Red! Shawl

Last winter I decided I wanted a brilliant red shawl. Just brightest red, no varigation. I did want some interest in the knitting though. I’d also been returning again and again to a pattern called Adularia which has a plain garter stitch body in wool and a deep, very pretty lace trim meant to be done in silk. I put those two thoughts together.

I had ~170g of palest fawn alpaca fleece which I washed, combed and spun, trying for a 4ply finished equivalent. This was back in January.

It came out beautifully and on target straight off the wheel, though it did bloom to become a bit boofier on wet finishing.

I dyed it with Landscapes dye “Desert Pea” which came out really well.

So, so bright and not blue tinted at all which is what I wanted. This is “my” red! It was such a marvellous contrast to the brilliant blue sky on the day.

Knitting beginnings. I didn’t fancy doing so much utterly plain garter stitch. So I introduced a row of yarn over k2tog holes every sixth row.

The silk was purchased from Colourmart, which is a dangerous mill end online shop based in the UK. I skeined off 116g (exact weight not important, I just wanted to make sure I had enough), scoured it and dyed it the same full strength Desert Pea as the alpaca. That came out a kind of dark coral pink, so I overdyed with food colours and very happily got something pretty close to an exact match.

Alpaca at the top, silk below.

Here she is pinned out for blocking

Such pretty lace and oh so many pins

The cast off involved a whole lot of little segments of crochet chain. I don’t really crochet, but I can manage bits of chain. I’ve done lots for provisional cast ons before but this might be my first crochet that has stayed in a finished garment.

Done. I’m pretty pleased with it. About a month’s worth of spinning, some dyeing and something over two months to knit. Ideally the alpaca would have been a little finer. I had to go up a needle size to get a fabric that wasn’t too close, but that is really a bit loose for the silk. I still really like it though.

On me. It really is my red!

Hmm. I should take those cloth masks down and put them away somewhere. I’ve moved on to N95s.

Gradient Suri Spin

Spinning was also a good activity to do while hiding inside in with the aircon. I was given this pretty bag of Suri as a christmas present.

I’d never spun pure Suri befoe so this is now added to the small but growing collection of fibre types I have experienced. I decided to try for a 2ply gradient yarn so I split it out into colour groupings and halved those by weight.

I knew it ought to be long staple, so I combed it. Not easy! Some of the locks were lightly felted and/or twisted and they were slippery so getting the combs to work was fiddly. There was also a lot of shorter stuff present that needed to be put aside, a bit less than half the weight. I’ve kept that for possible carding adventures.

Here is some combed. Lofty clouds.

I spun each half into singles, both starting from the turquoise, aiming for a fairly fine spin. The second half went much better. Surprise! Partly due to simple practice. Partly because in the first half I started out by trying to include the short fibres. Bad idea. I rather wish I could wind the clock (and the spinning) back and do the first half again with just the good long stuff. Oh well, I knew this would be a learning experience. It’s long staple and really slippery. I hope I’ve got enough twist in it for it to hold together.

From there it was more familiar plying, skeining, wash and dry. 56g or 130m lace weight yarn.

I have thoughts on what to knit from it, but I want to clear at least one of the projects on needles first.

Drum Carder Initiation

I’m not sure how much processing of fleece will be in my future. I rather imagine I will mostly spin commercially prepared fibre.  So I’m milking the experience options from the alpaca goodness project. I retained all the combing waste. The pale fawn I had already processed with hand carders. A lovely friend offered her drum carder, so I’ve put the combing waste from the caramel alpaca through that. Oh my, so much easier and quicker than hand carding! The kit is also a lot more expensive of course.

This is a picture of a similar drum carder from the Ashford website. Silly me didn’t take any process pics.

and this is the batt of fluff that we produced from about 30g of combing waste.

I chose to get as worsted an effect as I could, by tearing off strips and spinning from one end.

