A short update

It has been a quiet week on the fiber front. I decided not to do anything on the loom while I caught up on knitting. And I've done some of that. I also have been spinning

I had made triangular pockets on the sweater. As a reminder, here is the last photo I posted of the pocket.

The issue here is that things can fall out of the pocket since it has no depth. For Cross Pockets, the designer has you knit a pocket extension that hangs behind the bottom band. However, that is a wide bottom band. I am just doing an icord at the bottom. So I needed to do something different to make the pockets functional.

I decided to add 2 inches to the length (pocket and body) where I would sew up the side of the pocket so it was vertical. That would achieve the same result as the pocket extension. In order to do this, I had to lengthen the pocket I was knitting, put the sts from the body and the other pocket on to the needles and add the length, and then go ahead and join them. 

So that is what I've been doing. I just finished the icord BO on Monday. I was going to graft the beginning to the end and then finish the pocket area to make sure it all lays flat and neat before I move on to the sleeves. But I have been having itchy eyes due to allergies. I scratched at them on Monday night and they are all swollen. It is better today but I couldn't see very well yesterday. So there was no fine finishing work going on yesterday. I hope to get to it today and will have photos in my next post.

In the meantime, I have spinning photos. I have been spinning the stretchy 3-ply sock yarn in a full project quantity. In the process, I realized that you only really see the colors in a braid when you are spinning. Looking at the braid only lets you see the large color blocks and not the lovely transitions that occur between colors. 

This was the braid. As you can see, it is mostly blues with some yellow and bright green in it. It looked pretty monochromatic to me. When I opened it up, I realized that most of the yellows were concentrated in one area of the braid. If I split it vertically into 3 as I usually do, there would be  only one section of the yarn that would have the yellow. So I split it horizontally into 3. This way the yellow would be predominant in one ply and be spread across the whole length of the yarn. 

However, as I started spinning, I realized that there are sections of green in other areas. This is from the first ply.

And some lovely violets and ceruleans in the second ply. The cerulean is hidden under the very light blue layer on the left of the bobbin. The violet was surprising. After I spun this and I looked back at the original braid, the green and the violet jumped out at me. But when I first looked at it, they were overwhelmed by the blue and the yellow-green. I am really looking forward to this yarn and I may not use it for socks after all. The colors would make a very wearable shawl with my usual uniform of blue jeans and T-shirts.

This is the first bobbin, all spun up. You can see the green in the single here. Of course, when it is plied, it will also have the colors from the other plies at that point but the green will show up as blips of color and will get accentuated by anything I wear that will is green. 

My recent scientific sampling (from the previous posts) has also led me to actually make a control card for this yarn. I have samples of the singles taped on to it and a plyback sample showing the amount of twist. You can see that in the bottom right of the card. A plyback sample is just letting the singles ply back on itself when it is freshly spun and the twist is active. I do plyback samples a lot but I never keep them. I just look at them, undo the plying and wind them onto the bobbin. I am doing this temporary plyback a lot while spinning this to make sure that I am maintaining the under-spun low twist desired state. I plan to put samples of the washed and unwashed 3-ply yarn on the card also. But I am not sure what I will do with it. This is why I don't usually make cards. Let's see. Maybe it will come in useful.

The low twist has resulted in a few times when I didn't have yarn. The singles just came apart and I had to go back to a spot where there was enough twist and then add more to the part that was falling apart. I hope the plying works because if it doesn't, it will be a pain to recover. This is why I started with a braid that I wasn't too enthralled by :-)

I am almost done with the second singles. I have about 8-10" to spin which is a couple of hours at most. The third one is the one with all the yellow-green, so I am looking forward to that and saved it for last as an incentive. 

Making stretchy yarn

When I first started spinning, I was fascinated by the process of making yarn .It is magical.You start with fiber that pulls apart so easily but then you add twist, and it becomes strong and holds together. Just by the application of twist.

However, as a knitter, I was a little disappointed. I am used to the elastic properties of wool and the yarn I made was not elastic. In fact, most of the yarn I have made has been used in shawls and scarves and cowls. Things that don't require elasticity. My yarn was even and soft and completely inelastic. I watched videos. I watched Margaret Stove make lovely elastic yarn and explain how she did it. But I wasn't able to replicate her results.

A couple of years ago, I took a singles class with Amy King. Amy is the low-twist singles queen. At the end of the class, she mentioned that she uses low-twist to create elastic sock yarn. I was intrigued and I asked her how she does that. Her method is to spin a very low-twist singles and then ply with the normal amount of plying twist that one would for that weight of yarn. As you may remember, we normally add twist to the individual elements of the plied yarn (the singles yarn) and then balance that twist energy by adding opposing twist in the plying direction. This is called a balanced ply. But in this case, we add more twist in the plying than we added in the singles. So the yarn isn't balanced. I spun a tiny 3-ply sample in that class and I was awed by the fact that it was indeed elastic.

