Part of the purchase was the exchange of these wonderful, soft and gorgeous fibers! I got a little sample of 5 different alpaca fleeces that Katy so lovingly raises. Did I mention they were soft. I love soft fibers and these are soft... it makes me feel like the merino top I purchase is second rate. I totally want to roll around in these fibers.
This year I decided that I should participate in the Tour de Fleece on Ravelry. It's this fun challenge that takes place each year during the Tour De France. I figured that if I can do the Everyday Yarn Challenge back in April then this should be a breeze. There are even built in break days. Originally I was going to join the rookies team but a fellow fiberista named Rawfish has a Ravelry group that got together and became team "Tour de Fish." Its a nautical theme galore. See I even have a temporary avatar made courtesy of Laila of Rawfish. =D
uploaded photos specifically to put in groups. I always limited myself a little when I knew there was only 200 photos available to view. One of the new fiber photos I put up is on the right.
sure what brand it is, reminds me of Lornas Lace fiber and it spun extremely soft. The other yarn is merino/silk that I carded when I had the Strauch Petite. It was pulled (by hand) into roving and I could never get it to spin quite right. I picked up a portion of it that was pulled into pencil thin roving and when that was successful I found the remaining roving and spun it up. I guess some things just take time. Speaking of which, I have been working on my "long term project" and I honestly think I lost my determination for it yesterday. I actually lost my yarn multiple times in a five minute setting and finally just had to stop. I'll probably try to find something nice and easy to spin tonight. Maybe coils, a few people have been doing coils and its been a while. Guess we will just have to see.
Saturday night we had a guest over in the form of my 11 yr old nephew. This is a good and a bad thing. Good because it keeps the 9 yr old son busy, bad because I am convinced that boys can't play together without getting on each others nerves. So, my kid went to bed about 10:30 which is late for him but not so early that he misses time with his cousin. The 11 yr old went to bed an hour later. So from about 9:30 till 12:30 I did some dying.
I also got some carding done. I don't have a really good picture since I wasn't planning to take any. However, my husband was playing around with the camera and got several fiber pics (after he took my spinning pictures.) So in case you can see through the clear plastic enough, thats my new batt set. Its pink and black with sari silk and bamboo and glitz and some regular silk as well. That's pretty hard to see but I will be sure to upload more pictures in the future.
Granted this little break has stretched about 3-4 days but after all that moving I really was starting to tense up. So, as a little stress relaxer and treat (once I made it past the frustrating part) I finished spinning the roving I purchased from Julie Spins. Now I am attempting to free hand knit my first hat on a pair of circular needles. That's right, no pattern. I am just armed with my basic skills of knit and purl. I laugh in the face of common sense! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Finally, here is my new craft area. Craft area and other stuff at the moment as we are still surrounded by packed boxes. Besides this is more like a storage area for the crafts I have. I just have to deconstruct, pick something out of a storage bin and take it in to another room to spin or knit or crochet. Yep, its much much (much) smaller than the space I was occupying at the apartment but its probably for the best at the moment anyway. Still, having a yard is a fringe benefit of renting this house that I'm totally going to take advantage of. (i.e. - Dyeing and Drying!)
*SIGH* Okay, but its not the only thing I did this week. I spun the roving that I purchased at Knitch from Gale's Art. (She has an etsy store.) I wanted to keep the colors true so I split the roving into four long pieces and spun them with the expectation to do a two ply. That way the long repeats she created in the roving would ply against itself and make a somewhat self striping yarn with defined blocks of color. When I finished I pretty much changed my mind and decided to Navajo Ply. (See a theme here ;P) I am seriously no good at it. Every time I do a Navajo ply I end up with a very dense yarn. I believe the culprit is that I am treadling too fast on the ply. I think. I'm welcoming any opinions or advice to the contrary. Oh and when I set the twist on this fiber... Just a small light green tint in the water. Yea for well prepared fibers from small business owners!
And a quick note in unrelated (i.e. real life) news. We are finally getting some of our stuff moved into the new place. And yet again I realize two important things.... I hate packing and I hate moving. It's even worse at the moment because my husband is injured and can't lift more than 5 pounds and only on one hand. Of course this would be the optimal weekend to have these issues since the father in-law could only help us move all our big stuff like dressers, bookshelves etc on his trailer THIS weekend. That's just our kind of luck though. Bah! I can't wait til this is over.
Who doesn't enjoy a little (relatively) free fiber? I know I do. I recently received a couple of new fiber items. First, I participated in a Craftster fiber of the month swap. I received two beautiful red, blue and sparkly batts from pmpknpunk aka UniquelyYoursDe sign on Etsy. I haven't spun these up yet but I am hoping to soon. The workers are almost finished with the house so my next few weeks will probably be spent packing and moving.
