which_chick (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
which_chick) wrote2007-11-23 09:19 am
which_chick) wrote2007-11-23 09:19 am
(no subject)
Thanksgiving went well -- I made dinner rolls, which went off without a hitch. Heather did the pies, which were excellent. There was stuffing and gravy and baked corn (very good) and baked apples and cranberry orange and sweet potatoes and (obviously) turkey. There was good fellowship and good cheer. Before and after dinner, I worked on the HoHI, which now have four rows of pattern work remaining.
Should you ever end up with a raw sheep fleece and the desire to make it into something yarn-ish (maybe it's after the apocalypse and our industrial society has magically collapsed and all of its wealth of manufactured goods and machine-age artifacts disappeared overnight), here's how you might proceed. Some of this clue I got the hard way and some of it I got from reading about other people learning the hard way. (One of the great delights of the internet is that you can endlessly discover that you are not the only idiot on the planet who goes out and tries new stuff. The path that I tread, it is not treaden just by me.)
If your fleece has a definite lock structure, pull it gently apart into locks. (If your fleece does not have a lock structure, get another fleece.) The easiest way to do this is by grabbing the butt (cut) end of the lock while holding on to the rest of the fleece with your other hand. Pull off the lock and lay it aside. Repeat until you have enough locks to make one layer of them, laid flat, in your lingerie bag. You do not *have* to pay attention to the lock structure, but it makes things easier later on, especially if you're hand-carding, which, if it's after the apocalypse, you will be.
WASH CYCLE: Fill a container (sink, dishpan, five gallon bucket) with very hot water. I run hot water out of my tap until the sink is 3/4 full and then add a medium-sized saucepan of boiling water. This makes water just a bit too hot for me to put my hands in. Add enough blue liquid dish soap to make it slippery. (I use Dawn. Dawn takes grease out of your way damn it all, and we're trying to remove grease from sheep fur, here. If it were after the apocalypse, I'd have to learn to make soap from fat and lye. Watch this space for developments.) Put the lingerie bag of fleece into the hot water. DO NOT STIR, AGITATE, OR MESS WITH. You can use a spoon or something to push the fleece down into the water. Once, maybe twice, and then you're done. Seriously, that's enough. Now, wait forty minutes without playing with it. Go watch some TV or run a load of laundry or something. After forty minutes, come back, fish the lingerie bags out, and drain the water.
RINSE CYCLE: Run tap water hot into container. (I don't use the boiling hot for rinsing, just for washing. You could if you wanted, I suppose, but this is what I do.) Put bag into hot water. NO STIRRING. Submerge once. Wait ten minutes or so. Drain.
Repeat WASH CYCLE and RINSE CYCLE until the water is clean at the end of a WASH CYCLE. Hang lingerie bags up to dry somewhere that they can drip. Now, wait between two and five days, depending on the relative humidity of your house. Each day that your fleece is drying, try to lift/fluff it at least once per day.
When the fleece is dry, you can proceed to the next step, which is getting the fibers all lined up straight and clean from vm (vegetable matter -- bits of hay and chaff and so forth) and fluffy. You can do this with a drum carder or with hand cards or with combs (pointy!) or with a flick carder or with a dog brush from Wal-Mart, the kind with the skinny, bent metal teeth. If you use either a flick carder or a dog brush, you will need a piece of leather to protect your leg. As I happen to have some lovely buckskin I made myself some years ago, and as I'm cheap as can be, I'm using the dog brush from Wal-Mart ($6.74) instead of the flick carder ($14.95) or the hand cards ($55.00 a pair) or a drum carder ($300.00 and up).
Flick carding is a slightly messy (depends on your fleece, of course) process that may result in chaff and bits on your floor. I heat with wood, so most of the winter, the floor is already covered with wood bits. The chaff and hay bits keep the wood bits company. I do not have a problem with this, but ymmv. First, cover your thigh (I'm right handed, so left hand holds the lock, right hand holds the brush, and right leg wears the leather) with leather. Grasp the butt end (where it was cut off the sheep -- you can usually see the pointy curls at one end of the lock and the wide, blunt end at the other end of the lock. Your left hand should be holding the wide, blunt end.) of a couple (usually two or three but you can do just one if you want) of locks of fleece, about halfway up. Hold the pointy curls across your leg, toward your right hand. I weave the butt ends around my fingers because that's less strain on my wrist than holding it with my thumb as the main pressure source. (I spent fifteen hundred dollars fixing the wrist last spring and I don't want it fucked up again.)
