More spinning, weavi, some knitting

I have been in a spinning mood. I am winding a warp for the floor loom but mostly I've been spinning.

I'll start with the knitting as it is easier. I finished the red fingerless mitts with some leftover yarn. They only needed the thumbs. The thumbs are fat because the yarn is thicker but when I wear them, they are OK.

I also started these flip-top fingerless mittens in India but they've been languishing. I really don't like knitting mittens. Anyway they are done. They match the practice scarf I did on the floor loom. The yarn for the mittens is the weft although I used a little of the warp when I ran out of yarn. You can see that in the top of the left mitten.

My spindle spun thick yarn is plied. I had to hand wind it onto the bobbin for the last few yards as it wouldn't wind on because the bobbin was so full. But I didn't want to make a skein for a few yards. So I persevered and managed to finish it. This is lac and cochineal dyed roving from Handspun by Stefania. I got it some years ago at Rhinebeck.

 I also finished the little Navajo rug. It looks crooked because I let the sides draw in too much so the fell line (where the weaving ends) got tilted. I filled it in with black but as a result, the rug looks crooked. I am pretty pleased with it.

I have also finished spinning an Onyx-to-Crimson gradient from Fiber Optic. But all you see is black on the bobbin so I will post pictures after it is plied.

I also plied and semi-finished a small cotton sample skein on the charkha. One is supposed to boil cotton in an alkaline bath to finish it. I didn't want to do that for a small skein so I will spin some more and finish it all. I just soaked this in a warm water bath. It is a bit thick and thin but seems to be yarn.

I spent some time pondering how to ply this. There is a built-in lazy kate on the Bosworth charkha but the angle from that to the spindle is a bit weird. Maybe I will use that another time when I have more confidence. I ended up winding a 2-ply plying 'ball' on a soft foam core left over from some yarn. I could have put this on my lazy kate but I decided to just let it roll around on the floor. It worked well although there is too much plying twist in the yarn.

That is what I've been up to. Next up is warping the floor loom and plying the gradient. Plus I am going to swatch for a sweater, and am spinning more cotton and spindling the purple cashmere/silk.  I will finish up the travel next week.

New fiber skills

I went to India for 3 weeks to mostly visit family although we did a couple of days of sightseeing also. More on the sightseeing later.

First of all, the scarves and towels I made were received very favorably. I was surprised to some extent because knitted gifts were received well by some but not with this level of enthusiasm. I think it is due to the fact that there is limited use for knitted items in hot Chennai.

I generally just visit when I go to India. I don't have a long shopping list any more. I used to, because everything was not available here. But now I can get most things here. I wanted to buy some stretchy sari blouses, a never-ending quest. I want colors I can wear with my classic Kanchipuram silk saris so I want the traditional colors. Well, they never have them. They have more 'exotic' colors. That is great when I want to match a new sari but not so great when I want ones that will go with a variety of the saris I already own. So each time I buy one or two that I think will match. This time I got a dark blue. I bought an orange to match a new sari and a few for my sister.

I also used to buy a Christmas gift for my hair stylist. She is more of a friend than a hair stylist as I have been going there for more than 30 years. But these days, I make her a gift so there is no need to buy. I buy a gift for her when I travel outside India but I've already bought her a lot of the things that I think are nice gifts from India.

This time I had cotton punis on my shopping list as a major item. I spent a whole morning googling and calling stores where I thought they would have them. No one in Chennai had them or even seemed to know what they were. Then a Ravelry friend from Kolkata told me she got them from a local seller who travels to Wardha in the state of Maharashtra to buy them. The Gandhi Sevagram Ashram there makes and sells them. But there is no online shop. However, she generously sent me some by courier. What a lovely gift!

They come in 100 g bundles wrapped in newspaper.

After my return, I started spinning cotton on my new-to-me Bosworth charkha. I bought this last summer from another Raveler.  She included some easy-to-spin colored cotton sliver so I started with that. That is my first new skill. It is interesting. I have thread that varies from very fine to not-so-fine and I need to decide what degree I want and then produce it consistently. I've spun 1 spindle full.

I also started working on the Navajo rug I started in the class at Rhinebeck. Navajo weaving is very different from tapestry weaving, which it resembles. The technique interlaces the weft threads every other row so the rug is nice and tightly woven. This took me a bit of time to master. Fortunately, I had video taped the instructor when she demonstrated key techniques. Going back and watching that, trying it out, watching again, watching other Navajo weavers weave, etc. finally made it click. I am doing pretty well given I am designing on the fly as the Navajos do. It means I have to backtrack some times and of course, I have to unweave when I make a mistake - for example, I didn't cover a warp thread for 2-3 rows and had to go back.

I have finished the design of the blocks and done a stripe to delineate it from the next design. I am not making this symmetric as I don't want to have to manage the height of each piece. The warp has to be completely woven and it is tightly packed in. I am just going to do another pattern on the other side and end with stripes.

