Photo post - winding down the dyeing fun

Fibers that are almost dried on the rack. Winters are brutal on the drying times.

Hand painted Tussah Silk and Milk fiber in Cardinal, Chestnut and Baby Blue



Milk fiber in Baby Blue (same as above) Chartreuse and Lavender


Close up of the Hand painted Tussah Silk (pre fluffing - dyeing compacts a little)

Handspun, Corespun Yarn

I call this yarn Mossy. It was made from wool batts that I carded from various fibers dyed green. The fibers include coopworth, mohair, wool, and silk; carded with lots of glitz. I spun this on a DMX embroidery thread.


It was really frustrating at first. I just couldn't get the swing of it. Eventually I was able to get more of a rhythm and method for spinning and it went a bit easier. I haven't measured yardage yet but I wouldn't put it more than 100 yards if that. Just sort of a show and tell post. I needed to show off a little since my weekend got off to a pretty bad start.

More Batty Goodness!

Here are the batts I promised a couple of days ago. Since then I have begun carding a multicolor blended batt. It has no glitz in it but thats okay. What I do know is that it is the perfect color combo to go with Mystic Dreams. I wasn't sure what to make with that yarn but I know it wanted to be something sorta hip and funky. Unfortunately I am not the hip and funky type. Plus it was knit a scarf or crochet a shawl. A very tiny shawl at that.

So after talking to my spinning group I decided to make Mystic Dreams into a crocheted handbag. We got to talking about it and figured 132 yards of bulky isnt enough. So I was going to make some black three ply for the bottom and the handle. Instead I have to figure out how to incorporate this blend. Do I try to create a cabled yarn with 3 black and 1 multicolored strand? Do I do a black navajo plied yarn for the bottom? I don't know. So many options!

I do however know that these batts are lovely. On the left is "Technicolor Yawn" and "Overload in Red." On the right is "Overload in Yellow" and "Mixed Berry." Mixed Berry is the one that is going to be spun and paired with Mystic Dreams. I'm having a lot of fun with the batts as always, though sometimes I wish they werent so time intensive. You really can not multi-task and card at the same time. I did list "Rebirth" (below) in my Etsy store as separate batts and will probably list the two "Overload" batts as well. I may even make more to add to the listings later. On a happy note. I did make a sale today. Yay Froggy! I guess that is my prerequisite "one-per-month" sale. I'm super thrilled about it though. It's still a really good feeling.



(P.S. - It looks like we will be moving in the next two months! Woot! Goodbye apartment living, Hello rental house! Keep your fingers crossed cause five years is too long here.)

Fibery Tidbits

I have been working on spinning up some plain wool yarn to dye into more Mix and Mingle colors. I really like how they have come out so far and they seem to have gotten a good response (i.e. views) on Etsy. I start with what I can get for the time being. I finally caved recently and got an order of the Sheep Shed Mill End Grab bags. Monetarily the price can't be beat. However, as is the case when purchasing things like fleece you do more work trying to prep then you do with the more expensive already processed "nice" roving. Case in point; I purchased four pounds of mill ends grab bag i.e. whatever they send me. Roughly a pound of the mill ends are colors including black, brown red and a little blue. Then there is another pound thats mostly batts that have been cut off the machine. Then of course there is the regular mill end roving bits and the mohair mill end roving bits.
Yes, there are a lot of mill end roving bits.


So after just a few hours of spinning I was already through the easy to use roving mill ends. Next would be the easy to use batts. Unfortunately almost all of the batts had cut ends. Fortunately, I had the experience with some of the cut ends from the roving and manufactured a plan. I took all the batts and carded them into ... well, batts. I basically recarded the wool which there by eliminated the hard to deal with blunt cut ends and made the wool soft and bouncy and easy to draft. Yay me!

The other thing that I did was to divvy up the rest of the undyed bits and started dying them. I have green and yellow that I did this past weekend. I will also have purple and hot pink which I am doing today. The plans for these bits are to card them up with all the variations of colors, texture, glitz and anything else I feel like putting in there. I'm really excited about this but wish I didn't have to wait for the other wool to dry tonight. Where is an air-only dryer when you need one!