Now, hit (it's more of a "hit" action than a "brush" action) the tippy end of the lock with your flick carder. Repeat until it's all fluffy. Swap ends and do the butt end. On the fleece I'm using, there are sometimes bits of fuzzy fluff that are not really what I want in the finished product. That stuff gets caught up in the brush and I remove it. Clean out the brush when it gets icky. (A broken bamboo dpn, size 1, works great to slide under the mat of stuff on the brush and pick it up off the brush surface.) I've tried to re-card the stuff that the brush picks up because it looks like I'm "wasting" lots of wool. Preliminary loss-abatement experiments showed that re-carding the stuff that the brush picks up only saves about 10% of what I was going to toss, so I don't bother anymore. (I am contemplating saving some of the "toss" quality wool for stuffing a cat bed to be constructed at some indefinite future time.) This carding process is what removes the vm from your fleece -- it won't generally wash out -- and it's what makes your fiber almost ready-to-spin. Skimping here, well, you'll really see it when you go to spin the stuff.
I know that I'm done carding when the handful of locks is all fluffy and straight and has no vm in it anymore. (You can see vm better if you hold the handful of mostly-carded wool up to the light.) At that point, I put it over in my bag of "done" wool, being careful to keep the butt end aligned with all the other butt ends. (On my fleece, there's a slight color difference between the creamy white of the tip ends and the sparkley white of the butt ends.) This "done" wool would be called "top" if I were using combs. I am not using combs but what I make looks a lot like pictures and descriptions of "top" and I'm going to go ahead and call it "top" because if I called it seme, it'd just confuse folks.
When I have a big enough pile of top, or when I'm tired of carding (which is amazingly soothing and way more interesting than I would have thought possible), I can proceed to making the top into a rope nest that is ready for spinning. I don't know how other people do things, but I can't just grab a fistful of top and make with the spinning. I grab a fistful (the same lock structure that I combed out -- it stays in lumps pretty well that way) of top and (starting from the tip end) string it out into a long, fluffy string of ready-to-spin stuff. I do this by pulling a small amount of fiber out of the bunch. It drags along some other fibers because wool sticks to itself really well. I repeat-grab about every three inches (This will vary depending on the staple length of the wool you are working with and how "grabby" it is. Grabby is probably related to crimp.) and continue the process until I have one long, thin, fluffy rope instead of a handful of top. Making the long, thin, fluffy rope all even and nice is VERY important and will make your spinning effortless. Also, at this stage, you can see any issues with your wool prep. If you have issues, fix 'em now. Once I have the wool all pulled out, I wind it up into a nest by wrapping it loosely around my hand.
Now, we're ready to spin. Take the outside end of the nest. Spin it gently with your fingers to make it hold together enough to poke through the leader on your spindle. Loop it back on itself and then give the spindle a turn. I roll it off of my left thigh with my left hand while holding the fluffy rope thing with my right hand. Once I'm good and underway, I wrap the fluffy rope around my right wrist and hand so that I can be going forward without worry. Pictures you may have see with people who have a fluffy rope wrapped artistically around their back drafting hand (where you stretch out the fiber for spinning, that's called drafting), they are NOT doing that to be all artistic. They are doing that because if you let your fluffy rope of fiber-n-air hang straight the fuck down, it gets caught in the spindle and makes one hell of a mess. The looks-artistic wrapping thing is purely practical. Ask me how I know.
Spin. Pull your fluffy rope as thin as you want (probably thinner than it currently is) and let the twist eat it up. Feed the twist your drafted fibers. Replenish the twist by spinning the spindle again when it slows down. When the spindle hits the floor because you have made enough yarn for that to happen, stop it spinning and unhook your yarn from the hook. Wind the yarn you made around the base of the spindle, leaving enough leader (I like about 8" for this) to bank your twist while you get underway again. When you're out of fluffy rope (or it breaks apart), you should stop with about two inches of fluff left. Get the next piece of fluffy rope and overlay the ends of the two pieces a bit (more than an inch, less than two, for the fiber I am using) and kind of hold them together when you spin. It does not take very much for the new piece to join up and I found that I was worrying way more than was necessary about this.
How do you know how much twist to add? I add twist until the untensioned yarn single curls around itself. I'm going to ply the singles into a 3-ply for the project I have in mind and I don't want it to be all untwisted when I get there. Also I want a tight, kind of shiny yarn without a lot of fuzz, so I'm kind of overdoing the twist thing. This is an experience thing, I expect. Preliminary efforts on the plying front revealed that I was totally not putting enough twist in, so now I'm adding more than I think I need. (I have no idea how other people do it.)
