine, which blends them together into what is known as a "batt". A batt can be stretched into a roving (a long length of unspun fiber often confused with combed top). Or you can spin it just as it is. Either way, the fibers in a batt are carded, rather than combed, and thus jumbled up a bit. They don't all sit exactly the same way. They cross. They fold. They twist around. This traps in more air and when spun in just the right way, they stay fluffy and soft.

The "long draw" method of spinning involves letting the twist you are introducing into the fiber into your "drafting zone". This distinguishes itself from "short draw", where you inchworm your hands along the fiber, carefully controlling the twist so it only gets into the drafting zone once all the fibers there are carefully aligned with one another, and then you smoooooth it in so there is very little air left in the yarn. This yields a very strong and smooth yarn.

I find long draw to be very challenging. Having freshly drum-carded fiber helped a lot. It was very soft with a lot of air carded into it, instead of having been packed with a lot of other things and squished into a compact lump. It was very easy to draft. On the other hand, I'm a bit of a control freak and letting myself get into the more hands-off groove of long draw is rather tricky. It also drives me nuts that any inconsistency immediately shows up as LUMPS in your yarn.

Still, I managed to toss my ultra control-freak self out the window long enough to finish 110 yards of squishy yarn that probably rates somewhere between aran and bulky in thickness. If you number these batts from back to front, I spun numbers 1-2-4-6 into one single and 3-5-7 into the other (the purple I played with on the side with a tiny leftover of one of my two green singles). So the skein slowly shifts from a very pale ocean green to a deep teal with lots of play through the middle. I think it's going to knit up quite lovely, once I figure out what it ought to be!

Sock Summit Loot

Support Spindle
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

I did promise a loot post. I'm afraid it will be somewhat sparse. You see, I went to Sock Summit '09 with a very firm promise to myself. No. Sock. Yarn.

I know, it boggles the mind. No sock yarn at a sock knitting convention? But really, I have quite enough and there were plenty of other things to purchase.

One thing I wanted to find was a support spindle. I had MacGuyver'd myself a support spindle out of a bamboo skewer and a racquetball, and it worked quite well. But it was a bit unwieldy and after one day of marathon spinning (my "challenge" day for the Tour de Fleece), I blistered my fingertips.

I found a lovely spindle at Carolina Homespun. At the time, it wasn't so lovely. It had been around a while (I know because I had looked at it at the Black Sheep Gathering as well). The wood was dry and scratched from much handling, but it had really lovely lines. And Sheila Bosworth had mentioned to me earlier in a post that I could easily take some 600-grit sandpaper to the shaft of my Bossie spindle to clean it up.

I figured the same would work here. So some water and buffing later, and a little bit of Wood Beams, and all of a sudden I had a fantastically gorgeous support spindle.

It also spins well.

In addition I bought two small lots of fiber I thought would be fun. The first is also through Carolina Homespun and comes from Silver Moon Farm. It is a two ounce bag, 50/50 blend of baby camel down and tussah silk, dyed in soft shades of peach, rose and green.

I also grabbed a two ounce mixed bag of "exotic" fibers from A Verb for Keeping Warm. They have stunning fibers colored with natural dyes.

There was plenty of fantastic sock yarn to be had, but that will have to wait for next time and next year.

Sock Summit '09

Anne Hanson and Jan
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

I think much of the knitting world is aware of Sock Summit whether they were one of the many that wanted to go, or not. It certainly has been a sensation in the area. I was highly amused when Portland's mayor, Sam Adams, declared it sock knitting week!

I was thrilled when I got into a class for Sock Summit. I'd planned ahead and set aside time. My visiting family was kind enough to take the children off elsewhere and let me sit in front of the computer for the hour it took to get into the system to register (the system crashed several times under the load of insane knitters trying to get in). I signed up to take Sock Design with Anne Hanson.

If you don't know of Anne, you should go check out KnitSpot, her blog. It has tons of fabulous pictures of her lovely designs (and of her garden).

Anne was a fascinating teacher. I particularly enjoyed her insights into putting different stitch patterns together, and the discussion about her own design process with various finished patterns she has already published.

I also bumped into Joan Schrouder, Sivia Harding, Judy Becker, Tina (of Blue Moon Fiber Arts), walked past Stephanie Pearl McPhee herself on the way into the market, and WonderMike from the Y-Knit podcast.

