Heather Knits

I just finished spinning up some Manx Loghtan ( a rather funny looking sheep as you can see from that link). I bought the fibre from Wingham back in November and started spinning shortly after Christmas.

The fibre smelt quite rural, although that improved greatly after washing the finished yarn and is quite hairy, producing a fairly hairy and slightly lumpy yarn.

I spun a 3ply and got 346m from 121g (the non-round number of grams is because if you go up to Wingham, then rather than buying fibre per 100g for most of the different types of wool you select a plastic bag and stuff in as much as you would like from an enormous coil of combed top, then pay for the weight you have got. I was aiming for slightly over 100g to allow me plenty to play with), in about a DK weight.

It has come out as quite a soft and bouncy yarn, though not as soft as Merino or Bluefaced Leicester. I am enjoying experimenting with different breeds of wool and seeing how they behave. In hindsight I didn’t put quite enough twist into the singles which meant that they drifted apart a few times as I was plying. All a learning experience, I will know for next time.  The finished yarn seems fine though and not too delicate. I am looking forward to knitting with it! It is going to be part of my Handspun Leaves Waistcoat, which I must get a move on with, it has been languishing on top of my speakers recently (yes there is yarn or fibre on every surface in this house!).

I think Dawn is a bad influence. No sooner have I read about her casting on a multitude of portable projects, that I find myself following her lead.

The latest project is Haruni, a little shawl.

I am using 3.5mm needles, and my first attempts at spinning laceweight. As you can see I haven’t got very far yet

The jumper has become a bit difficult to haul around, so for the last couple of weeks I have been stuck with no travel knitting. I had been resisting casting on anything new, for fear that it would slow down the jumper progress. The frustration of not having any knitting to take with me has worn me down and I have cast on for a sock, with strict instructions to myself to only knit on it when it is not possible to be knitting on the jumper.

The pattern is called circle socks, and the yarn is some 3ply handspun bluefaced leicester I dyed before spinning. My yarn is a bit thicker than the yarn the pattern used so I am using 2.75mm needles rather than the 2.25mm recommended. I am not altering the stitch count (yet) though because I would like these to come out larger than the pattern. My foot measures about 10 inches in circumference, but the pattern is written for 7.5 inches.

I have tinkered a bit with the cast on to make sure it is stretchy enough, I cast on 96 sts, then worked a round of purl, a round of (p1, p2tog), then another round of purl, and then went onto round 4 of the pattern.

I did have a bit of a false start with these. My first guess at needle size was 2.5mm, but the fabric was coming out a bit too stiff! There is a fine line between a sturdy sock and something which stands up on its own, and these were on the wrong side of it! The 2.75mm needles seem much better.

It seems very appropriate that I was spinning festive red merino over Christmas. This was the stuff I carded using Lisa’s drum carder. The original fibre was merino top in scarlet and crimson. There was slightly more crimson in the mix than scarlet because it turned out I wasn’t very good at estimating equal quantities.

I spun a 3ply, DK weight, 11 wpi, and have 146g which is 298m. Here is a (rather blury) closeup.

I had some of the uncarded merino left over, and thought it would be interesting to spin the singles in separate colours and then ply them together, and compare how this differed from the fibre that had been carded. So I spun two singles in the scarlet, and one crimson (luckily I had almost precisely twice as much scarlet as crimson), and plied them altogether in a 3ply.

Again DK weight, 11wpi, there is 53g and 116m. Here is a closeup where you can see the different coloured plies.

These are going to be part of my handspun leaves waistcoat. I am looking forward to seeing how the two different yarns knit up. The carded yarn is definitely lumpier (due to my lumpy carding), and wasn’t as nice to spin as the uncarded top. The uncarded yarn looks stripey in the yarn (although because the colours are quite similar it looks less stripey from a distance), but the colour mix is more even than in the carded yarn, and I will be interested to see whether they are a lot more similar once knitted.

Well at least it is a bit thinner than 4ply, and I am intending to knit lace with it It isn’t as thin as some laceweight, but then laceweight is a bit of a vague term anyway.

This started off life as two balls of Schoppel Wolle Fingerwolle, in the Fuschia colour, bought from the High Weald Fibre Factory at Wonderwool Wales (the stuff on the left of the picture).

There was 40m on each ball of combed fibre about the thickness of a finger (hence the name). You can also knit with it as it is on 8 – 9 mm knitting needles or spin it (or you could probably felt it too). The colour changes are very gradual, although it turned out that the two balls I picked weren’t at exactly the same place in the sequence, so when I plied my two singles together I have got quite a few bits where one ply is orange and the other purple.

The effect of the colours is muted quite a bit by the plying (I did a 2ply). I am looking forward to knitting this up and seeing how the colours go. I think you will still get the colour progression effect, just not as striking as it was before spinning.

I have 450m and 100g, and this is the thinnest I have managed to spin so far. I am very proud even though it is still a bit wobbly, but I am improving. I think I am going to knit some kind of a lacey shawl but haven’t decided on a pattern yet, I shall continue to keep my eye out.

A couple of weeks ago Lisa very kindly brought her new-to-her drum carder along to spinning group and let me have a play with it.