Okay, so now you have a spindle full of yarn. What next? I roll the single off of the spindle onto a dowel rod bobbin. I do this by hand, though there are other ways to do it, and I'm certain that at least one of those ways is going to involve a power screwdriver for rotary motion. (Watch this space.) Once you have enough singles to ply the yarn you have in mind (You need at least two yarns to ply, normally. I don't like the concept of Najavo plying so that isn't discussed here.), you can make a lazy kate (holds the bobbins while you reel off the singles for plying) and thread all the plys together and spin them the OPPOSITE WAY FROM HOW YOU SPUN THE SINGLES (so that there is untwisting going on, hence the need, above, for overdoing it a bit) to make a however-many-ply yarn.
Done yet? No. Not done yet. Once you've got the yarn plied up the way you want, you unwind it from the spindle and make a skein. The thing you use to make a skein is called a niddy-noddy. (Like any specialized field, spinning is chock-full of words you will never see anywhere else. Half, or more, of getting up to speed is knowing the vocabulary.) I don't have one yet but I'm told that I can make them out of PVC. Since I'm pretty good with putting together PVC and it's lightweight and cheap and whatnot, that's the direction I am going for a niddy-noddy. The skein is just a big loop of yarn, wound round and round. It's tied in several places and then put in hot water and cold and thwacked to set the twist in the yarn. I haven't had any yarn good enough to bother doing this with, yet. I'm working on uniformity in my singles at the moment.
Then, once the yarn dries from all that, it's ready to use.
Generally, for an easy-to-spin wool, it should take the average human being (that'd be me) about two weeks to get from "can't do a damn thing with this" to "hey, look, almost-usable yarn!" I am pretty happy with my yarn singles at this point (one week in) and by the end of another week of practice, I should be able to make yarn I want to knit with. I am not sure why people take classes to learn to spin -- maybe they don't like the learn-by-doing thing. Maybe they're starting with expensive roving that they don't want to mess up any of. (That's why I bought a whole sheep -- so that there would be enough for me to fuck up with.) My problem is that if I take a class, then I will spend good money and look stupid in front of other people and then (this is the deal killer for me) go home and do what I want anyway, particularly if I don't have full faith and credit in the instructor. Most of the time, I'm happy enough to skip the spend money and look stupid in front of people part because it isn't (for me) any faster or easier than going it alone. So it is with this.
Should you ever end up with a raw sheep fleece and the desire to make it into something yarn-ish (maybe it's after the apocalypse and our industrial society has magically collapsed and all of its wealth of manufactured goods and machine-age artifacts disappeared overnight), here's how you might proceed. Some of this clue I got the hard way and some of it I got from reading about other people learning the hard way. (One of the great delights of the internet is that you can endlessly discover that you are not the only idiot on the planet who goes out and tries new stuff. The path that I tread, it is not treaden just by me.)
If your fleece has a definite lock structure, pull it gently apart into locks. (If your fleece does not have a lock structure, get another fleece.) The easiest way to do this is by grabbing the butt (cut) end of the lock while holding on to the rest of the fleece with your other hand. Pull off the lock and lay it aside. Repeat until you have enough locks to make one layer of them, laid flat, in your lingerie bag. You do not *have* to pay attention to the lock structure, but it makes things easier later on, especially if you're hand-carding, which, if it's after the apocalypse, you will be.
WASH CYCLE: Fill a container (sink, dishpan, five gallon bucket) with very hot water. I run hot water out of my tap until the sink is 3/4 full and then add a medium-sized saucepan of boiling water. This makes water just a bit too hot for me to put my hands in. Add enough blue liquid dish soap to make it slippery. (I use Dawn. Dawn takes grease out of your way damn it all, and we're trying to remove grease from sheep fur, here. If it were after the apocalypse, I'd have to learn to make soap from fat and lye. Watch this space for developments.) Put the lingerie bag of fleece into the hot water. DO NOT STIR, AGITATE, OR MESS WITH. You can use a spoon or something to push the fleece down into the water. Once, maybe twice, and then you're done. Seriously, that's enough. Now, wait forty minutes without playing with it. Go watch some TV or run a load of laundry or something. After forty minutes, come back, fish the lingerie bags out, and drain the water.
RINSE CYCLE: Run tap water hot into container. (I don't use the boiling hot for rinsing, just for washing. You could if you wanted, I suppose, but this is what I do.) Put bag into hot water. NO STIRRING. Submerge once. Wait ten minutes or so. Drain.