As a special highlight, I snuck over to the Beginning Spinning class to meet Abby Franquemont and Denny McMillan. Abby has been a huge inspiration to me. She's extremely knowledgeable and wants to share that knowledge with others. I got to show off my hand-spun shawl, and then Abby called the remaining members of her class over to look, too. I was so proud!

It was a fantastic time. The Marketplace was amazing, full of all-too-pretty things. I'm going to save those for another post (because some of what I bought is all tied up at the moment and not ready for pictures). The sheer number of knitters congregating in one place was amazing. I'm really looking forward to next year, if there is another one, where I might be able to go for more than one day.

Random Batts

Random Batts
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

Since my husband has been out of town for over a week now (he was back for one day, Friday, and then off again) I have been gifting myself some little bits of time. We are blessed to have two young women that live nearby that are able to watch my children from time to time. I asked one to come by for a couple of hours this afternoon. My daughter is in camp, and she joined us just as my son was finishing lunch. He was to go down for a nap at 1pm, and I'm told he did so. So I know she had a very easy time of it.

I did, too. I took myself, and some random bits of wool top, and the last of my green silk over to the Eugene Textile Center. This is a newer yarn store in Eugene, and it caters more to weavers and spinners than knitters, but there is obviously some overlap. ETC has a drum carder which they are willing to lend out for "drop ins" with a small fee of $10 per half-day of use.

I've been wanting to try to spin a batt, but these lovely confections are often pricey. And there's a good reason why. As much fun as it is to turn a batt, a drum carder is quite an expensive piece of equipment. And the creation of the batt itself is a fair amount of work. I'm sure you get better and faster at it with practice (I did even in the two-and-a-half hours I played with it) but there is still that investment of your time and expertise.

I set out to create the center batts that you see here. I wanted something reminiscent of the brilliant tropical waters you usually see advertised for Caribbean cruises and the like. I had a bunch of blue bits of wool top, but most had odd ends of other colors. That's what makes up the purple batt. There's a bit of brown, lots of shades of purple and just a little bit of blue in it. The four central batts are primarily the "ocean blue" bits, and green silk blended. And the three on the far end were the last piece of wool top I had, which was comprised of white, and sky blue, and the rest of the silk. They have considerably more silk in them than the other batts, which gives them the lovely green color.

I started spinning one of the last batts today. They run about 10g each. I wasn't sure quite how much you could load up onto the drum carder, so I played it safe. It was a lot of fun to spin. Very soft and fluffy. I split off strips and then broke those strips into 6" sections and folded them in half for spinning with a long-draw.

Right now I'm debating if I'll spin the three green into a 3-ply yarn, or if I'll alternate down the line with every-other batt going in order into two singles. Either way could be very interesting, but the 2ply done in this manner would give me a variegated yarn that slowly darkens from one end to the other. I think it would be a very striking effect.

In other news, I'm pretty excited about going to Sock Summit tomorrow. I think I have everything prepared to get my children over to our friends' for the day, and get myself to Portland. With any luck, we'll all have a blast!

Foliage Shawl

Foliage Shawl
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

And... here's the reveal. I caught a little light and some quiet time to hang this up in my wisteria. While I wish I could display it on myself, it's a bit hard to get the camera far away enough to do that!

It's lovely, soft, and silk-shimmery-gorgeous and everything I could ask for. I hit my goal spot-on for size and I'm really looking forward to taking this to Portland with me on Thursday for my day up at Sock Summit!

All aflutter!

It's done! It's done! It's done! My shawl is done! Yay!

800 yards of 2-ply tussah silk handspun and several weeks of knitting later, and my shawl is complete. Currently it is stretched out tight on my floor upstairs, pinned to within an inch of it's life and perhaps a little beyond that. A fan, tilted on a chair, is blowing the shawl dry as swiftly as it may be for silk, which loves to soak up lots and lots and lots of water.

No, you may not see a picture... yet!

Suffice to say it is gorgeous. You'll have to take my word for that, but I don't want to pop up a half-done picture when a little patience will hopefully yield something stunning. Right now it's pinned out on two different colored towels in bad lighting. On the other hand to get a picture of me wearing it, I'll have to find a photographer, or press my four-year-old daughter into trying. That'll be fun.

So, pictures coming soon, I promise. I just don't know how soon.

Not just rose..

