Need More Hands!

It’s been over a month since I’ve posted, but the autumn whirl has begun, trying to get enough yarn and handwovens ready for the winter season!  Lazy winter days won’t occur until after tax season next February or so.  I am sure I’m not the only one who’s perhaps busier than they’d prefer!

A set of 4 weft-faced rugs are on the floor loom, though just one rug has been woven thus far, because, once the small loom arrived, I’ve been trying to keep it warped and scarves woven off.  

Yes, I did have a 16” RH loom for a short time, then sold it – it was too large for scarves, but not large enough for towels.  The 10” loom is perfect – I should never have tortured myself about buying the 16” loom, but, like many other weavers, I was trying to only buy one loom to make too wide a variety of fabrics.  

The weft-faced rugs are slower to weave than my usual rag rugs, but the effect is worth the time.  The hard beat that rugs need does mean it’s noisier than weaving regular fabrics, so I don’t work at the floor loom when hubby has a headache, which is quite often.  I don’t want to add to his pain.  

So, the small loom is an ideal addition to my business, as it’s quiet and very quick to warp.  And, perhaps because I have been a knitting designer for so very long, I *love* to chart weaving drafts as well!  In a short time, I’ve charted 65 drafts, just for plain weaves. I love the interplay of color.  

With stranded color pattern knitting, the secondary color(s) are held to the wrong side, so the color charts are pure for lack of a better word.  In weaving, the yarns interlace.  Two colors interlacing can give the effect of a third color, and even a simple draft can look complex when using 3 colors.  It’s magical!  And something I don’t think I’ll ever tire of doing.

In between weaving, I try to keep the bins stocked with several weights of handspun Falkland and Romney wool yarns.  I’ve spun other finer wools, like Rambouillet, Merino, and Polwarth, and many other fibers from camel down to cotton and horsehair, but I find spinning the Falkland wool to be such a pleasurable experience – it’s soft enough to be pleasant to wear, yet has a long enough staple length and excellent prep which is easy to spin.

Romney has always been a favorite, one of my first, and one day, I’d like to spin enough to weave a blanket or 2.  In the meantime, it’s wonderful for handknit socks, which I wear almost all year long.

I may be imagining it, but I find the socks knit from Romney, or other long wools, seem to breathe better than, or resist retaining moisture better than, socks knit with softer wools.  I love Lamb’s Pride, both the worsted and bulky versions, but I find that they can feel damp during the day, requiring changing.  This doesn’t happen with the Romney pairs.

The change in activity from weaving to spinning is surely better for the body than making the same motions every day, and I do love to spin.  It allows my mind to relax and wander a bit, where if I did that when weaving, the patterning would go wrong, requiring un-weaving, which no weaver wants to have to do.  So, weaving requires much more concentration, which can be tiring.  I could probably spin all day long, but weaving is best kept to about 3 hrs.

I’ll post pics soon of what I’ve been making, with links to my Etsy shop.  I’m working up a small pile of scarves at a time, which I will wet block and lay flat to dry en masse, then sew on labels.

May all your work go smoothly and may you still find time to relax during this busy season!
Happy Autumn!
Dawn

A Summer of Socks

My sock WIPs have multiplied this summer, like bunnies!  It began as one pair, as a distraction from the cardigan I’m knitting, but then they quickly took over

Many sock knitters will likely have a drawer full of hand knit socks, and I am no exception, although I almost exclusively knit socks in DK to super bulky weight, instead of fingering or sport weight, and prefer non-superwash wool yarns, which I find to be warmer.  I’ve knit hubby several pairs of fingering and sport weight socks, but as he tends to be warmer than me, his socks last much longer, simply from lack of use!

I wear hand knit wool socks all year long – nothing is as comfortable and breathable, but I don’t have to tell sock knitters that!

The wide range of yarn weights I use covers all the seasons, with the bulky to super bulky socks knit larger, to be worn over a thinner pair, in the winter.  

One of my favorite yarns for socks (and sweaters and afghans) is Lamb’s Pride, worsted and bulky weights.  The mohair in the blend adds to warmth and wear, even though they’re single ply yarns, and they just feel cozy!  

I’ve loved other wools for socks, like Lopi, the defunct Woolpak Perendale, yarn I spun from a blend of 44% Mohair, 28% Romney, and 28% Leicester wools, which is also no longer available, but which lasted several years and were so warm, and the single skein of British BFL (Bluefaced Leicester, for non-knitters) I bought from Iriss of Penzance in Cornwall, England many years ago. 

Oh how I wish I could have bought a kilo (or 2, or 10!) of that beautiful yarn – it was heaven to knit and wear.  British BFL yarns these days all seem to be superwashed, unfortunately.  To my mind, and after many years of wearing wool socks, nothing beats long wools for socks.

These 2 most recent pairs are in a simple pattern, which has quickly become a favorite!  They fill a thickness gap in my sock drawer between the plain all stockinette LPW socks and the bulky wt. socks, as the pattern has two rounds of stockinette followed by one round of stranded color work, so it’s not as thick as an all color work pattern, but thicker than all stockinette. 

I mistakenly worked the first pair with the same 42 sts I would normally use for stockinette LPW socks.  They fit, but they are a bit snug, so I used 46 sts for the 2nd pair.  Stranding, even on occasional rounds, does take the fabric in a bit more than stockinette.  The summer heat must have made me forget this fact! 