I came back inspired and was discussing the topic online in one of my Ravelry spinning groups. I wondered how different blends would react to this process. One of the very lovely spinners in that group sent me 3 samples of roving she had - about 8 gm each. I intended to do some experiments with them but got distracted by other things. The rovings sat there.

While I was spinning the collapse weave yarns, another member of the same group posted about a class she took with Jillian Moreno. They had spun a variety of yarns in the class. One of them was a crepe yarn. A crepe yarn is one where you spin 2 singles yarns in one direction, then you ply them together with a lot of plying twist. You spin a third singles in the same direction as the plying twist and then you ply the plied yarn and the singles in the original spinning direction,. The reason you add more plying twist is because you are going to be plying again in the opposite direction.

This is a photo from Sarah Anderson's Spinner's Book of Yarn Designs. I took it to show someone the structure of crepe yarn. Anyway, this spinner said that the crepe yarn was very elastic. This discussion inspired me all over again. And in my experimental scientific mood following the collapse weave experiments, I finally picked up those rovings and did my stretchy yarn experiments.

 The first one was a Corriedale roving. Corriedale is a medium wool but it has a lot of crimp and it puffs up and becomes very soft and fluffy after the yarn is finished by washing. I expected this to become a nice stretchy yarn if I used Amy King's low twist singles with a high twist ply. And I was proven right. This skein stretches from 11" - 13" easily. Once released, it snaps back to its original length.

Next up was a Corriedale/silk blend roving, which you can see spun up and waiting to be plied above. I expected that the addition of the silk would reduce the elasticity. I wanted this as a comparison to the plain Corriedale I spun first. So I used the same technique. I did a low-twist singles and then added more plying twist. As I expected, it was still stretchy but much less so. The skein also relaxed a lot more. Wound on the same niddy-noddy, the skein was 13" when relaxed and stretched to 15", but relaxed back to 13" again.

The third roving was a Romney/silk noil blend. Romney is a long wool and thus does not have as much crimp as Corriedale. It has a wave. I thought I would experiment with the crepe yarn to see if it would add elasticity to what I expected to be the least elastic of the 3 rovings. 

This photo shows the 2 initial plies and the 3rd piece that is waiting to be spun in the opposing direction to be added after the first two are plied together. This skein relaxed the most. It was 15" long - also wound on the same niddy-noddy. It only stretched to 16" but also went back to 15" when released. Crepe yarns have texture, which you can see in the photo below.

Yardage also varied a bit. The Corriedale gave me 29 yds. The Corriedale/silk yielded 17 yds for the same weight, and the Romney/silk resulted in 17.5 yds for the 8 gm weight.

I think this is the first time I've been relatively scientific about my spinning. I mostly just spin and then decide what I'm going to do with the yarn based on its qualities after I am done. There is one more yarn structure I need to explore. It is called an opposing ply yarn and it is very stretchy. Another description of it is here.

Those of you who know the scientific method know that this is kind of scientific, but not quite. There are too many uncontrolled variables, and the fiber itself is very different. I want to add to this set of experiments by using a plain roving (not a blend) that I have and spin all three yarn structures with the same fiber and compare them. But that is for another time.

I started spinning the mystery wool (from a couple of posts ago) for socks using the low-twist singles/high-twist ply method. I am part-way through the first of the 3 singles.

The fiber looks like this. I divided in in 3 lengthwise instead of stripping it widthwise because the non-blue sections are sparse and I wanted them more distributed in the yarn.

On the weaving front, I did a quick little project. I had been saving an old pair of jeans that were worn and too big because I know denim is great for upcycling. In a Ravelry group devoted to rigid heddle weaving, the April theme is weaving with fabric. I was inspired to cut up my jeans and a T-shirt that I didn't like very much to make a rag rug.

I used the method described in this video to make the yarn. I used a thick, rustic cotton I found at a big box craft store as warp. To pack down the weft and create a thick, stiff rug, I used a hair pick. I had bought the hair pick to open up locks of wool and spin directly from them. But it was the perfect tool to pack down the weft and make the rug.

Another rabbit hole was exploring options to finish the edges. Who knew there were so many ways to finish rugs. I ended up doing a single Damascene edge and then making overhand knots to make a fringe. Typically, one would weave the ends back into the body of the rug after a single Damascene edging. But I found that too difficult with the cut up fabric. Hence the fringe.

One technique I want to try is a Maori edge. I had some leftover warp so I found some bulky Lopi-lookalike and wove a little sample. I plan to finish this using the Maori edge so I can see how easy or fiddly it is.

Now I am going to take a break from weaving to plan my next weaving project and finish up my Calmer hoodie. I've finished the pockets and now I need to join the pockets to the body and finish the bottom of the sweater. Then I have sleeves and a hood to knit. So that is a project that needs some time spent on it.