Tour de Fleece overview
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

So, the rose wasn't the only thing I spun this past three weeks. Oh, no. In fact, after a bunch of the rose, I was getting pretty darned tired of dusky pink. And dark pink. And light pink. And pink-y brown.

Yah.

So somewhere in there I conceived a desperate need for blue. I went by my LYS-dyers' place and picked up the most gorgeous blue/green/purple/gold tussah silk top you've ever seen.

And then a few days later I went back and bought the rest of it that she had (for 6 oz total). Since this was never in the original plan for spinning, I didn't really have any major drive to get it done. I started out spinning a very thin and even single and just working my way through it as a break. At the same time I was working on knitting a shawl and it came into my head that it would look amazing with a green border. At my Monday knitting group I approached my friend dyer and asked if she couldn't cook up a batch of green silk. Green, like the pretty fronds of plant in the vase beside her on the table. She took a sprig, tucked it behind her ear, and by Wednesday, I found GREEN waiting for me!

So the green became my second project of the Tour. But wait, you say, isn't the blue your second project? Well. Yes, and no. You see the green silk is finished. Two ounces spun in 385 yards of 2-ply, lace-weight tussah silk yarn. And it's already wound and being knit as well! (You'll get to see that later. Maybe Friday. I'm keeping it under wraps.)

The peacock blue/green/purple/gold was still being spun.

Side trip number two was getting back to a project I'd planned for the month, but sidelined for my Tour de Fleece projects. I spun up my Spindler's Group Challenge yarn. I had planned on this being my second attempt at a cabled yarn, but it just wasn't working for me, so I went with 3-ply instead.

I also took a side trip into supported-spindle spinning. Of course, I don't own a supported spindle. But I solved that problem! Channeling my inner MacGuyver, I dug out a bamboo skewer and a racquetball and constructed a perfectly serviceable supported spindle. I began to work on my long-draw techniques, so that I might feel confident enough to take the leap into spinning down fibers like cashmere.

I'm still working on the "peacock" silk. I'm trying to decide if I should ply it with itself, or find a coordinating wool to use as the second strand. At the moment I'm leaning towards wool, to give it a soft hand, loft and bounce.

As a final overview of this past month's efforts, and listed in order of spinning:
950 yards (+100 yards leftover silk single) of 2-ply rose in 3.8oz of tussah and 4oz of merino, (24-20 WPI)
55 yards of 3-ply “just for giggles” in 47g of random wool (didn’t measure WPI)
385 yards of 2-ply green in 2oz of tussah (22 WPI)
? yards of cotton “challenge” yarn on a bamboo skewer+racquetball. (Go MacGuyver!)
1200 yards of tussah silk single, waiting for its perfect mate (as yet undetermined)

950x2 + 100 + 55x3 + 385x2 + 1200 = 4135 yards or 2.35 miles.. approximately

From Fiber to Yarn

Tour de Fleece - July 14th
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

What you see here is my first week-and-a-half spinning for Ravelry's "Tour de Fleece". This fun group makes a spin-a-long of the Tour de France, with the only requirement (and a loose one at that) being that you at least TRY to spin every day.

This is made easy by the fact that if you post your progress for the day to the "daily progress" thread, then the next day people vote on their favorites and an award is given to the top two most-voted-yarns. Being somewhat competitive in my nature, this spurs me on each day to at least a little bit of spinning, and sometimes to a whole lot of spinning!

One of my goals for this (my first) Tour was to finish a project I've had in mind for a while now. I originally purchased 2 ounces of tussah silk from Dyepot.com because it was on sale, and it was lovely. I later went back and bought the rest of the lot (almost another two ounces) as well as four ounces of a coordinating merino wool to ply with it. This, I reasoned, would easily give me 1000 yards of lace-weight yarn with which to make a shawl.

Another shawl-in-progress at the moment was my first attempt at working with tussah silk. Rather than leave it all to chance for the "Big Shawl", I decided to spin a smaller project first. This was especially easy when I happened on another sale of a lot of four ounces of silk. (I'm a sucker for a sale, and know it. Thus, when I need to save money I'm very careful NOT TO SHOP in the first place.) That was done just before the Tour and I'm knitting it now. What it did for me is allowed me to test out how evenly I would spin over time, and how I liked for the silk to be spun.

With that knowledge, I embarked on this, my second (and largest) lace-weight project to date. I started with the silk and purposefully spun it "thicker" than my original yarn. I wanted a slightly softer yarn, and my first silk had gotten quite twisted, and thus a little rough, in many places. I also didn't want to stray towards cobweb weight, which is all too easy when spinning silk.

