A most educational week

I came home yesterday after the most amazing week away. It was exhausting, mind-blowing and productive. While I can't repeat it too often, it would be wonderful to do it again some time.

I went to 5 days of spinning classes with Maggie Casey. Maggie is co-owner of Shuttles, Spindles and Skeins in Boulder CO. But to the spinning world, she is a guru. But I should start at the beginning, a very good place to start.

Last Sunday, I packed up my car and headed out to Harrisville NH. I had never been there before so it was quite the adventure. I was the first to arrive at the historic Cheshire Mills Boarding House, where a number of us were staying.

Harrisville is a lovely place. It is on the National Registry of Historic places. Being a mill town, of course there was water.

 This view looks the other way from the same place. The small building straight ahead is where we spent our time. This is the location of the Harrisville Designs Knitting and Weaving Center, where our class was.

The boarding house was spartan, but clean and relatively comfortable. This is a view of the living room where people spent their evenings. I tended to stay in the studio and spin all evening.

 A view from the dining room looking into the living room.

 We had a fully furnished kitchen. It was a bit dark but quite sufficient.

 Note the dormers. I didn't. Or at least I did, but I didn't internalize their locations enough to avoid hitting my head on them frequently. The most common ones that contacted my head were the one over the trash can in the kitchen. The microwave was also under the same dormer so it had quite a few opportunities to whack me over the head.

 We had to carry our stuff up 2 flights of stairs. This is looking down from the living room window. I wish I had known that. I would have packed two smaller bags rather than one large one. Live and learn. It was good exercise though.

This was my bedroom. Note the dormer over the fan. That was the one that made the second most contact with my head. I started out with a room to myself but ended up sharing it. The boarding house was very hot when we arrived but it cooled off with the large number of fans scattered around the place. However, later in the week, when it was very humid. the air-conditioning units were just not enough to do much.

 

This was my bed. We brought our own linens. I also brought my own pillows as I wanted to make sure I was comfy. It didn't help. I didn't sleep well all week. But it was worth it.

 Our class room had a whole wall of Harrisville Shetland fiber on cones. This was for weaving classes, not us, but I couldn't resist taking a picture of the wall. Each color is labeled.

 This is a view of the classroom standing by the wall of cones and looking the other way. You can see Maggie in the front in a blue shirt. My spot is the empty chair to the right of the photo. You can see my Tina in front of the chair.

We started off spending a couple of days with this Lincoln-Corriedale fleece. We grew to know and love it as we learned about its characteristics and processed it. Maggie started off by explaining how she washes fleece in her bathtub using Dawn, hot water and a few laundry baskets.

 The locks were from a spinner's flock and had very little vegetable matter, although it was amazing how much we found as we worked on the wool.

 A close-up of the locks showing the crimp and length. Note the sun-burned tips. They ended up blending with the rest of the fiber to add depth to the color.

Each of us grabbed a section of locks and teased them. Here is a section I worked on.

 After teasing, it became a cloud of fiber. Our chairs were covered in bits of vegetable matter.

After teasing, we carded the fiber and made rolags. This was a new experience for me. I had never carded wool before, let alone made rolags. As the day wore on, the carding and the rolags got better and better.

 At first there is one.

 And then there are more. You can see how varied the colors of the fleece were. Maggie is the Queen of woolen spinning, especially the long draw method of drafting. So I was excited that we were going to spin woolen right away. We practiced the drafting and made a ply-back sample. Here is mine.

 We repeated the process (except for the ply-back sample) over and over again. Here is a bobbin with singles. Maggie wanted us to spin 2 bobbins on day 1 so we could ply it on the second day. Or maybe it took us 2 days to spin the singles. I can't remember. It is all a blur. In any case, I spun 2 bobbins of the singles.

 

 I plied the two singles to make a skein. This is not yet finished to set the twist. I have to reskein it as I made a mistake in skeining and I would rather fix it now than later.

 I spun another bobbin that I have not plied yet. So I will definitely get another skein of this fiber. Later in the week, we learned how to use a drum carder. I took more of the fleece and made a batt with it. I brought the batt back as I didn't have time to spin it in class. The batt will become the second single for the second skein. 

There should be enough for me to make a hat and mitts out of the yarn. It isn't next-to-skin-soft but it isn't harsh either. 

So there it is. My first carded and spun yarn!

In the next few posts, I will describe more of the class and also our tour of the Harrisville Designs spinning mill. Stay tuned....

Eye candy

 I promised you pictures of the books I bought at Camp. I was very selective this year. I had already decided to buy one book before I went there. The other two, though, leaped into my hands. That is my story and I'm sticking to it.

The Haapsalu scarf book is a complement to the Haapsalu shawl book. In Estonia, a scarf is a square shawl. This book is devoted to the square shawl and it is just beautiful - both in content and eye-candy.

 It was photos of shawls like these that made me buy the book! How could I resist such beauty?

