The fiber from the last post (autumn squash, falkland) has been turned into a lovely pair of socks. The first picture shows the colors better, while the second picture shows the textures better.

I haven’t worn them, yet. But I’m solidly convinced that I will spin more falkland in the future.

I spun this in my office, while I was waiting on phone calls or for processes to complete, or whatever. I took it home and just barely plied it together. It’s superwash Merino, and yielded about 465 yards out of four ounces.

It will be some lovely heathered socks.  Or something.

Aurora and I tried our hand at dying some fiber.  We did cake dyes set in a crock pot with citric acid.  Here’s what it looked like dying:

Here it is drying in my office:

Here it is as a skein of yarn:

And, finally, here it is on Aurora’s hands:

That’s what she had in mind when we started, although I think she had hoped for the yellow to show more rather than morphing into a green.

I joined a fiber club, from the inestimable BrewerGnome, aka Dan. His first offering was called “Anubis”, and was dyed the black, turquoise and orange associated with Anubis. It was a new fiber for me, Wensleydale, which has a surprisingly long staple length, especially when you’ve been spinning Merino. Dan also suggested that we might try fractal spinning, so that’s what I did with it. Here’s the resulting yarn:

And here it is, almost finished as a hat. Aurora thinks it need ear flaps before it’s done.

Another project, Woodsman. Superwash BFL. I’ve already posted about the fiber, so here’s a picture of the finished object, a pair of socks which I gave away just a couple of days ago. I should have tried them on, first, because I think they’d feel wonderfully warm.

I spun some Dorset fiber, which is apparently very tough to felt. This would make it ideal for socks, of course. I should get around to that…

That should be it, for now. I do know that I’ve got more to take pictures of, but that will wait for another day.

One side note: it’s snowing today, and I’m very glad for the wool I have on my feet, on my hands and on my head.

Into 435 yards of 3-ply fingering weight yarn in 7 days.

Because I was having “a whale of a time” spinning it (as I wrote elsewhere), I tried to look up the characteristics of the breed. It turns out that there is no “Falkland” breed. It’s more of a location identifier than it is a breed identifier, much like the Punta wool I spun last year. As far as I can tell, the wool on the Falkland Islands from the various breeds of sheep is blended together (according to some fairly strict sets of criteria), and that’s what “Falkland wool” is.

Now, part of why I liked this so much is that is isn’t Merino, and it isn’t Romney. It has its own feel while drafting and its own hand as a finished yarn. So I hope that “Falkland wool” remains much the same as it is now–although I did read that the islanders have been introducing more Merino sheep in hopes of making the wool softer. I can only hope that this isn’t true, but market pressures probably are messing about.

In any case, I loved spinning this batch of wool, and I hope to get some more soon.

And, following up from last post, Aurora has indeed knit the BFL yarn she asked me for into a 50″ garter stitch scarf. There’s plenty left over for tassels, which she might do later on, but this is a nice picture showing the kind of drape she got from the yarn.

Now, with a few years of experience under my belt, I have come to understand that the Corriedale I spun first was probably overly compacted, and spending a bit of time loosening the fibers before spinning would probably have made it just fine. I still look at Corriedale with squinty eyes, but I’m willing to try spinning it again sometime in the future.

Likewise, with the Merino, it was a bit trickier than I would have liked to spin a shorter-stapled fiber, but I have spun enough of it since then that I have come to understand Merino well enough. I think it’s overused in the commercial yarn world, but the last batch I did (see my previous post) of “acorn” was a joy to spin and is one of my better yarns ever, so I can’t say I hate Merino.

But BFL… well, I might not be buying a whole lot in the future.

BFL has a longer staple, but is soft and has a bit of luster to it. Usually the long wools have more luster, so that’s no real surprise, but the fact that a really good BFL can be as soft as a middle Merino is what makes it stand out. But one of the things I’ve noticed over time is that BFL can be sticky, which has started to make me think I might be parting ways with it. I don’t like sticky fiber.

I have spun some gloriously smooth BFL, of course. The stuff I bought from Spunky Eclectic was very nice, although I didn’t keep notes back then, so I’m going by memory here. But I have purchased a bunch of BFL from various sellers and have found most of them to be sticky in at least some places.

Now, I realize that some of this might be due to the dye used on the BFL. In fact, some of the sticky patches were clearly in the darker dyed patches, so I’m pretty sure that the dye did have something to do with it. But some of them were not. In fact, one of the stickiest four ounces of BFL I every laid hands on was white, undyed commercial top. And some of the dyers are people I trust to treat the fiber right (and have had some great fiber from in the past), so I hesitate to completely blame the dye.