Over the course of the week I worked my way through the silk, documenting my process each day. It is especially fun to spin outside while my kids play in the yard. We get to enjoy the sun (and sun on silk is a beautiful thing to behold). They get plenty of playtime, and I get spinning time. They'll even chase the spindle, or I can chase them. It's wonderful to be mobile!

At the end, I could feel myself getting anxious. I wanted to get this project done. I was also nervous about my yardage, so for the first time I sat down with my singles and wound them onto my niddy-noddy for measurement. Relief! I was well into 600 yards of silk single on the first attempt.

I polished off the silk (and wound that.. it was over 500 yards) and then heartened by my success I pulled out the merino top. Here, I ran into an issue I'd never had before. This particular top was so densely compacted I almost couldn't get it to "break" apart into sections. I knew that would be an issue for drafting. In addition, parts of it were dyed brown, rather than rose. I'd expected a bit more of an even application of color. This wasn't bad, just not what I'd originally envisioned.

My first hour of each day spinning the wool was sitting down and breaking it into sections by brute effort. Then I split each of those sections along their length several times. And finally I mixed-and-matched the sections until each one had an equal number of rose strips, and one tan strip. These lengths I then carefully "pre-drafted" together. I tugged a little bit at the bottom just until the fibers started to slip past each other, and then moved up a little bit and repeated the process. This turns a compacted, dense top, into a light and airy length of fiber that is easy (or at least much easier) to spin. As an added bonus, it also blends the various strips together, so the tan became incorporated into the other colors rather than standing out bluntly against the various pinks.

Then I went to town. My silk spinning had put me in good practice, but the merino went like lightning. I spun through two ounces each day, finishing four ounces in two days! This didn't spin quite as thin as the silk. Despite having a bit more wool by weight, I spun about 100 less yards of it. Still, this was putting me right around my 1000-yard-total mark, and that made me happy enough.

Now I had four rolls of spun fiber. Each of these I wound together so that one strand of silk was with one strand of wool. This is known as a "plying ball" and is a great way to make your plying work much more portable. I hold the ball in my left hand and unwind enough yarn to ply, spin it up, wind it on the spindle, and continue. You can ply all over the neighborhood. At the gym. In the supermarket (if you wanted, but I wouldn't). Did I mention I like portable?

Plying spindles get full. You want to be careful how you wind them. I've had trouble with the bottom getting loose, despite careful winding and cross-winding to keep it stable. This time I cross-wound very rarely, and straight-wound quite a bit more. I came out with a really solid cop. There's just enough cross-winding on it to make sure the spiral-wound strands won't come loose, but not enough to make the cop slippery so that things start falling off.

The last step is to wind one more time onto the niddy-noddy. This confirmed I had 950 yards of finished 2-ply merino/silk lace yarn, with 100 yards of silk single left over. Whew!

Next Monday

I dropped by Dyelots today. I've been desperate to find some super-saturated blue/purple SOMETHING to spin. Of course, she had some. AND it was silk. I'm so addicted to silk right now. She also had insanely saturated mohair, which just wouldn't cut it on the spindle, but dang. PURDY.

Janice says, "Let's knit at Cafe 440 on Monday." So I'm sure people will be getting email soon. Except the list is totally broken, so she'll be doing her best to get the word out. Spread it around. Cafe 440 (on Coburg road, just a little north of Pier 1 and Trader Joe's) on Monday night!

Setting yourself up for failure

Some days, you just can't get it right.. and while it was entirely my fault. Well. It wasn't my fault!

Okay. It was all my fault.

I took lace knitting to my Monday night group. This was, of course, a minor risk. Lace takes thought and attention. Chatting it up with a half-dozen knitters (or more, but summers are pretty light in attendance) isn't exactly conducive to either. But the shawl I'm working on (with my own handspun, I might mention!) is a very easy "leaf lace" pattern I've done several times before and hardly have to think about now. The only trick is remembering the center-line where the pattern starts over.

We set the scene on Monday night amidst several happily knitting women. I knit along on my project and at some point I spread out my stitches at the end of the row and frowned. Things didn't line up right and it was very odd. So I spent an hour over that small section, figuring out what was wrong (which I never quite did) and finally fudging the stitch count back into shape so I could continue. But it bugged me. I'm pretty darn exacting about my knitting and even small errors gall me.