Repeat WASH CYCLE and RINSE CYCLE until the water is clean at the end of a WASH CYCLE. Hang lingerie bags up to dry somewhere that they can drip. Now, wait between two and five days, depending on the relative humidity of your house. Each day that your fleece is drying, try to lift/fluff it at least once per day.
When the fleece is dry, you can proceed to the next step, which is getting the fibers all lined up straight and clean from vm (vegetable matter -- bits of hay and chaff and so forth) and fluffy. You can do this with a drum carder or with hand cards or with combs (pointy!) or with a flick carder or with a dog brush from Wal-Mart, the kind with the skinny, bent metal teeth. If you use either a flick carder or a dog brush, you will need a piece of leather to protect your leg. As I happen to have some lovely buckskin I made myself some years ago, and as I'm cheap as can be, I'm using the dog brush from Wal-Mart ($6.74) instead of the flick carder ($14.95) or the hand cards ($55.00 a pair) or a drum carder ($300.00 and up).
Flick carding is a slightly messy (depends on your fleece, of course) process that may result in chaff and bits on your floor. I heat with wood, so most of the winter, the floor is already covered with wood bits. The chaff and hay bits keep the wood bits company. I do not have a problem with this, but ymmv. First, cover your thigh (I'm right handed, so left hand holds the lock, right hand holds the brush, and right leg wears the leather) with leather. Grasp the butt end (where it was cut off the sheep -- you can usually see the pointy curls at one end of the lock and the wide, blunt end at the other end of the lock. Your left hand should be holding the wide, blunt end.) of a couple (usually two or three but you can do just one if you want) of locks of fleece, about halfway up. Hold the pointy curls across your leg, toward your right hand. I weave the butt ends around my fingers because that's less strain on my wrist than holding it with my thumb as the main pressure source. (I spent fifteen hundred dollars fixing the wrist last spring and I don't want it fucked up again.)
Now, hit (it's more of a "hit" action than a "brush" action) the tippy end of the lock with your flick carder. Repeat until it's all fluffy. Swap ends and do the butt end. On the fleece I'm using, there are sometimes bits of fuzzy fluff that are not really what I want in the finished product. That stuff gets caught up in the brush and I remove it. Clean out the brush when it gets icky. (A broken bamboo dpn, size 1, works great to slide under the mat of stuff on the brush and pick it up off the brush surface.) I've tried to re-card the stuff that the brush picks up because it looks like I'm "wasting" lots of wool. Preliminary loss-abatement experiments showed that re-carding the stuff that the brush picks up only saves about 10% of what I was going to toss, so I don't bother anymore. (I am contemplating saving some of the "toss" quality wool for stuffing a cat bed to be constructed at some indefinite future time.) This carding process is what removes the vm from your fleece -- it won't generally wash out -- and it's what makes your fiber almost ready-to-spin. Skimping here, well, you'll really see it when you go to spin the stuff.
I know that I'm done carding when the handful of locks is all fluffy and straight and has no vm in it anymore. (You can see vm better if you hold the handful of mostly-carded wool up to the light.) At that point, I put it over in my bag of "done" wool, being careful to keep the butt end aligned with all the other butt ends. (On my fleece, there's a slight color difference between the creamy white of the tip ends and the sparkley white of the butt ends.) This "done" wool would be called "top" if I were using combs. I am not using combs but what I make looks a lot like pictures and descriptions of "top" and I'm going to go ahead and call it "top" because if I called it seme, it'd just confuse folks.
When I have a big enough pile of top, or when I'm tired of carding (which is amazingly soothing and way more interesting than I would have thought possible), I can proceed to making the top into a rope nest that is ready for spinning. I don't know how other people do things, but I can't just grab a fistful of top and make with the spinning. I grab a fistful (the same lock structure that I combed out -- it stays in lumps pretty well that way) of top and (starting from the tip end) string it out into a long, fluffy string of ready-to-spin stuff. I do this by pulling a small amount of fiber out of the bunch. It drags along some other fibers because wool sticks to itself really well. I repeat-grab about every three inches (This will vary depending on the staple length of the wool you are working with and how "grabby" it is. Grabby is probably related to crimp.) and continue the process until I have one long, thin, fluffy rope instead of a handful of top. Making the long, thin, fluffy rope all even and nice is VERY important and will make your spinning effortless. Also, at this stage, you can see any issues with your wool prep. If you have issues, fix 'em now. Once I have the wool all pulled out, I wind it up into a nest by wrapping it loosely around my hand.
