Knitting ahoy!
I am still knitting, I just don't write about it here as much. I'm still doing a lot of socks, I'm still doing a lot of shawls, I have a sweater in progress for Erik that's been sitting there since I was 5 weeks pregnant with Lillian. But my new bug is mittens. Fancy, fiddly, fine-gauge colorwork mittens. In particular, the black-and-white mittens and gloves from the Selbu district of Norway, and the crazy-colored mittens from Latvia.
The Latvian mittens are particularly fun; they use three, four, or even five colors in a single row, plus a surface texture called a "twined braid" that requires purling with the yarn in front of the work. I am bad at colorwork, and particularly bad at three or more colors in a row, and SUPER bad at colorwork with very long floats, which these involve a lot of. The only way to get good at something, though, is to do it, so there you go.
I'm also on a brutal yarn diet right now, though, as the result of budget issues. So no waltzing out and buying lots and lots of skeins of lovely different colors of yarn! And while I have a ton of yarn, I don't have a ton of the sticky wooly wool that's really good for colorwork, in the fine gauge that these mittens require. What I do have a ton of, though, is unspun fiber, and that can be any kind of yarn I want it to be. (Within reason. Silk purse, sow's ear, etc.) In particular, I have a lot of naturally colored wool that I acquired as raw fleece. Working with raw fleece is, uh, not the least time-consuming way to get yarn, but you gain a huge amount of power over the finished textile by being able to do the prep work yourself as you see fit. After a lot of sampling, I decided to do these mittens in natural brown CVM, natural white from a mystery fleece, and red commercially carded roving. I prefer spindle-spinning from carded prep, because I find a one-handed draw easier that way.
The brown fleece is a gift from liralen, part of an enormous destash from her before I even learned to spin. The color is gorgeous, the wool is very soft, and the crimp is amazing, but from the start it has proved to be a very difficult fleece to work with. The staples range from about 1.5” to 3”, and the bouncy crimp means that drumcarding is impossible, since every pass creates exponentially more neps. Combing it was a laughable disaster; the fibers stick to the combs with incredible tenacity, and more ends up in waste than in top. I had some success making rolags with handcards, but the fleece is fairly tippy in places, and those tips caused more neps!
Finally I went back to basics and just flicked the locks and spun them from the fold, and that was the answer. Even though the fleece changes character a lot in different sections, each lock is completely consistent, which makes for a fairly easy draw. The broken tips come off with the flicking. The fleece ranges in color from a dark walnut - almost black - through a warm nut brown and up to a lovely cinnamon frosted with white. I could have created a more consistent color with aggressive sorting, but I decided that would lend a lot of ass pain to an already fairly pain-in-the-ass project, and that the changes in shade would add some nice complexity to the finished product.
My sample skein is 23 yards of two-ply fingering. I am spinning on a Bosworth Midi rim-weighted spindle and andean-plying. The yarn is similar in weight and grist to Rauma Finullgarn, though the hand is very different. I have a small plastic bin the size of a shoebox filled with flicked locks right now, ready for spinning. I don't have a good scale, but I'd estimate that I have about three ounces. Working with the flick carder is fun, though hard on the middle joint of my thumb; it's a great way to get really up-close and personal with the wool as you work with it. It's also very slow. I don't know that I'd want to prep more than about 8 ounces of wool this way at a go, even though this wool would make a lovely sweater.
I know this is a lot of chatter about wool and mittens for those of you who don't really care at all. Sorry about that. This is what's on my mind at the moment.
The Latvian mittens are particularly fun; they use three, four, or even five colors in a single row, plus a surface texture called a "twined braid" that requires purling with the yarn in front of the work. I am bad at colorwork, and particularly bad at three or more colors in a row, and SUPER bad at colorwork with very long floats, which these involve a lot of. The only way to get good at something, though, is to do it, so there you go.
I'm also on a brutal yarn diet right now, though, as the result of budget issues. So no waltzing out and buying lots and lots of skeins of lovely different colors of yarn! And while I have a ton of yarn, I don't have a ton of the sticky wooly wool that's really good for colorwork, in the fine gauge that these mittens require. What I do have a ton of, though, is unspun fiber, and that can be any kind of yarn I want it to be. (Within reason. Silk purse, sow's ear, etc.) In particular, I have a lot of naturally colored wool that I acquired as raw fleece. Working with raw fleece is, uh, not the least time-consuming way to get yarn, but you gain a huge amount of power over the finished textile by being able to do the prep work yourself as you see fit. After a lot of sampling, I decided to do these mittens in natural brown CVM, natural white from a mystery fleece, and red commercially carded roving. I prefer spindle-spinning from carded prep, because I find a one-handed draw easier that way.
The brown fleece is a gift from liralen, part of an enormous destash from her before I even learned to spin. The color is gorgeous, the wool is very soft, and the crimp is amazing, but from the start it has proved to be a very difficult fleece to work with. The staples range from about 1.5” to 3”, and the bouncy crimp means that drumcarding is impossible, since every pass creates exponentially more neps. Combing it was a laughable disaster; the fibers stick to the combs with incredible tenacity, and more ends up in waste than in top. I had some success making rolags with handcards, but the fleece is fairly tippy in places, and those tips caused more neps!
Finally I went back to basics and just flicked the locks and spun them from the fold, and that was the answer. Even though the fleece changes character a lot in different sections, each lock is completely consistent, which makes for a fairly easy draw. The broken tips come off with the flicking. The fleece ranges in color from a dark walnut - almost black - through a warm nut brown and up to a lovely cinnamon frosted with white. I could have created a more consistent color with aggressive sorting, but I decided that would lend a lot of ass pain to an already fairly pain-in-the-ass project, and that the changes in shade would add some nice complexity to the finished product.
My sample skein is 23 yards of two-ply fingering. I am spinning on a Bosworth Midi rim-weighted spindle and andean-plying. The yarn is similar in weight and grist to Rauma Finullgarn, though the hand is very different. I have a small plastic bin the size of a shoebox filled with flicked locks right now, ready for spinning. I don't have a good scale, but I'd estimate that I have about three ounces. Working with the flick carder is fun, though hard on the middle joint of my thumb; it's a great way to get really up-close and personal with the wool as you work with it. It's also very slow. I don't know that I'd want to prep more than about 8 ounces of wool this way at a go, even though this wool would make a lovely sweater.
I know this is a lot of chatter about wool and mittens for those of you who don't really care at all. Sorry about that. This is what's on my mind at the moment.