Then, near the end of the evening, I stretched the whole thing out to admire my work and noticed an oddness near the center. Oh, sure enough, in that one tricky spot where I've debated every row that I ought to put in a stitch marker to remind myself that HERE is that tricky center stitch... I'd missed it. I'd shifted the whole thing over (by an increasing number of stitches each row, due to the way the lace is put together). It was a mess.

I will admit that I used some fairly strong language (greeted with much kind laughter by my friends). I scowled at it for a good amount of time as one of our more accomplished lace knitters packed up to go home. I was advised to let it go and look at the whole thing with fresh eyes in the morning. But fresh eyes would be at war with two children. I just don't have the ability to drop back lace AND properly take care of things around the house. Monday nights are my best bet.

I took a deep breath. I could see what the issue was, and I could see a plan to fix it, so I dropped back those dang stitches and proceeded to knit them back up again... wrong. At this point it was 10pm, and everyone else was packing to leave, so I did as well. But I know myself well and I muttered about it all the way home. There was no way I was going to get to sleep with this looming over me.

When I got home, I dropped those stitches down again and this time fixed the persistent error. I was rather proud of myself for it. I went to sleep a happy woman.

This morning, bolstered by my success, I resolved to do the same with the other problem. Only, I just couldn't find the root of it. After dropping more stitches than I like back more rows than I like, I finally admitted defeat. I pulled my circular out of the knitting and several rows of yarn were wound back onto the ball before I carefully picked up each stitch in the next row down as the yarn popped out of it.

As I began to re-knit that "first" row, the first row of my evening out, I was happy to have erased my error (even if it did mean loosing a fair amount of progress). I once again got to the end of the row and couldn't help but notice that things weren't matching up. So I stopped, counted, and scrutinized and found the one stitch I'd dropped into a yarn-over.. and realized that because of this I had decreased incorrectly in three different places for the rest of the row. There was NO WAY I could have fixed this by dropping back stitches in the middle of a supermarket cafe with women chatting all around me (and certainly no way I would have noticed it in the first place, chatting back as I was doing at the time). And once I noticed the error it was much too much to fix easily. I would defy any but the most accomplished (and OCD) of knitters to be able to drop back that 20-some stitches in any circumstance.

But now that I had frogged back, fixing just the one row below was quite simple. And now I'm back on the right track once again.

Whew!

Chunky Knits

Square One
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

Whenever you need a break, or just need something to make you feel a little better.. pull out the chunky yarn, I say. After sock yarn, nothing is more fun.

I've been trying to work through the skeins of yarn I bought early in my "stashing" career... the ones I purchased when I didn't know that one skein of bulky yarn wasn't enough to make anything out of, even if it is luscious and soft.

I picked up two skeins of Mirasol's "Sulka" yarn (50% merino and 50% silk). This is a fabulous soft-spun single that has 55 yards in 50 grams. It was on sale, and it was gloriously soft and what did I know? I figured out later that I would have needed to go back for... way too much to do a scarf or anything else. But hats, now, hats are great. I was going to do this hat alternating my two skeins (one is a lovely aqua blue and the other a soft tan). But then I remembered "Turn a Square" and I started looking into Noro yarns.

You see, Noro has many beautiful yarns and originally this hat is knit using one of them. It doesn't match my Sulka, tho. Luckily, my LYS carries Silk Garden Chunky -- a match all around! It's wool and silk, spun as a single, and well.. chunky. The slow color changes are what make the hat so fun, combined with the gradual shift of stripes that seem circular to stripes that appear to be square at the top.

They knit up in about a day and used exactly one skein of Mirasol "Sulka" and one-half skein of the Silk Garden Chunky. I actually ran out of the blue Sulka, but bound off the hat with Silk Garden and I don't think it makes a bit of a difference.

And now I have two fewer skeins left to be knit! Two fewer skeins that I had no idea what to do with. That makes me terribly happy.

Big, bigger ... big enough

Tussah Silk
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

Lately there has been some talk on the Ravelry Spindler's group about how heavy your spindle needs to be, how weight on the spindle changes its profile, and just how much fiber can you pack on a spindle. The acknowledged master of this, Abby Franquemont, posted a thread and picture of an amazingly packed spindle with a massive amount of fiber on it.

I'm not quite that talented (yet).

