It's Camp Loopy Time!

I love Camp Loopy. Yes, I realize it's just a ploy to get me to buy wool yarn in the summer, but it's a fun ploy and there are prizes. Our first project kicks off on June 1st.

Because knitting something in a month is not hard enough, I decided to up the ante this month by spinning the wool for the yarn. The Loopy Ewe now sells wool roving, so using it spin will qualify me in the challenge.

This is the Purple Mustang colorway of Lorna's Laces wool roving top. Top means that the fibers have been combed out nicely for spinning, ready to go. This one wasn't. It was kind of matted.

I've been wanting to do a shawl with color gradations, so I knew that I would be combing it out anyway, so on I went.

 The first step was to tear the roving apart to separate the different values. Working light to dark, the hunks of roving were sorted into individual stacks of shades of purple.

From there, each hank was combed, using nearly lethal wool combs. The tines are very, very sharp, and it took just a couple of pokes for me to come to respect the tools.

The roving includes both red purple and blue purple, making it a bit of a challenge to sort out the values. The blue purples just looked darker. To solve the problem, I used my camera, set to black & white, to rearrange the combed blobs in value order. See how the colorless photo helps to block out the confusing color. I use this trick with my applique as well, when a subtle value shift is important.

I want to make a lace weight, or light fingering weight yarn. This is pretty fine yarn, used for knitting shawls and socks. Ultimately the yarn will be two ply, so I separated the value gradations in two.

Finally ready for spinning, the fluffs of wool have been stacked up in a basket, near at hand for spinning.

I've finished spinning the first run of fiber, and am about half way on the second. I'm still undecided on whether I will spin the whole lot as a two ply for a shawl, or go for a three ply and make a pair of socks. We shall see.

Knitting for the first project starts on June 1st. The Loopy Ewe gave me permission to start early on the spinning, since it's neither casting on or knitting. So hopefully, by the time you are reading this, I will be done with the spinning and ready to knit.

Spinning my wheel

I've been bitten, bitten hard. Everyone needs a hobby, right? When my quilting hobby became my job, I needed to find something new to do, just so I wasn't working all the time.

I've been a fiber maniac my whole life. From four on, when my grandmother taught me how to embroider, I have spent my entire life either playing with fiber or figuring out how to get more fiber. One thing I had never done was spin wool into yarn.

In my down time I've been hanging out at Twisted Warps and Skeins, playing with their assortment of spinning wheels.There are so many factors to consider before choosing a wheel. Just as in quilting, spinning has a vocabulary of its own. While Pam and Dale tried to convince me to take my time before making a purchase, I just knew that I needed to have a wheel at home to be able to practice in a quiet space.

They had me spend some time on this used wheel, an Ashford Traveller, then offered it to me at an awesome price, and it became mine.

This is the first yarn that I spun. It's pretty much a disaster. Too thick in some spots and too thin in others, and over twisted throughout. I was just going to dump it, it's a small expense, just about the cost of a yard of fabric, and I figured I'd learned everything I needed to learn out of that fiber. But no, Dale said I had to take it home.

So I turned it into "art yarn". I've finally found a use for the crock pot that the men in the family despised. Several packs of Kool Aid, and a soak in the pot for a bit, and now I've dyed my first yarn. It's just crazy yarn, and I'm thinking I'll knit it up with ginormous needles and then felt it, perhaps into a seat cover for my desk chair. Or, something cozy to toss into Gracie's crate.

Learning something entirely new has been good for my soul. It has reminded me of how lost one can be when learning a new process, how terms that are second nature to us can be mysterious and confusing to beginners. It's given me something to be bad at, and yet enjoy the process of getting better. As I always say, anything worth doing is worth doing badly for as long as it takes.