 Another impulsive purchase was this Anna Zilboorg book. It has been out of print for a long time so when I discovered it had been re-printed, I had to buy it. It has very unique sock designs in it.

There are cables,

 whimsical designs,

 colorwork,

 and more texture. What's not to love?

 This is the book I went there with the intention of buying. This book contains all the technical information from Sweaters From Camp, which is now out of print. If you want to do stranded colorwork, this is the must-have book for you.

Last, but not least, here is my lovely scarlet skein. It is all plied and finished. I am quite proud of it. It is a 3 ply that is sock weight. I plan to combine it with some sock yarn and make a pair of socks. There isn't quite enough here for a pair.

Pink!

 Or, I should say Scarlet! but it looks pink to me.

This is called Scarlet Ibis and it is a BFL from Miss Babs that I got at Rhinebeck last year. I love spinning it. I have finished spinning the singles and will be plying a 3-ply sock yarn tomorrow evening. It is a good color fix after hours of staring at computers.

The rest of this post is about recent acquisitions. What do you think about the two yarns below? One is the Briar Rose Polwarth I spun and the other is a merino/tencel yarn dyed by Briar Rose. The colors are amazingly similar. I am planning to combine them into a shawl - with the similar colors but different hands. The merino/tencel will be more drapey.

 On that note of similar colors, this is what I bought from Briar Rose at Camp. Two sets of BFL rovings that I think I will spin separately and ply together. I think the combo will give me a lot of depth but it could also be mud when plied together. Sampling is my friend!

 This is a silk/Coopworth mix from Hidden Valley Woolen Mills. I love the colors. I can't wait to see how it spins up.

 I bought some books at Camp but those will be in a different post. I received two books in the mail in the past couple of weeks and I am excited about them. The first is a book I won (yes, I won) in a random drawing from Serious Eats. When they review books, they usually get multiple copies to give away. I enter every time I find a book I like. And I won this! How cool is that?

 The other book is from Paperback Swap. I signed up a while ago and listed (and sent away) some books that I didn't want any more. I also put up a list of books that I wanted. I have received one or two that I wanted right away. For a while I would check to see where I was on the list for the books I wanted. All of them were highly requested so there is a list of folks waiting for them. Then I got tired of checking and forgot all about it.

So imagine my surprise when I got a notice that this book was being shipped to me. I had signed up for auto-request for books I really wanted. This eliminates the step of agreeing that you still want the book when it becomes available.

It arrived really quickly and is in excellent shape. The way Paperback Swap works is that you pay the postage when you mail people books and they pay when they send stuff to you. You get credits when you list a book and those credits apply to books that you request. You can also buy with money but so far I've acquired my books just with credits.

I've been mostly spinning as my elbow tendonitis has been acting up and knitting is not fun. I hope it heals soon.

The girl with kaleidoscope eyes

I started with 2 skeins of natural Cascade 220. I knitted a rectangle of stockinette with garter borders. 

Then I used these tools...

 

Food dye pens.

Icing colors and stencil brushes

Paper cups, water and measuring spoons. Teeny tiny measuring spoons.

Did I mention paper cups?

I drew the outline of the girl and her rainbow hair with charcoal and then painted on each color using the stencil brush. She is floating in the sky...

After painting, the knitting was covered up in plastic wrap - top and bottom.

It was rolled up and steamed.

Then it cooled.

After drying, the details of the girl were added. I used buttons for her eyes, black and red and yellow yarn for her features. I was going to paint them in but the buttons made her look bug-eyed without some other texture. She has some braids and some loose hair.

I used a food writer pen to add a chin and some neck shading. Also, give a little shadow to her nose. French knots make up her nostrils and she has stem stitched eyes and eyebrows.

And there she is.. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!

Remember the buttons I showed you a few weeks ago? They turned into her kaleidoscope eyes.

Swarovski crystals scattered over her hair and then sewn down represent the diamonds.

After looking at her for a few days, I felt she looked rather thin-lipped so I got out some Ultra Alpaca and gave her more voluptuous lips with satin stitch around the original lips.

 And there is she is in all her glory - floating in the sky...

for those who are wondering what this is all about - the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" features John Lennon singing about a hallucinatory state in a monotonic, slow, mesmerizing tone. The title is supposed to stand for LSD. Hence: Knitting Under the Influence.

Sadly, many of the younger members at Camp had no clue about the song and so only half the attendees laughed when I told my story about how my knitting flowed in multi-colors from my needles as I played the song on my iPhone.

I won this lovely kit. The shawl is pretty but

 the yarn is even prettier!

 I also get a nice zippered case. I think this laceweight will be a nice shawl.

I hope you enjoyed my Knitting Under the Influence! It was a fun adventure, a grand experiment. I had never used stencil brushes to paint on colors, much less use the food writer pens. I didn't set the dye after I used those so I don't know if they will last.

The entire project is recyclable except for the bits of yarn. The hair will come right out, the crystals and beads can be removed and once I snip out the embroidery out, I have a dyed blank which can be used to make a cowl or a hat or mittens.