Now, we're ready to spin. Take the outside end of the nest. Spin it gently with your fingers to make it hold together enough to poke through the leader on your spindle. Loop it back on itself and then give the spindle a turn. I roll it off of my left thigh with my left hand while holding the fluffy rope thing with my right hand. Once I'm good and underway, I wrap the fluffy rope around my right wrist and hand so that I can be going forward without worry. Pictures you may have see with people who have a fluffy rope wrapped artistically around their back drafting hand (where you stretch out the fiber for spinning, that's called drafting), they are NOT doing that to be all artistic. They are doing that because if you let your fluffy rope of fiber-n-air hang straight the fuck down, it gets caught in the spindle and makes one hell of a mess. The looks-artistic wrapping thing is purely practical. Ask me how I know.
Spin. Pull your fluffy rope as thin as you want (probably thinner than it currently is) and let the twist eat it up. Feed the twist your drafted fibers. Replenish the twist by spinning the spindle again when it slows down. When the spindle hits the floor because you have made enough yarn for that to happen, stop it spinning and unhook your yarn from the hook. Wind the yarn you made around the base of the spindle, leaving enough leader (I like about 8" for this) to bank your twist while you get underway again. When you're out of fluffy rope (or it breaks apart), you should stop with about two inches of fluff left. Get the next piece of fluffy rope and overlay the ends of the two pieces a bit (more than an inch, less than two, for the fiber I am using) and kind of hold them together when you spin. It does not take very much for the new piece to join up and I found that I was worrying way more than was necessary about this.
How do you know how much twist to add? I add twist until the untensioned yarn single curls around itself. I'm going to ply the singles into a 3-ply for the project I have in mind and I don't want it to be all untwisted when I get there. Also I want a tight, kind of shiny yarn without a lot of fuzz, so I'm kind of overdoing the twist thing. This is an experience thing, I expect. Preliminary efforts on the plying front revealed that I was totally not putting enough twist in, so now I'm adding more than I think I need. (I have no idea how other people do it.)
Okay, so now you have a spindle full of yarn. What next? I roll the single off of the spindle onto a dowel rod bobbin. I do this by hand, though there are other ways to do it, and I'm certain that at least one of those ways is going to involve a power screwdriver for rotary motion. (Watch this space.) Once you have enough singles to ply the yarn you have in mind (You need at least two yarns to ply, normally. I don't like the concept of Najavo plying so that isn't discussed here.), you can make a lazy kate (holds the bobbins while you reel off the singles for plying) and thread all the plys together and spin them the OPPOSITE WAY FROM HOW YOU SPUN THE SINGLES (so that there is untwisting going on, hence the need, above, for overdoing it a bit) to make a however-many-ply yarn.
Done yet? No. Not done yet. Once you've got the yarn plied up the way you want, you unwind it from the spindle and make a skein. The thing you use to make a skein is called a niddy-noddy. (Like any specialized field, spinning is chock-full of words you will never see anywhere else. Half, or more, of getting up to speed is knowing the vocabulary.) I don't have one yet but I'm told that I can make them out of PVC. Since I'm pretty good with putting together PVC and it's lightweight and cheap and whatnot, that's the direction I am going for a niddy-noddy. The skein is just a big loop of yarn, wound round and round. It's tied in several places and then put in hot water and cold and thwacked to set the twist in the yarn. I haven't had any yarn good enough to bother doing this with, yet. I'm working on uniformity in my singles at the moment.
Then, once the yarn dries from all that, it's ready to use.
Generally, for an easy-to-spin wool, it should take the average human being (that'd be me) about two weeks to get from "can't do a damn thing with this" to "hey, look, almost-usable yarn!" I am pretty happy with my yarn singles at this point (one week in) and by the end of another week of practice, I should be able to make yarn I want to knit with. I am not sure why people take classes to learn to spin -- maybe they don't like the learn-by-doing thing. Maybe they're starting with expensive roving that they don't want to mess up any of. (That's why I bought a whole sheep -- so that there would be enough for me to fuck up with.) My problem is that if I take a class, then I will spend good money and look stupid in front of other people and then (this is the deal killer for me) go home and do what I want anyway, particularly if I don't have full faith and credit in the instructor. Most of the time, I'm happy enough to skip the spend money and look stupid in front of people part because it isn't (for me) any faster or easier than going it alone. So it is with this.