It was a different spinning experience with fluffy short fibres and lumpy noils all through. I got yarn though. Not the lovely smooth yarn that combing produces, but yarn with character. Actually, it doesn’t look as lumpy as I felt it would. I’m pretty pleased. This is straight off the niddy noddy. I’ve since washed it and drying is slowly happening as I type this.

Alpaca Goodness part III and done

The end product of my big winter project has reached it’s people. I’m extremely pleased with myself for managing to produce such an item from fleece through learning both fibre preparation and wheel spinning, then knitting it up. It’s a cowl, a neck warmer. A scarf that won’t fall off.

I’ve used the imaginatively named pattern “3-colour cashmere cowl” by Joji Locatelli. I found this pattern a few years ago and loved the variety of design elements and colour balance. This one is of course in 4 natural colours of fine alpaca and the depth of some elements have been tweaked a bit. One day I’ll make one for myself.

A couple of detail shots:

Modelling it to demonstrate a few wearing options. Wear it either way up

Or pull one end up over your head and it works as a hood too

Handspun Jumper Part 3 – Supplementary Yarn

The chocolate alpaca shown in Wool Combing- Handspun Jumper part 1. has been turned into yarn

This skein is 73g The reason I’ve only extracted another 400g from the fleece, is that I have 300g of yarn that has been sitting about in stash, handspun by other people. The turquoise yarn was bought at festival market, the white-ish and darker variegated skeins were bought from a friend.

I wasn’t happy with the colours though. So I bought a pot of blue dye hoping to get a pretend indigo effect.  Not quite as it turned out. It did deliver a truer blue than I can get from food dye, but I felt it was too bright against the chocolate (other than the darker variegated yarn, the blued version works really well.

So I used food dye to then dullen the two blue skeins, which worked a treat:

Here are the two dyed versions with the alpaca I’m much happier with the darker versions especially the one that started out near white. The skein that was originally turquoise hasn’t changed a great deal:

As for the paler specks in the once near white yarn….they are deliberate. I put several bindings in part of the skein before dyeing, aiming to get a bit of that imitation colour work effect that happens in some sock yarns for interest. That pale pink colour ran away on soaking prior to the first blue dye.

Right. The supplementary yarn is ready to go. I need to prep and spin more alpaca, finish my current knitting project and find a pattern for this jumper. I’m envisaging some kind of striped cardigan or jumper, possibly a circular yoke.

More New Skillz

Well early achievement in a new skill.

After wool combing, there is a bit of waste wool left over. This is shorter fibres and tangled bits called noils or nips. I knew one could then card that and spin it up.

I had one session of trying to make the hand carders work on Koki’s caramel coloured leftovers. Big nope. I felt really awkward and failed to either get the fibre to untangle or get it out of the teeth of the carder. I put it all aside and felt stupid for a while.

Then I watched a few more Youtube how-to videos and decided to try again with the leftovers from Kiki, which had been my favourite to handle, comb and spin. This worked much better. My technique isn’t really as recommended, but I got it to at least sort of work and produced a bunch of decreasingly ugly rolags. On the left is the wool waste from combing, then my first semi successful rolags, then the pair of carders on the right.

and the finished pile of rolags. I was getting better, but some of the nips and noils stayed as little lumps. I didn’t have the patience to re-card to reduce that and thought I’d see if I could spin these anyway. I’ve included a beautiful little roll of combed fleece in the picture. A little lock of whole fleece had made it’s way into the waste bag.

I wasn’t at all sure that my rather too fluffy rolags would hold together for spinning, but they did! Here is 16g of semi worsted yarn. Woolen prep, worsted spinning style (because I dont know any other). In fact, part of it is worsted semi worsted* or something- one ply is fully worsted the other semi. Never mind that, I’m just being silly. I am however interested that this feels warm to the touch, where my fully worsted yarn can feel quite cool (and beautifully slithery).

This is but a beginning I know. I am pleased that I didn’t let the carders beat me though.

*thinking of compass or wind directions. West Nor West and similar.