I actually received about 6 gallon sized bags with different llama fibers or what I though was different fibers. Some of it is light brown and white, others have a nice reddish brown colors and some even have a dark brown color.
On the left is the original batt made of wool fiber dyed in pink and grey, loaded with glitz. On the right is the new batt with fuchsia dyed wool, mohair, and alpaca, undyed carded bamboo, more glitz, sari silk along with the original dyed fibers and glitz. I had two of these batts but by the time I added all the additional goodies I ended up with four. So far I have carded 2 red batts, 2 yellow batts and a multicolor batt in addition to this with plenty more wool to go. I'll probably work on getting 2-4 carded a night and start listing some mid-week. Once I start listing some on Etsy I think I will get back to spinning up the plain handspun for Mix and Mingle yarns. All I've got to do is get a little schedule working. Some days its just very difficult with work, kid, husband and everything else. (On a bit of a positive note, we might be in a position to move from this crappy apartment. I mean basically the best chance we have is this one so keep your fingers crossed! Hopefully we will know a little more by the end of the week.)
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, I carded these last night. A total of 11 batts in all. My carder is a Strauch Petite so its not really meant to card real bulky items. It will pull on the teeth and bend and break them. I just carefully turned the handle and when the fibers started to collect on the licker-in drum I took the bat off. One run through... thats it. If I wanted a nicely blended fiber then it would be put through several times. Fortunately there is no real need for that. The fiber puffs are made for good texture and tons of bulky.
Country that a friend in my spinning group loaned me. I asked if she would be interested in selling it so if all things work out it may be mine permanently. I also have my eye on purchasing a small floor loom. The price is right, the size not so much for living in an apartment. I feel bad though. I am totally ready to expense money that I don't need to. More than likely we can get something worked out on the wheel but I have my doubts on the loom. I've told my husband I still want to get the Sonata and a loom and its not just an "I want I want gimme gimme gimme" sort of thing. I really enjoy these things and there is always something new to learn about fiber arts. That's really what keeps me going. I love to learn and I like watching things change and experiencing how it changes. Even if you do the same project ten times, when you use different fiber, yarn, needle size etc... the project comes out a little different. I just really enjoy the why's and how's of things. That's probably the best way to put it. I'll leave it at that.
The only other detail I received (or really asked for) was whether the wool was skirted. All told this is supposed to be skirted for tags and belly fiber but not second cuts. Haven't done a super close inspection but I don't think the second cuts will be a problem.
between good surprise and "Oh my is that mine" surprise. We both commented that it didn't smell like the last time I purchased a raw fleece. Maybe its a difference in breed. I do recall the first one was supposedly smellier because it was a ram fleece.
could guess the spin-able portion versus the felt-able portion versus the "better blend with this" portion. What I need now is a good tutorial on how to appropriately pick a fleece apart and what to do with it.
available (should they continue in their new location.) Plus, I saw that they do mohair fleeces and even though I said I wouldn't do raw locks again, this type of quality is tempting. I am not expecting to have to pick out lots of seeds or hay or grass. I pulled some larger pieces out and a little dried corn but hey, a sheep's gotta eat! Expect more fleece-y details in the future. This is definitely a project and one I think is worth of following. Now.... send me some links on deconstructing a fleece! I'm going to need it!
We had been to Knitch before but it was probably over a year ago. That first trip was a bit lackluster for a spinning nut. But since then I received an email that stated they had opened the upper section of the store. While I'm not a fan of the narrow winding stairways, I decided to go back for the "expanded" fiber section. I was so pleasantly surprised when I got to the second floor. They had a nicely finished area with yarns on one side and plenty of fiber on the other. The great part was before I could get my bearings about me, MrFroggy had already pointed out the selection of glitz in the wall bins. Glitz, I wanted glitz! So we had to set a budget. Realistically there is no good budget to have when your in fiberlust but I managed to skirt under it. All told, I got 7 ozs black merino, a bag of fiber puffs from Pagewood Farm, and 6 - 1/2 ozs of glitz in red, pink, gold, cooper, green iridescent and blue iridescent. I feel all the richer for having made the purchases.
While it could be a number of things. I believe part of it is the equipment. My wheel is a Babe Double Treadle Production. Since purchasing it I have had a chance to spend on several different wheels via my spinning group. Now, I am less in love with it then I should be. My dream wheel is the Kromski Sonata and my hopes are that the stimulus money is good to me. Probably won't be from the reports but every little bit counts. In the mean time, I am making the best of every situation. 