But this is still a fair amount of fiber. This cop uses Abby's technique of cross-winding the single for stability, as well as circular-winding to compact it. Packed on this 23 gram spindle are 50 grams of spun silk. I could get more on there, but it's about half of my total, and so it's time to stop.

Tussah silk is the slightly lesser cousin to bombyx silk which comes from the fabled silkworm fed only mulberry leaves. While the wild moth that gives us tussah silk is less picky about its food and enjoys munching on oak leaves, it is still no slacker in its spinning and the combed top is lustrous and beautiful.

This particular batch was dyed by the Etsy seller HandOverTheWool. The colors are lovely white, pink and violet and titled "A Bunch of Lilacs". I'm rather amused by the differences in light between my picture and the seller's photo shown here. I was certainly expecting rose much more than pink, and nothing as deep as the purple I received. I love it anyway.

Silk is slippery and it wants a lot of twist. I want laceweight and I want it to be tightly plied. Since lace is traditionally 2-ply, and I like 3-ply, I'm putting not just a lot of twist in this single, but a WHOLE LOT of twist. I'm getting somewhere around 47 WPI in the single, which will hopefully get me around 20 WPI in the 2-ply (maybe 25). That's firmly in lace-weight. This is consistent with what I learned from my test cards.

Amusingly enough I picked up this silk mainly for practice. I have another four ounces of tussah silk in another color, and a coordinating merino roving for a future planned project. I wanted to see what would happen if I spun my "default" single with silk, even with a heavier spindle. My planned project is going to be a lot bigger, and it's going to be for an elaborate shawl, so I want it to be as consistent as possible.

I'm really looking forward to the finished 2-ply yarn but it took quite a while to spin this much. It's going to be quite a while longer to finish the second half.

I'm really looking forward to it.

Bollywood

This month's theme for the Spindler's Challenge is "Bollywood". The spindler's challenge each month has simple criteria. Spin a skein, any size, within the current month and have it somehow relate to the theme. The prize is equally simple: your yarn pictured on the group's front page for the next month, and the pick of a following theme. The only restriction is "no seasonal themes" (I think they got burned out on that last year).

Bollywood is a pretty fun theme. I was introduced to Bollywood by my friend Arjumand. She's a wonderful person and her enjoyment of these movies is undisguised. The singing is a little over the top for me, but the imagery and energy are unmistakable and enticing. In short, these movies are bunches of fun. It is also very easy to turn up hundreds of great pictures for inspiration. Above are my choices of an album cover that exactly represents the colors I think of when Bollywood is mentioned, and what I was able to dig out of my stash to match it. The largest piece of roving is 20g and is fiery reds and oranges. The smaller piece is dusky red, gold and purple. And the white is a merino/silk blend I picked up from Dyelots here in town. My intention was to make a cabled yarn so that the merino would pop out like pearls all down its length.

Here are my various cops spun for this purpose. I split the bright red roving in half down the middle to start. I then took the first half and split that into finger-wide segments and spun it onto the first cop. The second was my merino/silk blend. The third was the dusky roving and my fourth (not pictured here) was the orange/red again, but this time spun without being split. This gave me one strand with fast repeats of red/orange, one white, and two that had longer repeats of color but didn't match each other.

I plied the short-repeat red with the white single, and the two longer repeats together, turning them so that hopefully the similar colors wouldn't line up (this wasn't entirely successful, but close enough). I knew I would be plying these strands together again, so I put a lot of extra twist in them and then wound everything together into another plying ball. Unfortunately, it still wasn't enough twist to make a nice cabled yarn. So I had to un-ply what I'd done, and then unwind the two parts onto separate balls so I could add even more twist. Unfortunately this turned what had seemed like fairly lofty 2-ply yarns into super-dense, over-twisted strands with little springiness left in them.

Plied back together we get my cabled yarn. This time they twisted around each other nicely, but still remained pretty dense. I was going for something a little bit more squishy and luscious. What I got was a very compact yarn. It still looks like it was strung with seed-pearls, which was my original intention. But it doesn't have the hand that I want, so I suppose I'll just have to spin a cabled yarn next month, too!

It did leave me with just the smallest bit of leftover 2-ply of the merino/silk and red yarn. There are only five grams of yarn here, but they're still really pretty. I let the extra twist back out, so the plies fluffed up nicely. I like this yarn, but would love it as a 3-ply.