So what's the deal with this handspinning thing? Part 1: Wool

I recently had a conversation with my father about my new Etsy shop, AliCat Fiberarts, where I've started selling my handspun yarn and hand dyed wool for spinning.  He was wondering about the market for such products.  He wasn't being critical - just curious.  It was one of those conversations where I need to explain something to an "outsider" - in this case not only a non-spinner, but a non-fiber person!  I'm going to attempt it again here, drawing some parallels to food and gardening, as those topics have become more mainstream.

Welsh Hill Speckled Face Sheep:  Photo by Pete Birkinshaw

Once upon a time, when most people grew most of their own food, it mattered what type of tomato you were growing or what breed of chicken you raised.  It wasn't so much a matter of Good or Bad, more of Good for this purpose and Bad for that one.  With the advent of Industrial Agriculture (among other things) that idea had largely disappeared.  Now, with the current trend toward Farmer's Markets, home gardens, and heirloom varietals, these topics are in the news, so that many non-foodies know something about them, even if it's not a personal interest.

Karakul Sheep:  Photo by Patricia Longoria, zencrafting.blogspot.com.

What does this have to do with spinning?  The same idea that The Variety Matters also holds true for sheep and other fiber-bearing animals.  Just as there are hundreds of varieties of tomato, there are hundreds of breeds of sheep (and yes -to the already-spinners out there - I know there's a lot of stuff to spin besides wool, but I'm leaving that for another post!).  Unfortunately, the average yarn-user's knowledge and understanding of sheep breeds has followed the same path as the supermarket produce shopper.  Aside from the "brand recognition" of Merino and Shetland (both breeds of sheep), wool is wool, right? That itchy stuff that you have to wear a heavy turtleneck under?  Well - not really -no!

Lock from Merino fleece:  Photo by Lisa Dusseault

All sheep have wool, but different breeds have slightly different wool.  To vastly oversimplify things,  all sheeps' fleeces fall somewhere on a spectrum of fine to coarse, and short to long.  Fineness is based on the diameter of the fibers.  Length is the length of the fibers (usually one year's growth) - wool parlance for this is "staple length."  The finer a wool is, the softer it is.  Conversely, the coarser a wool is, the rougher and more prickly it feels, and it's this "prickle factor" that gives wool a reputation for being itchy.  Wool, from an industrial perspective, is a byproduct of the lamb industry.  With the exception of Merino and other specialty breeds, ranchers make their money off meat.  Most sheep need to be shorn annually for health reasons, and in most cases the shepherd sends all the wool to the local "wool pool" which will have fleeces from several breeds, all of varying quality, all mixed together.  This is where most generic "wool" for the textile industry comes from.  Naturally it's likely to be itchy!

Merino Ewe:  Photo by nzsheep

Merino is the Gold Standard in soft, fine wool.  Most people could wear Merino underwear and be perfectly comfortable and non-itchy.  At the other end of the spectrum there are breeds like Lincoln, which have long, coarse staples, and make excellent rug yarn - but you wouldn't want it in a turtleneck.  And here you see your tradeoff.  Merino is nice and soft and comfy - but you certainly wouldn't want to make a rug out of it.  The fine fibers that make it so soft don't stand up to that kind of wear.  You'd have holes in your rug in no time.  The nice sturdy fibers that wear like iron (the "rug wools") would be way too itchy for clothing.

Crimpy Wool:  Photo by Kara Brugman 2010

Wensleydale Sheep: Photo by Eadaoin Flynn

 Here's where we get back to the original subject.  Why spin your own yarn?  Because there are lots of sheep breeds that fall in different places all up and down this spectrum of fine-to-coarse.  Just like growing your own vegetables or sewing your own clothes, when you spin your own yarn you can tailor it to the end use in a way that's difficult to do with generic off-the-shelf wool.  Sure it's easy to find Merino yarn - that's one of the few breeds available by name.  But suppose you want to crochet a hearth rug or make potholders?  Pick a coarser longwool breed.  Knitted and felted clogs, slippers and handbags are also becoming popular - you can choose something in the middle that's not too prickly on your feet, but will still survive being walked on. Sure you can use Merino for socks - it'll be comfortable, but I hope you like darning! Pick something like Blue-faced Leicester, which is a longwool breed, but still very soft.  Once you start exploring the characteristics of different breeds it can be hard to stop!  You start giving the classic spinner's justification of "Yes I know I have ten fleeces in the closet, but I don't have that one yet!"  In the end it all becomes useful stuff.  The more we know and understand, the more useful and long-lasting our stuff will be!

Things to do in the dark

Being without power for extended periods of time means finding things you can do in poor light.  I can spin pretty well in the dark, and I don't usually have to look too hard at my knitting if it isn't something too complicated.  Unfortunately the knitting project I was working on when the power went out was these:

Not really something I could work on in the dark!  I managed to finish them the day after the power came back on.