There are two sheds. The top heddle is the dowel on the top that is threaded through every other warp thread. Then there is the pull heddle that is hanging below it. On every pick, you thread something through one of the two sheds and then that holds the shed open to do the weave. I was using a pick up stick but now that is too wide so I am using a fat knitting needle. I will go down to a smaller one in a bit and then eventually one has to remove both dowels and weave using a needle. I am beating with a metal hair pick, some dog combs, and occasionally I put the pickups stick in and press down with it to make sure I have a horizontal edge.

On the non-new skill area, I knitted a hat and undid and reknit it when I was in India. I wanted to make a pair of fingerless mitts to match but I ran out of yarn. I undid the hat and ripped out an inch worth of yarn and reknit the crown. But that still wasn't enough for the thumbs. I found some red yarn, slightly thicker, and I will finish the mitts with that.

Before I cut an inch off the length.

After the re-knitting.

I also started another pair of fingerless mitts. They are still in progress and I don't have a photo.

I plied the red yarn I spun before I left. This was the last of my Tour de Fleece projects from last year. I am very happy with the yarn. That is the bobbin of plied yarn on top. I am now spinning the gradient on the bottom. I will weave a shawl with the two together after spinning. I have 560 yds of the solid red - it was 8 oz of fiber. I have 8 oz of gradient. Right now I am thinking of the solid red for the warp and the gradient for the weft. I'll spin each gradient braid separately and ply them together.

As you remember, the solid red was actually spun by holding a cool red and a warm red together. I am quite pleased at the result. It has a lot of liveliness in color and the yarn is very bouncy. One braid was Polwarth/silk and the other was superwash merino/alpaca/nylon/Tussah. I was afraid about how it would react when I finished it. I was gentle and I will be gentle when I finish the weaving. I don't want differential shrinkage where the non-superwash wool shrinks and the rest doesn't. The gradients are merino/silk so will behave like the Polwarth/silk. Note to Self: read the fiber content before you put fibers together.

I also received some lovely cotton yarn for weaving from another Raveler friend in Chennai.

There are about 250 g of each color so 1 kg in total (2.2 lbs)

She and I went to Shuttles and Needles in Chennai, which is a fabulous store. They are dealers for Ashford and Saori and have looms set up to weave and spinning wheels and spindles as well as knitting supplies. I spun a little on one of the Ashford spindles when I was there and bought one with some fiber for my sister-in-law who was fascinated by both my weaving and my search for punis. Unfortunately, I only went there two days before I left so she had 1 day worth of teaching. Now we are trying it using WhatsApp.

I also boiled the marigold flowers I had been freezing over the summer. I simmered the flowers for 1 hour on day. Let it cool and then simmered again for another hour the next day. Strained out the flowers on the third day. I put a white skein into it and simmered for 30 mins and let the yarn cool in the dye pot overnight. There was still dye left so I added two more skeins to over dye them. I didn't mordant as the recommendation in Jenny Dean's Wild Color was to use alum sulfate on protein fibers and I only had alum acetate. I have the original edition.

I think the color would have been more intense if I had used a mordant. But I am happy with the results. There was more dye in the pot but I discarded it as I didn't have any other fiber that was ready to dye.

 
This was the pure white skein. The next two were overdyed and are slightly muted from the originals, which I thought were too bright.

Overdyed:

Original:

Overdyed:

Original:

And that is it. I am really enjoying all this. I have my next weave planned but will not start till the Navajo rug is done. It is going to use up a bunch of leftover yarns.

Fiber doings

I'm interrupting the travelogue for a quick fiber update.

I started knitting the Turn About Wrap with 4 natural colored alpaca yarns my daughter brought back from Peru. It has been going quite fast so far. If the colors are numbered 1-4 from white to dark brown, I decided to do the center triangles in #1 (white) and #3 (the second darkest brown). Now I am doing the two outer triangles in #2 (lightest brown) and #4 (darkest brown). It looks like chocolate to me!

The colors are not very good in this photo but you can see one of the outer triangles on the right if you look carefully. The colors in the first photo are truer.

I also went back to spinning the red yarn I was working on during the Tour de Fleece. It is all done now. Both sets of singles are completed and I will be plying soon.

Photo from July showing the two braids. The warm one is on the left and the cool one on the right.

First bobbin.

Second bobbin almost completed. It is now done. The remaining fiber is visible in the bottom. The warm red is on top and the cool red below. 

All done!

I am finally done with all the weaving I committed myself to. Now, no one twisted my arm and no one is expecting presents. But I thought it would be nice to take home-made gifts to family in India. I've always been a bit leery of taking knitted things as most of them live in warm weather places. I've given my SILs and aunt a couple of knitted shawls for use when they travel to colder places.

But now I am weaving and a woven shawl is much lighter and more useful than a knitted one. Besides, knitting with the fine yarns that one can use in weaving is time consuming. Weaving with them is easy.

I showed you the yarns I was planning to use in my last post. My plan was to warp for 2 scarves at a time and weave different designs by varying the sequence in which I depress the treadles as well as the possibly the weft. I would have warped for more scarves but I didn't have enough yarn. I would have had to use 3 colors in the warp and then a fourth in the weft. I thought that might be too much. So two it was.