Here is the 42-st pair, with slightly shorter leg than I usually knit. After knitting them, I decided the heel flap didn't look organic.  It didn't *flow* from the sock patterning, so I changed it in the 2nd pair, below.

     

 

This 2nd pair is on 46 sts, and I worked a few more rounds in the leg, so that when working the heel flap in the darkest color, the color flowed from the center of the stripe panel. A 1/2 repeat was needed just before the toe shaping, to give the desired foot length. This, too, flows into the dark toe color, and will be how I knit this pattern hereon in!

It’s a simple 2 stitch by 12 round pattern, which works well with hue/shade changes within a color family.  A 2 stitch repeat means the design can be easily adjusted smaller or larger as needed, and will work with any weight of yarn. 

Such designs are also ideal for using up bits of stash.  I used just 5 colors, but each color panel could be knit using a different set of colors, depending on your stash, or each panel could use the same 2 colors with a 3rd color as the background.

The other socks I’ve knit this summer (shown in the 1st photo above) are:
a 2-ply handspun Romney worsted wt. pair,
a super bulky handspun Romney pair (still in progress),
a Lamb’s Pride Bulky pair,
a re-knitting of the heels and feet of both a LPW pair and a Cascade 220 pair, and
a palindrome striped pair just begun.

I’ve knit many hundreds of socks since the very early ’90’s, and they’re still one of my favorite things to knit.

I love how they’re lightweight in the hands, so they don’t tend to stress joints, they’re small and portable, so they’re finished must faster than a sweater, they don’t use much yarn, and one can play with all manner of patterning or just enjoy plain knitting around. And who doesn’t like warm feet!

Onward!
Dawn

A Box of Heaven

(Originally posted on WP 7/28/20.)

As I began to open the box, *it* wafted up towards me.  My heart began to race. I caught my breath.  Lanolin! Fleece! Cotswold!

Only other handspinners could likely relate to the level of excitement and pleasure that the sight and smell of raw fleece evokes.

I love many things in this world (and have long felt that it is the best way to know God, Goddess, Higher Self, or whatever personification we are most comfortable with), but the level of pure joy that a pile of greasy, dirty wool brings…well, it’s just one of life’s many simple pleasures.

Though you wouldn’t know it to look at it, as fresh-shorn fleece is a bit of an ugly duckling, until it’s been transformed by hot water and either soap or detergent.  Now, I’ve read that soap is harder to rinse out of wool.  Paula Simmons mentions this in her classic “Spinning and Weaving with Wool”.

But I’m not really a fan of detergent. If our town water was perhaps softer, I’d only use soap to do the laundry, but have found the laundry gets dingy quickly.

I do find, though, that when hand washing, Kirk’s castile soap is unbeatable.  It cleans quickly, thoroughly, and gets even blood stains out.

I do not yet know how I will process and spin this beautiful wool, and I haven’t yet acquired any of the usual combing or carding equipment.  But I will leave that until later.  I may just get a large dog slicker brush and flick card the locks, then spin them on my Country Craftsman wheel.

Options could be a smooth worsted, a semi-worsted, or a type of wolf yarn –  a tufty boucle-like singles, from hand teased locks. I am sure the Cotswold will tell me what it *wants* to be spun as.

Ideally, I’d want to capture all the lanolin that is in these fleeces.  I always have a 4 oz bottle of lanolin on hand, to use in winter on my hands, and to add to rinse water when washing wool socks, but, why have to buy it, when it’s sitting there, trapped in all this wool?

So, I went looking for ways to do this, most of which involve boiling or simmering the wool with salt, which is said to leave the wool much drier, perhaps even ruining it. Steaming it is also mentioned, as is boiling away the wash water to concentrate the lanolin.

This was looking to be a huge palaver – lobster pot filled with wool either simmering or boiling away in the kitchen, in August, no less. Then having to let it sit there until cool, so not to shock the fibers, causing them to felt. All the while taking up a good portion of our stovetop. Like some of my other homesteading thoughts (from making soap to making jam), not all these activities are easy or practical, given space and time constraints. I’m crazy, but not that crazy, like I don't have enough to do already!

Then I read this Cast-On article mentioning that the wool soaking water is excellent fertilizer: "The soaking-bath water provides an excellent fertilizer for the plants in your yard and garden after it cools down."

And then found this site talking about using wool pellets in the garden.  So, a use for all the second cuts and other bits of wool that aren’t as suitable for yarn.

Result? I’ll just buy a bottle of lanolin when i need more and, instead, water the garden with the wool wash water and dig any useless wool bits into whichever garden bed needs the most help.

Btw, i tend to link to products on Amazon as it is the quickest and usually the easiest way to link to products, for a visual. However, I receive no income from click-throughs, so that is not why I do it!

I find Ebay can often be the best place to find used books, inexpensively, and Kirk’s castile can be found at many vitamin supply sources, like Swanson and Iherb. Webs is a great knitting and weaving supply resource for new materials, and there are many Ravelry groups  for used spinning, weaving, and knitting equipment and supplies. There are also Facebook groups with used equipment, although I am less fond of FB’s layout.

Onward.
Dawn