I really needed something completely mindless, so I decided to knit swatches! I had two full-sized skeins and two samples in different colorways.  I decided a while ago that I wanted to post photos of knitted sample in my Fiberarts Etsy, because there's so often such a big difference in what a multicolored yarn looks like in the skein and how it knits up.  How many times have you had a multicolored yarn that you loved in the skein, but that you really just didn't like in the knitted object?  

The same thing happens in reverse all the time - you see some knitting with colors that you love, then see the yarn it was knitted with, and think "I would never have pictured this yarn coming out like that!"

Spinners experience this all the time.  See how bright and almost garish the different colors look in the unspun wool?  The colors become much less intense in the finished yarn because of the the blending that occurs during spinning.  Because of this blending, it can be hard to see from the yarn that it will create subtle stripes when it's knitted up.

The striping is more prominent in the first example because I used colors with strong contrast. In this second example the colors are much more closely related, both in hue and value.  Here, you don't get strong stripes so much as a subtle shading.

Of course, the final effect will always depend on the size of your knitting.  Smaller projects like socks will end up with much wider and more prominent stripes.  Sweaters and shawls will have narrower stripes - sometimes maybe only one row before the color changes enough to be noticeable!  Still, it's always nice to at least have a ballpark idea of what a yarn is going to do before you plan your project.

Well. That was unexpected.

An unusually early winter storm with a greater potential for power outages due to the number of trees with leaves still on them at this time of year.  OK - that makes sense.  Not once did a report anywhere indicate MASSIVE damage to trees and EXTENSIVE power outages!  We really were not prepared for this one.  Irene was just practice.

These photos are nothing.  Many of the trees I passed were much worse - every single "section" of branches snapped off at the top of the trunk, like you'd do with a bunch of broccoli.  The damage to trees from this storm was much more extensive than Irene, and the accompanying damage to power lines was also worse.  We lost power for five days after Irene.  This storm had us out for a week!  It was a very chilly week.

Ways this storm was worse:  Because I hadn't expected a power outage that lasted this long I had not planned my grocery shopping accordingly, and ended up with more spoiled food that I could not get to in time.  Also, the convenient neighbor with the generator who helped us out after Irene has moved, so I couldn't keep my freezer chest going.  I still have hope for the freezer chest - it was packed pretty full, and more than halfway through the week all the important things were still frozen solid.  If I open it up today and still find the normal crop of ice crystals on the sides, I think I'll be good.  Number one difference between this storm & Irene - temperature!  It's obviously much colder outside in October than in August.  I have gas heat, but the furnace has an electric pilot!

Ways I was lucky: None of the trees on or near our lot suffered extensive damage. We may not have had the furnace running, but the house never dropped below 60, even at night.  I suppose it's the advantage of a very small house.  A few extra blankets & sweatshirts, two pairs of handknit wool socks, and living in my winter hat all day - 63 degrees was actually not that uncomfortable by the time we got to the end of the week.  The human body will acclimate! We knew from Irene that we do not lose water, and our water heater does *not* have an electric pilot, so we continued to have running water and hot baths and showers.  We also have a gas stove, and although I could not use the oven, cooking meals and making coffee was not a problem.

The biggest way we were lucky:

Having had five days of practice just two months ago, Scarlett adapted to the "new normal" very quickly!  It took three days after Irene for her to stop asking for "TV on?"  This time it took one.  We got her a brand new package of markers, and she was pretty happy for most of the week.  We even got her to wear a hat for about a minute!

Back to More Important Things!

Now that I'm done whining about having to replace my computer I can get back to the fun stuff!   I was very, very lucky recently.  A good friend decided to "invest" in my business(es) and gave me enough money to really start to get some things off the ground.  I'll be able to start a wholesale account with a fiber supplier, so that I can buy my wool at wholesale prices, which will give me a broader selection and a slightly higher profit margin.  After waiting forever for Etsy to come through with the promised ability to manage more than one shop from the same account, I finally just went ahead and started a second Etsy account to sell the yarn and spinning fiber in.  I'm not putting the link out there yet because the shop is still empty.  Writing up Etsy listings is more like writing ad copy than a classified, and that's never come easily to me, so the listings are going through lots of revisions before I make them public.  I'm hoping to have the new shop up and running by Thanksgiving!

Here's what I've been working on:

 I'm starting to work on colorways outside of single color families - these are some of my more successful attempts. 

 I'm also working on increasing my spinning speed.  I expect the dyed fiber to be a bigger percentage of sales, but since much of what I spin ends up sitting around waiting for a project, it may as well be available for purchase while it's waiting!

These first two colorways came out beautifully the first time!  I love it when things work right!

This last skein is just for me :)  It'll go nicely with this yarn.  Right now I'm thinking of hats and leg warmers, because this yarn is too "soft" for socks.  It would pill terribly, and I'd probably get holes faster than I'd like.

 

Not terribly fashionable perhaps, but I'm planning on wearing them under skirts with the actual aim of keeping my legs warm! 

The New Toy

I had to get a new computer at the beginning of the month.  I was not happy about this.  Not happy at all.  It took way too long to figure out that I did, in fact, need to replace the computer, and now it's taken another two or three weeks to get things almost back to where I want them.