I used the same basic color plan for warping. Even stripes, but I didn't want it to be half and half. I decided to put one repeat on each side in the color from the other half of the scarf. It worked really well.

This is the first warp for example. The warp is half maroon and half teal. But there is a narrow stripe of maroon on the teal side and a corresponding stripe of teal on the maroon side.

Here is the first scarf which I showed in process above. It has an indigo weft.

The same warp with a ruby weft and a different pattern.

Details of the two patterns. The colors are accurate in the big pictures. In the close-ups, the camera gets a bit confused color wise.

I also finished the socks I was knitting two-at-a-time. I worked on them a little bit at a time in the evenings and finished them up on a drive we had to do for some business.

These 3 photos are the close-ups of the second pair of scarves and a sample I did with the bit of warp left over. All three use the same threading through the heddles but a different sequence of treadling. All of these patterns are basic twills where I am raising two shafts on the loom at a time and moving fairly rhythmically across the shafts.

These two scarves were done with stripes of tartan (green) and chestnut (brown) in the warp and a weft of old gold.

I also finished up two scarves with the Shetland I was using up. Now I have only a little bit of the yarn left.  These and the cotton/linen one that follows are plain weave woven on the rigid heddle loom, I am now at the point with that loom that I can warp it in a little over an hour and finish a scarf in 2-3 days.

First of the two scarves. The second is still drying so I'll post a pic next time. I'd rather wait for daylight to take the photo.

Lastly, one of my SILs doesn't wear silk so I made her this cotton/linen scarf from the same yarn I used for the towels. To break up the monotony for me, I inserted some hand-manipulated laces at various points. I had used one of these in my doubleweave workshop but had never done it otherwise.

These two are called Leno. The bottom is on an open shed (with the two layers of warp separated) and the top is on a closed shed. I like it better on the closed shed.

Then I did another called Brooks Bouquet which I like better overall. I find Leno a pain to do but I like working Brooks Bouquet. I saw this for the first time at the Ashford shop in New Zealand. The top is a closed shed and the one below is on an open shed. Here I prefer the open shed version.

And that is it for now. 10 scarves and 3 towels since Sept. Of those, 6 scarves since Thanksgiving.

Tomorrow I am going to finish sewing the hems on the towels and then will wet finish them. I also got little labels to put on the scarves that say 'Handmade with love by Jaya' and will sew those in too.

More photos to come of all that and my next knitting project. I may also take the opportunity next week of it being a bit quieter to do the travel write-up from one of the two trips.

Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate!

Glass sculptures!

I am afraid that I don't have too many fiber topics to discuss today. I have finished one sleeve on my Grapevine sweater but I need to start the other one. I am hoping to have it done this weekend but there are so many things going on that I don't know if I will be able to or not.

Being away at the workshop and then having the first full week in August fly by meant that I had to spend a good bit of time in the garden this week. There were weeds everywhere. I have managed to weed everything but the flower bed by the mailbox. I hope to get to that tomorrow. I thought I could do it today but it rained last night and I don't want to compress the wet soil by walking on it.

A couple of things arrived by mail that are interesting. I bought a sifting litter box from Petco to wash fleece. I haven't used it yet but it fits nicely in the laundry tub and I think I will end up saving water by using it.

It stacks nicely together for storage. My idea is that I'll fill one of the pans with hot water for washing/rinsing, put the fleece in the sifter in lingerie bags so it is easy to move around, and then soak it by putting the sifter in the pan of water. When it is time to remove the fleece from that water, I can press out the water using the other pan and then put the sifter in it to drain while I change the water. It is about 4-5" deep.

Next up, I bought an almost new Züca bag on Craigslist. I haven't put the minispinner in it yet as I have been too busy. We had guests all last weekend and they only left on Monday.

It is really pink! but the black and white bag sets off the pink rather nicely. The price was good so I am embracing the pink.

The last item is an amazing prize I won in the Tour de Fleece. It is exactly something I was thinking of buying so getting it as a prize is really awesome.

It is a purpleheart 2-bobbin kate from Hansencrafts! My lazy kates are all 3-bobbin so I was thinking of getting this one for workshops as it is lighter and smaller. The bobbins can be held vertical or at a 45 degree angle.

Now on to the eye-candy. Yesterday, we went to see the Chihuly exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden. They have a Chihuly Nights event every so often as part of the exhibit and that is what we did. No commentary here, just photos.

It was really beautiful at night because there was very little ambient light except for the gorgeously lit glass sculptures. The NYBG had an interactive map that showed where I was and where the sculptures were, along with the walkways. So I could navigate using my phone. When I got near a sculpture, it popped up a description of the sculpture and the name and a photo of it in daylight.

I was able to lay out the collapse weave project based on warp and weft calculations and my yardage. It will be a scarf as I don't have enough weft for a shawl. I hope to warp it next week and also finish the Grapevine sweater.