The One About Inori

We’ve been really really busy lately and look like headless chickens running around. My house is in a TOTAL MESS and it’s been affecting my mood.

No.. it’s not that I got lazy with housework. I’ll explain it in the next post, I promise.

I’ve been frantically working on spinning this yarn for the past few weeks and it’s finally all done!

This single (unplied) yarn weighs 190gm and I have not measured the yardage yet. It’s somewhere between a lace and fingering weight (2ply to 4ply).

It’s made up of 70% West Australian Merino wool (about 22microns) and 30% Mulberry silk.

Let me show you how it all started:

This is fleece bought from a sheep farm in Yallingup. We took a trip down quite some time back and I bought this fleece. It was sheared from a single sheep. Kinda looks like the red plastic bag is vomiting the fleece out doesn’t it?

Sheep fleece is VERY grimy and dirty. It has natural oils (lanolin) and veggie matter (VM) and faeces (shit) stuck to it. Not at all like those cartoons where you see white fluffy poofy cutie sheep happily bounding around.

The white bits you see are the undercoat. The top is usually dirty brown and black.

I pulled out the longer parts (I believe they are called ’staples’, please correct me if I’m wrong) and lined them up facing in one direction. I threw most of the shorter fleece away.
This is actually my second time washing fleece and I didn’t do this step for the first time. It was a disaster.

Then when I collected 200g of staples, I lined them up in 2 rows per laundry bag. I have 2 laundry bags here with all the fleece facing in the same direction.

I poured warm water and wool scour detergent into a tub and submerged the fleece into it. Used my hands to press the fleece down.

Look at how dirty it is!

I think it took 5 soaks before it was clean. I would recommend using HOT water instead of just warm as not all the lanolin came out, even with special wool scour detergents!

When I scoured for the first time, I didn’t have the wool scour detergent so I used Morning Fresh (dish washing liquid) with SUPER hot water and that came out lanolin free!

Anyway, this is how it looked like when it was clean and dry:

It looks matted but you can still pull out the staples like so;

I then dyed the fleece in 2 colours – purple and pink.

Sorry for the horrible photo – my kitchen is usually dark.

Then I carded the fleece.

Carding is a process where you make all the fibre face the same direction by using a drum carder. Drum carders are very expensive BUT can last you a lifetime if you take good care of it! It’s just like a spinning wheel I guess. My spinning wheel is the same age as I am and still working fine!

See the white bits on the carder? That’s the Mulberry silk. No, I didn’t grow my own silkworms. Not now, at least. I bought the Mulberry silk from EGMTK. (Mandie has excellent customer service and very fast shipping!!)

Blending two kinds of fibre together on the drum carder is called…………. taadaaaa! “Blending”. Kinda no-brainer ain’t it?

What you pull off your drum carder is called a ‘batt’.

I rolled them into this shape to save space but they should look rectangular after you pull it off the carder. Now I mentioned this is my second time doing this. The first time, I didn’t pull out staples from the raw fleece before washing it and therefore I had short fleece as well as slightly matted ones go through the carder. I got tons of nepps from that!

The next photo is of the batt from my first try:

See the parts circled? Those are nepps. I know they may seem harmless but when there are a gazillion of them, it makes the yarn spun from it VERY rough and ugly. That was the saddest part for me as I had spent so much time with my first try at washing and carding fleece. That’s why I did better this time!

So when the batts were ready, I spun the yarn!

And the end result:

This is going to be knitted up into a very special gift for someone. Someone who, obviously, likes pinks and purples.   But then again, MOST people I know love pink and purple…. I end up dyeing or knitting with a lot of purples and pinks!!!!!! Which isn’t so bad because if it were blue, I’d be tempted to keep it for myself… Hehehehe.

I hope to update again soon because I already have the pictures ready for the next post.

I still have more than half a bag of raw fleece left! These sheep have so much wool. Lol.

Anybody lurking around still?

Here’s what I’ve done for spinning:

This is blue merino roving that I bought from the Bendigo Wool show. I had 150g of it and managed to spin them into 2 bobbins of very fine singles- a great improvement from slubby thick/thin singles!

