wool – Crafturgency

The galette and jar of caramel last weekend went with me to a 4th of July get together with some friends just up the street from me. We had a lovely time chatting and eating, there were some laughs, and I got to visit with one of my very favorite dogs. The galette really wasn’t sweet enough and I think that would have been fine, but it was really missing something. A scoop of vanilla ice cream did wonders, but I think I’ll have to try it again. Perhaps lemon zest and the barest pinch of salt added?

In the last entry, you may have noticed that underneath the grey wool on that bobbin, there was some white yarn. After I got home from the get together, I set to work on that white yarn and plied it.

The difference in color is due to evening lighting and actual daylight. I’m very pleased with this!

Though, I also really need to start tagging these because I’ve made so many little sample skeins now, I’m forgetting which one is from which fleece. On the other hand, I’m having a really good time making these regardless of what fleece they come from. But I did wonder, what can I do with small skeins? They’re pretty to look at and soft to the touch, but I’d rather they don’t just sit around, so I thought I might pull out some dye materials I’ve been squirreling away over the last couple of years just to see what happens.

But also, I’ve been hankering to do some embroidery (you know, with the oodles of spare time I have – I should be working on painting the rooms on the second floor…my knee and collarbone are just about functional enough), and I thought, oh, crewel embroidery would be perfect. I need a new tea cozy, which could be embroidered, and this could be a small enough project that wouldn’t need to be confined to a dedicated space, because I have no space to dedicate to any projects right now. And so I went down a very brief rabbit hole looking up crewel yarns and the qualities in wool that are needed for them: mostly fine and soft, nothing about staple length, apparently Dorset is a popular breed (which makes no sense to me, but maybe they’re using lamb’s wool)…?

Okay, okay, I know, probably I don’t need to restrict myself to any particular qualities of currently available commercially made crewel yarns. I can make what I want, dammit, and that’s how I extracted myself from the rabbit hole. There was a bit of an entirely different fleece I bought this May that I hadn’t yet spun much of. It’s extremely fine, the staple of the bit I washed is fairly short, and it is absolutely filthy. I really needed very fine combs for this (I tried carding, and I still suck at it), but on Monday evening I started coming with my usual combs and did the best I could.

I’m VERY pleased with this! This is a pearl grey fleece and so unbelievably fine and soft. I really wasn’t sure how this would turn out, partly because I was spinning it so fine, I couldn’t actually see the twist anymore. I am middle-aged and require reading glasses now, which I’m still furious about, so there was some assistance with a camera and then zooming in. But it all worked out! I haven’t wet finished this yarn yet – it’s currently tucked next to my work laptop so I can pat it now and then. I am really hoping the bulk of the fleece isn’t as dirty as the bit I washed because that really slowed everything down.

Aaaanyway, the point of this test was to see if I could spin fine enough for a two-ply crewel yarn, and clearly I can. I might divide this skein up into a couple skeins and see what walnuts or avocados might do. Or marigold petals. Or I might see if I can find some madder root. The great thing about tiny skeins is that they will only require tiny dye pots, and hopefully also relatively tiny amounts of time. I can’t get exact about any of it, to be sure, but it feels like it might be fun to just mess around and get a feel for playing with dye stuffs.

Stay tuned.

(This was a draft I wrote in May of 2020 – today is April 17, 2024. So much has changed, but I’m going to publish this anyway, because it’s a fine post in itself, reminding me of The Before and all the things I was doing at the time.)

I tried very hard to get through that grey fleece I had bought from Balky Farm in 2019, but that didn’t happen. I did try, though, and that resulted in quite a bit of yarn.

Good yarn! Squishy yarn!

This time, I decided to measure and tag it. I have enough yarn that I swore I would remember which fleece it came from, how long ago I spun it, and how many yards there were. Good grief. And I have a terrible memory, and I know it. So. This time: tags!

You’d probably not guess that the fleece the above yarn came from was grey, but it was. It spun up brown, which I think I did not quite expect. Well, I did expect some yellowing from the sunburnt tips, but I didn’t expect brown. Not that I’m necessarily complaining! It’s still really gorgeous wool and made Really Good Yarn.

I also started combing some of that new! grey! fleece! that I washed up a small bag of.

So fluffy! So beautiful! And I wanted to do some experiments to see exactly how I should prepare this wool for spinning. So I combed some as they were, I combed some locks that had been flicked first, and I combed some locks that had their sunburnt tips trimmed off.

Combed fluff to spin! The color is off I think, but you’ll see some yarn spun up from it in sunlight, which is truer to the actual color.

Three tiny skeins!! So tiny. I spun each nest up, then Andean plied them (a technique that I very much appreciate now). The skeins on the right are probably closest in color. YOu can only just see the difference. The middle is the one with the tips trimmed, and while I was certain that was the one I was going to love the most, now I am not so sure. Oh yes, it’s grey. But it lacks a certain texture in the color. Or a layer of color. I’m not sure I can explain it. My eyes say that yarn is boring. And yet, I look at the Gotland yarn sample I spun up some months ago, and I think this is the perfect, beautiful grey and it is not boring. And it is way more homogeneously grey than that middle mini skein. Well. I can’t figure it out. But what I did like was the one on the far right. It’s the most even, and it’s grey, but with the very slightest tinge of creamy yellow, like that yellowish tinge silver has. And I loooove it. I really do. I’ve decided to spin the whole fleece with the tips attached.

In the meantime, I spun MOAR of the fleece I’ve been working on forever. Got two skeins. Washed them up.

Looms are very handy for hanging yarn on. I had been working on finishing the measuring portion of a dishtowel project that I started back in September 2019. You can see the warping board hanging on the other side of the loom.

Had some singles left on a bobbin, so I Andean plied that, and got a smaller skein that I wound into a cake. Then I knit a swatch.

I don’t hate the swatch, but I don’t like it either. I used three different sizes of needle, and I think I could go down another size even. This yarn would definitely resist pilling and it’s stretchy enough for knitting, but I’m not crazy about how it doesn’t fluff up after washing and blocking. It is, after all, a weaving yarn. If I want sweater yarn for knitting, I’m going to have to card the wool, and then spin using the long draw method, which, frankly, scares me. I’m pretty good at spinning a worsted yarn. Pretty darned good. I cannot spin long draw to save my life. It’s awful. And a thing I will have to learn.