And thus, the pound of BFL I have in my stash may be the last batches of BFL I spin. The four 4-ounce batches may be as smooth as butter to spin, and I might change my mind at the end of the end of them, but at this point, I am bidding farewell to BFL because I just can’t trust it.

Oh, and I finished up the 7.3 ounces of this BFL. A nice 4-ply worsted-weight yarn at around 320 yards, and it’s a very soft and squishy yarn–but oh, was it sticky in places to spin.

Aurora and I have already wound it into balls so she can knit it into a scarf for herself. I can’t wait to see how that works out.

It’s about 375 yards, so that should be enough for a pair of socks. My wife wants me to make some for her sister, so now I’m just waiting for foot measurements…

I also started (and finished) this wool pool yarn.

It was fun to spin, and although it isn’t as soft as some yarn, I could easily make gloves or something similar from this. It’s about 340 yards of three-ply yarn.

I finished this yarn from some top I bought in 2008 when I first started spinning. This merino was VERY squishy, and was easy to spin.

I got 540 yards of three-ply yarn out of this, which surprised the heck out of me. It was only 3.8 ounces to start with. Not sure what I want to make from it, either.

I bought this BFL a couple of years ago, too. It’s slated to become my new watchcap, so I spun it a bit thicker and made it 4-ply to try getting up to worsted weight. I didn’t quite make it (more like DK weight), but it is gloriously soft.

It’s about 340 yards.

Lastly, I finished the Exmoor Mule from my last post. That’s this yarn. It’s only 280 yards, which kind of surprised me, but that’s enough for gloves. I already knit some gloves for myself (should get a picture of them), so I’m not sure what this yarn will become yet.

For the future, this is on my wheel right now:

And this is on the spindle in my office:

In any case, the Ravelry group has a monthly challenge.  The idea is to start and finish in that month some spinning which is related to the theme.  February’s theme is “New Beginnings”, and I thought that this fiber reminded me of new growth and fertile soil. This is the picture of the braid as it was listed on etsy.

I started spinning it on the first of the month, which puts me within the guidelines for the challenge. I’m already over 1/3 done. This is what it looks like, so far:

The goal is for 3-ply sock yarn. I’m intentionally not worrying about keeping any of the colors aligned when I ply because I think these colors will all mix pleasantly, and if some of the plied yarn does end up with all three plies being the same color, that will also be nice. Good thing I ordered more plying spindles already, because I have the Exmoor Mule I spun last month sitting in a plying ball, ready to go.

That’s this stuff:

That will be three-ply yarn as well. I have decided during these colder days (was 4°F yesterday morning), that I need to make some gloves to keep in my truck. That steering wheel gets cold. Maybe this yarn will be those gloves.

The gloves were her request. She picked the fiber off etsy.  It looked like this:

I’m a little surprised at how different the two ends of the yarn ended up being.  When I look at this picture of the fiber, though, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

In any case, the gloves ended up being more fraternal than identical.  That’s cool by Aurora, and I kinda like it, too.

The hat also has some handspun in it–the brown stripes.

Now I just need to finish Elenna’s socks and cast on Cambria’s mittens.

2-ply sock yarn, 375 yards, 3.75 ounces.  Superwash BFL.  I wish I had a faster flyer because I felt like it took forever to ply it, and it’s still underplied in spots.  I also have upgraded my feelings about superwash from ‘hate’ to ‘dislike’.  Perhaps I’ll give it a spin again in the future.

The Abby Batt  (“Denny”) after plying and finishing.  I did this as a 2×2 cabled yarn, so that’s four plies.  Cabled yarns are supposed to make your stitch definition pop, so I need to find something that can be done with 90 yards of yarn that will show off the FREAKING PRETTY YARN.

I’ve never done gloves before, so I’m doing a really basic pattern, and I’m relying on the colors of the handspun to make them interesting.  I’m happy so far.

What’s on my wheel now?  Oatmeal BFL, of course.

And since today seemed that it might be the last possible time I could take a pictures of the leaves in my yard (after having missed some incredible shots… I has a sad), here are a couple of reasons I love my flowering pears so much.

My enabler convinced me that I needed to try spinning an Abby Batt, sometimes called Abby Crack. It wasn’t the cheapest stuff I’ve ever purchased, but for spinning enjoyment per dollar, it was top-notch.  Also, it’s not easy to get one of these.  I was warned by my enabler early on that a shipment of Abby Crack was on its way to one of her outlets, and I begged the store owner to sell me one (sight unseen).  It is entirely possible that none of them were ever displayed on the website because they were all sold prior to the shipment arriving at the store.