Alpaca Goodness part II

This business of holding posts back until gifts have been received does rather mess with the coherency of my post order. I want to post the thing after this…. and have just realised that these recipients have in fact already seen these pictures even though I am still working on the final product.

After my first combing and spinning of the lovely alpaca fibre from friends covered in Part 1.   
I proceeded to make better friends with the wool combs. I’d noticed that the palest fibre (from Kiki) was the nicest to process and spin, So I started with that.

Roughly left to right is washed fleece, combing waste and then the soft fluffy combed fibre in the round box.

I spun this up and was pleased to find my spinning had improved from the variegated skein. This stuff is an absolute joy to handle and spin. 18 micron and a first fleece.

Then I combed and spun the shiny blackity black Popo

Two skeins, mwahaha.

So now I had to tackle Koki. I hadn’t enjoyed dealing with her as much the first time. The second try just confirmed my dislike. It’s hard to say why? The fleece is apparently 19 micron, and it is soft. I have a theory it’s about a variety of fibre lengths being present? Maybe? Hard to check now as I don’t have any unprocessed fibre left. Anyway, I managed a skein from her. Gorgeous colour, despite all other issues.

Three, three the (not lily white) girls

Then a few weeks later I got some fleece from Encalada, a grey lad.

Four calling birds:

These are all combed and worsted spun. All shiny, smooth and as even as I could manage. I’m really rather pleased and am now working on knitting them up.

 

 

Handspun Jumper Part 2- Chocolate Alpaca Fleece

This moving box, full of alpaca fleece has been living in a corner of my bedroom for about 10 years. That colleague mentioned in Wool Combing- Handspun Jumper part 1. first gave me full fleeces of each of his three guard alpacas. He claimed he would get only about $2 for them (maybe $2 per kilo? Still a pittance) if he tried to sell them. They were a byproduct of his sheep wool fleeces. So he was happy to give them away to anyone with interest. The white and gold alpaca fleeces were very coarse, really only good for rugs or similar. The chocolate one was still fairly coarse but less so and fairly nice when spun up, which a friend did a bit of for me, which I knitted a hat out of, which is too big really but I’ve worn lots. The too big is good for wearing over my hair when it’s up. Bonus. Good springy yarn for outerwear. The right hand black bag has the remnants of the first three fleeces. The left hand bag has most of another fleece, just the chocolate, but two years growth.

I’ve got it all out to extract some to be enough for a jumper when added to what I have already in spun form. Looking lush eh?

Deep, deep fleece. How gorgeous is this eh? ………Oh, and I happen (possibly not by accident) to be wearing my first successful handknitted jumper today.

When stretched out, the best staples are about 19cm. The long staples should make for a hard wearing finished product.

I’ve taken 4 ~100g sections with the best staple length and least vegetable matter (VM). There is still ~2kg of fleece left in the bag!

These I will next split in two (the spinning wheel bobbins hold about 50g) and spin up to get enough to knit a jumper. Eventually. This has been a thought, a hope, a plan, for as many years as I have been storing this stuff. I took on the “Alpaca Goodness” project to get me past the wheel spinning block. That tactic jolly well worked. I’m off! I’m on it! It’s gonna happen!

Wool Combing- Handspun Jumper part 1.

I was feeling low brain this morning. The only thing on my list I could face doing was combing up some more fibre to spin. As a bonus, it’s more active than a bunch of other low brain activities, and one gets to feel a bit badass wielding serious spiky things. The combs are borrowed, I need to get my own set. The fibre is alpaca, given to me by an old colleague. He kept several alpacas as guards for his sheep. This is fairly course but very long staple. 18cm! Two years growth I think. Sadly I don’t know the name of the creature or even if it has one. It spins up to a pleasingly springy yarn, but as yet I’ve only spun it on the drop spindle. This lot will be done on the wheel. I’ve ambitions to spin enough of it to knit into a jumper, possibly along with the small skeins of random handspun wool that I have purchased over the years.

Chocolate brown alpaca, before and after combing. It’s darker when spun.

Badass wool combs. Spiky!