I think my carding technique needs improvement but it was a lot of fun! I had two shades of red merino fibre which I blended together. Both from Fibrecrafts, the darker colour is called Crimson, and the brighter one Scarlet.

Here is a very bad picture of the two different colours, the darker on the left, the brighter on the right.

And here is one of the carded batts. I did just one pass, and put the colours in in layers so you can’t see the blended colours particularly well here.

There are a few knobbly bits where my feeding onto the carder wasn’t particularly good, and they have made the spinning a little bit lumpy (along with my general inexperience). I have started spinning the singles, and have done about half now. I am hoping to do a bit more of this over Christmas.

Hopefully you can sort of see the two colours. It is eventually going to be a 3ply, hopefully about DK weight, and become part of my handspun leaves waistcoat. I must assess the yarn I have spun so far for that, and see how I am doing.

Back on the 27th of September (I am catching up, I am just a bit slow!) I helped out on the West Surrey Guild of Spinners, Weavers, and Dyers stand at the Loseley Country Show.

Here we all are setting the stand up.

And here spinning away!

We had about 6 or 7 spinners, a couple of weavers, and Mary demonstrating God’s Eye weaving and woven bracelets on a table at the front which was a big hit with the kids.

It was a fun day out, we had a great site for the stand, just to the side of the main arena and for most of the day we were packed with people coming to see what we were doing. It was only really quiet for the first and last 1/2 hours of the day. The only disadvantage with it being so busy was that I didn’t get much of a chance to see what else was at the show, although I did have time to have a quick dash around near the end, and you can’t come to Loseley without getting an ice-cream

I was spinning some dark brown alpaca, and then some lovely silk hankies which Lisa gave me.

I bought the alpaca fibre from Fibrecrafts,  and it was very nice to spin once I got the hang of it. A bit different to the shetland I had been spinning before.

I am very pleased with the way it has come out. It is lovely and soft and squishy. It is a 2ply, roughly DK weight, and I have 102g and 166.5m. It is going to be part of the handspun leaves waistcoat.

The silk was dyed in beautiful shades of pale purple, but I’m afraid I don’t have a photo of the hankies because I was too impatient and just dived in. It was really interesting to spin silk, it’s very strong and very fine. Since the hankies contain the whole cocoon there are all different lengths of fibre in there, so the yarn does tend to come out with some lumpy bits. I am keen to have a go at spinning silk top to see how that compares.

Here are my efforts (in several skeins because I snapped it a couple of times while plying)

This is barmily thin, rather like lumpy sewing thread I haven’t worked out what I am going to make with it yet, I have 55m of 2ply, something interesting and lacy I think.

I have finally finished spinning the black Shetland fibre I bought as something to practice with while I got used to Susie. This was very nice to spin, very easy even for a beginner. The yarn is a 3ply and is a thinnish DK weight, it is a bit wobbly but I am getting better! It is going to be part of my handspun leaves waistcoat.

I thoroughly tested the capacity of my bobbins while plying, and was very impressed to get 190g on one bobbin! This is about twice the amount I could get on the Ashford.

Altogether I have 303g and 741m.

I am going to go and wind it into balls now so it will be ready to knit with.

One of my contributions to the Show and Tell at this years patchwork knitting workshop was the start of this waistcoat.

The grand plan is to make something using some of my first few bits of spinning. To give it a moderately coherent look I am going to stick to natural shades of brown and black, and some reds which I have dyed.

The modules are reversible ribbed leaf shapes which I first saw at a workshop with Horst Schulz three or four years ago. I don’t think it is in any of his books, and the notes I have taken are a bit on the sketchy side! The safety pin stuck in the brown alpaca leaf is to remind me which is the right side. Although the pattern is reversible, I wanted to be consistent with always starting a new leaf on the same side, and it was getting a bit time consuming to have to work it out each time. The waistcoat has actually looked the same since the workshop while I spin a bit more yarn to add to it. I thought I had loads of yarn when I started, but once I collected it together it wasn’t quite as much, or as much variety as I had first thought! I have just finished some black shetland and some dark brown alpaca which will go into it too. I am trying to make it a random collection of colours, not in any particular pattern, but I’m not terribly good at random.

Luckily this pattern is quite forgiving of my rather inconsistent handspun, some of them are quite a bit thicker than others, and the brown alpaca with the safety pin is very dense! I am going to try and spread out my earlier yarns among my later ones so the finished article isn’t too lopsided.

I realised that I hadn’t shown you my first attempt at spinning sock yarn yet. I actually spun this before the red BFL. This is superwash bluefaced leicester again, dyed in the fibre, in a progression of colours, rather than a random mixture. I am hoping that as the yarn is knitted the colours will gradually shade from green through turquoise to purple. We shall see how successful this is!

There is 75g in each skein, and about 340m altogether. It measures about 13 wpi and so is somewhere between a 4ply weight and a DK weight.

I spun the lower skein first, and I think I got a bit over-keen with the plying of the second as it is plyed quite a lot tighter than the first. I’m not sure yet how much this will affect the finished socks. They may end up coming out slightly different sizes. I will just have to remember to wear the bigger sock on my bigger foot