One evening around mid-September my computer simple refused to power on.  That's it - no Blue Screen of Death - no warning, just *Poof!*  It then took a further two weeks to fix the situation: determine that it was not a simple fix (it had "motherboard issues") and that the flat rate the repair place quoted me initially could not be used because my computer was too old (!), that they would end up charging me more to fix this one than it would cost me to get a newer, faster one, and then to get the computer that I could afford because it was on sale shipped to the store and have all my data transferred from the old hard drives to the new computer.  Somewhere in all this, I lost nearly a year's worth of old emails, which I'm also not happy about.

I've now had to switch from Windows XP to Windows 7, which everything seems to hate.  I'm only now getting to the point where the applications I use most frequently are installed and functional.  Several of them needed to be upgraded to Win7 compatible versions, and at least one still hasn't worked all the bugs out.  There are some annoyances that apparently are just inherent to Win7, such as its inability to retain a monitor calibration setting after the screen has greyed out or gone to sleep.  There's a workaround for that (I have to manually run the "load calibration" app when this happens), but it's a PITA to have to remember to do this every time I'm going to be working with Photoshop.

On the plus side, I've now got a much bigger hard drive, and the CPU is a little faster, which means things don't heat up as quickly, and the fan doesn't start going into overdrive fifteen minutes after I start working.  As a result, this computer is much quieter.

Now that I'm finally done ranting about this major inconvenience/disruption in my life, I can get back to talking about important things, like yarn and food. 

A different kind of dyeing experiment

Having spent the bulk of the summer working on painted roving, I decided to try a different method for achieving Color in Yarn.  Painted rovings are fun to spin, and they can be a lot of fun to knit with, but solids are nice as well.  Plus, I have a lot of raw fleece that I can't process into roving at home, and I need to find something to do with it.

Rather than mix my chosen color and then dye the wool, I decided to dye the wool in the individual base colors I use, then blend them together in the proportions called for in that color formula.  Say I started with 100g of fiber - if my "recipe" was 68% color A, 20% color B, and 12% color C, I'd use 68g of wool dyed in A, 20g in B and 12 in C, and blend the individual colors.  This process takes advantage of optical blending, in much the same way pointillism does.  It creates the appearance of a solid color, but with greater depth and interest, especially when seen from up close.

Here's what I did.  I weighed out the fiber for individual colors into gallon zipper freezer bags (labelled, so I would know what color went in which bag), added a solution of water and Synthropol (a surfactant to ensure the fiber wets out evenly), and let the wool sit for a couple of hours.  Then one bag at a time, I carefully removed the wool and added the appropriate  amount of dye & other chemical assists, then returned the wool to the bag.  I found it important to remove the wool before adding the dye, otherwise most of the color would end up in one spot on the wool, rather than evenly dispersed.

I then put the plastic bags full of wool/dye in a large stockpot with a rack at the bottom, and filled the stockpot with water.  I slowly heated up the water bath, monitoring the temperature with one of those nifty probe thermometers that provides a constant readout, and kept it at about 180F for about two hours, then left the bags to cool to room temperature in the water bath.

When they had cooled, I rinsed the wool and hung it to dry, then blended the separate colors on my drum carder.

It spins up into a wonderfully lofty DK/Worsted weight 2ply!  I'm very pleased with the results!  One of the things I like about this process is that it allows me to turn what would normally be a flaw into a "design element."  This particular fleece is fairly fine, and despite my best handling is prone to neps.  These little clumps of fiber are generally considered undesirable in an undyed or solid colored yarn, but when the colors are dyed before being blended, the neps make nice little flecks of color in the finished yarn that I find I rather like!

My next question in this process:  Do I card the wool before or after the dyebath?  If I dye before, the fiber gets a little compacted by the process, and I need one or two more passes through the carder than I would otherwise.  On the other hand, if I dye after, I still need to do almost as much carding, but would no longer have the choice between very thorough blending (as in the example here) or a streakier, less uniform batt.  If I wanted that effect I would have to card all the colors separately anyway, so would it really save that much time?  I'll work on that idea on my next round!

What I did with my lawn furniture

I know it's a week late - this is what I did with my lawn furniture before Irene.  I didn't have anywhere else to put the chairs, and I wanted to weight the trampoline down with more than the four cinderblocks that sit on its legs.  It seems to have worked - nothing went sailing!

The wind was pretty impressive, but we really didn't get as much rain as we'd thought we would.  No water in the basement! Yay!  We did lose power for three days, and I consider us lucky to have gotten it back that soon.  There are still people without power in some parts of my town!  Scarlett's first hour with no power was rough, but she got used to the "new normal" pretty quickly.  In fact, I think her father had a tougher time with it than she did!

We have city water and gas for cooking & heat, so we still had a working stove and hot & cold running water.  Were were lucky - our next-door neighbor brought in a small generator that Monday, and offered to let us hook up our freezer!  I think I maybe lost a few Popsicles in the upstairs freezer.

After seeing the devastation all up and down the coast, I really appreciate how lucky we were to have gotten off so lightly!  There are so many places that still look like this-