I forgot to take a picture of it before I spun it (of course), but I finished up the singles last night and was reminded to take pictures of that before I start plying. Actually, I was reminded in the nick of time, since the picture is of my plying ball.

An Abby Batt isn’t always made of the same ingredients. This particular batt is 60% merino and 40% tussah silk, and named “Denny”.  The colors in this picture are fairly true, even capturing the luster of the silk, but the photo hardly does justice to how the singles feel. They’re soft and smooth and amazingly pleasant to pet.

I’m almost sad that I’ve run out of unspun Denny, because it really was a joy to spin. I believe I now have some idea of what a decently-prepared batch of fiber feels like, both to hold in my hand and to spin.

Seller’s notes: A longwool, similar in many respects to Wensleydale.  Slightly shorter stapled, with a good luster, good wear, and gorgeous dark heathering.  Good for laceweight.  A little bit coarser than the others.  This is a combed top.

I have Wensleydale in my stash, but I haven’t spun any yet, so I have no basis for comparison there.  I don’t know if I should have shot for some laceweight or not, but that’s not what I wanted from this wool, so I spun it for worsted weight.  Isn’t that the joy of spinning, that you can make the yarn you want?

A word on the “coarseness”.  Perhaps this is what I mean when I say dense, but I didn’t find it particularly coarse.  As top, it felt much more like hair than any of the other wools have—in fact, when it was still a braid, it kind of looked (and felt) as though some greying woman had cut off a braid from her hair and sent it in the mail.  That is, the fibers themselves feel quite smooth with little crimp.

The lack of crimp and the smoothness meant that I had to put a lot more twist into the yarn than I was used to.  I typically skate right on the edge of too little twist, and I had a couple of episodes where the single fell apart and wound into my bobbin.  It was a little tricky pulling it through the orifice to restart the spinning, since the lack of twist climbed onto the bobbin.

I’m interested in the contrast between the two yarns, and I’m thinking I may end up using them together in a garment just because I do enjoy the variation between them so much.  Here they are next to each other for comparision.  Oh, and the obligatory money shot.

I also finished plying up the Harvest roving.  I was aiming for a fingering-weight yarn, but I’m not quite where I wanted to be.  This is 4 ounces of BFL, which came out at about 480 yards of 2-ply yarn.  That’s a little lighter than I was shooting for, but if I’d done three plies, I would have only gotten about 320 yards and would have been more of a sport weight.  I’ll figure this out yet!

Also, I spun about half of it and then let it sit for a few months before I spun the rest.  There’s only a slight difference in the diameters of the singles, but it’s enough that there’s a bit of a bouclé effect to it that I wish wasn’t there.  That should mostly vanish when knit, but I’ll just have to be a bit more careful.  I know that there can be this kind of variation in the singles even when they’re spun closer together, too.

The colors are nice, though, almost exactly what I envisioned.

Some notes.  First, the roving was very light and puffy which is in contrast with the compactness of most commercial top.  That makes a big difference in how it feels to draft, although to be comparing apples to apples, I really should have some of the same wool type in different preps.  Maybe commercially-prepped Southdown feels the same when drafting.

Second, this is the crimpiest wool I’ve ever spun.  That made it harder for me to control the draft, since the crimp made it kind of ‘grabby’ and sometimes a big slub would get pulled into the drafting zone.  But it also meant that I didn’t have to put as much twist into the singles to get them to become cohesive, thus preserving loft.

Third, the color in the fiber is a blend of lighter and darker fibers, and some of the very dark fibers are actually little tightly-wound coils.  Most of those got pulled out when they were drafted, but not all of them did.  I suspect that these noily bits will end up pilling or something, perhaps even adding a little scratchiness.

Fourth, there was a tiny bit of grease left in the fiber.  My hands got noticeably softer while spinning it.  I don’t like lotion, but I did like how that felt.  I think most of it got washed out when I was setting the twist, though.  There was also a bit of vegetable matter, which I tried to pull out as I found it while drafting, but I can still see some in the finished yarn.  Since that will be scratchy, I will probably want to remove as much as I can before knitting anything out of it.

Here’s what the seller wrote about the wool:  One of the softest downs breeds, while still maintaining the incredible loft of other downs breeds. Great loft, good memory, and soft enough for next-to-skin wear. No luster to speak of. From a local shepherd. This is a carded roving.

Yup.

I ended up with a three-ply worsted-weight yarn.  I got about 133 yards out of 2 ounces.

I like the slightly less-finished look to it, which is what I was aiming for.  The idea is that I’ll use this and the Gotland wool (next up to be spun) from the sampler to make a new cap for me.   The Jacob hat is a little bit scratchy, and I’d like something less so—this fits the bill nicely.