Then I plied them together:

Looks good no? I’m so proud of my first, non slubby handspun!

I wrote down the yardage but misplaced it (whats new?) and will have to reskein it to find out the yardage again. Grrr.

Now for pictures of little Chubbs who fell asleep at the table in Nad’s arms:

He’s into sucking his thumb nowadays and has been very interested in his toes/feet. He would grab on to them and stare at them while gurgling to himself! Very very cute.

And this is what I’ve been doing with myself these few days:

I’m designing some knitwear for kids! This is the first ’sample’ I’m knitting up.

It took many days of planning and rough sketches before I sat down to start knitting this. (Actually, I was trying to finish a shawl as a gift to my neighbour for her wedding before I cast on *yet* another project.)

While writing this pattern this morning, I did the calculations and wrote everything down. BUT, had to rip back 3 times because I couldn’t get the stitch counts correct!

It was when I spoke to Lulu over msn that I realised that I had written;

8 x 8 = 48

on the very top of the pattern.

-__________-

And I am supposed to be one of the top students in maths class!

I must say, however, that I have new respect for all the knitwear designers out there who have amazing designs offered for free. It takes A LOT of patience and calculations to get stitch counts correct! To translate a design from a sketch on paper to a ‘real’ knitted garment takes a lot of brain juice and time. The generosity and ingenuity of these many designers warms my heart and I think one should never take free patterns (or even paid ones for that matter) for granted, let alone breaching copyrights and doing other despicable acts like selling them illegally etc. Doing such things will only discourage designers and jeopardise the availability of these free patterns.

I am trying to give back to this awesome community of knitters by coming up with these patterns which I hope will not cause me too much anguish and time to write. I might have to look for some test knitters but will advertise for it after I’ve knitted up a successful sample.

The yarn in this project is Malabrigo Merino Worsted, one of my favourite yarn (seeing how I’m selling it in my store). And the colourway is also one of my most favouritestestest – Oceanos.

I’ve been winding my skeins by hand into yarn balls instead of using the ballwinder to wind them into yarn cakes. Although I risk having the skein slipping from my knees while I catch falling children/ wipe their snotty noses/ die from a myocardial infarction, I still prefer the feel of a ball to a cake in my hands. If ya know wad I mean.

Besides, a yarn ball is harder and I can fling it in the direction of Nad’s head when he says something unpleasant to my ear. Tee hee.

Last night……. I did this:

What is that, you ignorant good people ask?

It’s yarn! You dumb dumb.

Not just any yarn. It’s yarn spun by ME. ME ME ME and ME! Myself! Me!!!

I finally dragged out the spinning wheel we bought from eBay aeons ago. The only thing that was spinning on it was cobwebs. *Blush*.

It’s not easy, spinning yarn for the first time. Yours hands have different jobs. My left hand pinches the twist and my right hand drafts the fibre. Then your foot has to pedal. 3 limbs doing 3 different movements. Only one brain. That’s why spinning is best done by women.

The one you see in the 1st picture above is called ’singles’. I divided the fibre into two and spun two bobbins of singles. Then I plyed them with an opposite twist to get the yarn showed above.

I think it’s pretty good for a beginner. Don’t you think? Very little slubs although some parts are overspun.

I hope to get better with practice!

Oh, I tore off the beginner parts:

Lots of slubs and overspun bits.

I’d rather have yarn that I can actually knit with than be stuck with slubby, unknitable yarn which I know I can’t bear to throw out since it’s my first handspun. And then it’ll be stuck in my stash and I will hate myself for it.

I’m thinking of knitting mittens for either Sunshine or Chubbs for when we visit the East Coast this July. I think there is only enough yardage for a pair of kiddie mittens.

Hmm, yet another hobby added to my list. I guess I have to sacrifice and ignore my kids, ignore housework, ignore husband, knit less……

Well… Veni, Vidi, Spinni.

(I came, I saw, I spun.)