So it begins

(Still not great with titles but I'm working on it.)

I've dedicated the next few days to listing new items and relisting in my Etsy Store. I am also trying to use what spare time I get to work on a small little e-commerce site separate from Etsy. It's absolutely nothing against Etsy, their great but I want something of a fallback I guess. Somewhere I can go in the event that one day I become so disenchanted that I can't handle it anymore. Or something.
I got out this weekend with the family and took some new pictures. One of my husbands complaints was that I had gotten lazy. I used to get out and take pictures but recently I had become sort of focused on "the best light I can get while indoors." So if I am going to work on it, I am going to have to get serious about it. I'm particularly proud of this picture:



This is my dyed silk. I could never quite get the picture right before. It hit me while I was out there not to treat it like normal wool roving. The braid would just make the silk cling to itself with each pass. Instead, I did a crochet like chain using my hand. It makes it ver pretty and a lot easier to handle with out the loose fibers getting everywhere. If someone wanted to loosen it, they would just need to untuck the end piece and pull. Each loop should fall out one by one.
I will also have a little promotional and re-opening sale sometime between now and April 10th.

Who's afraid of Batts?

Here are a couple of batts that I carded over the weekend. I had lots of fun but ran out of glitz. (Oh Noz!)

On the left is Spring Green. ( I just made that up as I wrote it.) It is pre-dyed fiber I bought from Wild Fibre in Savannah. It's layered with dark green, yellow and a lighter, celery green. It also has bombyx silk and glitz. I used a rhyme and reasoning to make the green outer layers that were blended with silk and glitz. The yellow was an inner layer that was carded with silk and the lighter, celery green was carded with glitz.

The middle batt is a one-off sort of combination of fibers. It came out to over 1.5 ounces on my little Strauch Petite. Normally, I can't get more than an ounce comfortable on there but this was apparently packed dense. The colors are a blend of the dark green in the first batts, Louet's Jade roving and a roving that I unsuccessfully dyed a while back. (It had a greenish tinge with brown on the outside, like it was picking up residual dyes.)

The last batts will be called "Boysenberry." They are a combination of purple roving (wool I assume) that I bought from someone a couple of years back and Coopworth locks that I combed to open up before carding. The Coopworth was purchased at SAFF and was a nice purple and purplish-blue. These also included tons of purple glitz. Sort of mono-toned but not really. I really enjoyed drum carding this weekend but it took a little time to get the rhythm going. I'm hoping to get more carding or some fiber dying done this upcoming weekend.
Oh! Have you heard about Sock Wars? I saw something about it yesterday so Google it. (Or come back tomorrow and I will write about it. (For those like me to lazy to Google anything right now.)

Felting Fun?

Today I opened up my long ago purchased Clover Needlefelting Tool and tried some needle felting on a large scale. This obviously isn't the greatest thing in the world but it is something. I made it as part of the February EtsyFAST Challenge.

The long and short of it is a "scarflet" made of a light pink dyed roving on one side and dark pink on the other side. Smooshed in between was bombyx silk. I cut the edges to try to give it some shape and I added a needlefelted heart. The heart was felted separately, cut and needle felted onto the scarflet. The theme is "Anti-Valentines." It may be slightly obvious that I'm totally a newbie at this. I feel like every other word is "needle," "felting," or "needlefelting." Next time I'm going for a thesaurus.

Yarnings....

I finally finished spinning this silk up. I received it from Yarn Mafia in a craftster.org roving swap last year. Its very pretty and the colors range from pink to purple. Unfortunately I seem to have a hard time with taking pictures of silk. The light just bounces off the silk and into the camera.

Also, this is my next work in progress. Now that I have a ballwinder, I'm going to make this a nice two-ply. Originally this was listed in my store as a roving but I got an itch and needed to spin. If it turns out nicely, I might have to pull the other one too.