I finally finished plying my green sweater yarn yesterday. This was stalled for a long time, but once I actually sat down to do it, I finished all the plying in one night.

Amazingly enough, this is the sum total of leftover singles.



Two of the final three balls came out exactly even(!), and the remaining one only had 7 grams on it, which I chain-plyed into a 10-yard mini-skein.

After a quick swim in the tub, and a swing on the clothesline on a sunny afternoon,



I ended up with this lovely pile of loveliness.



I have 1850 yards (44 oz) of 3-ply, in twelve skeins, which poofed up a bit more than anticipated when washed. I'm not exactly sure why that happened, as I did sample, and I treated the sample the same as the final yarn. I think maybe my singles got just a smidge thicker than my sample, as I was long-drawing with delicious abandon and thinking "not laceweight! not laceweight!"

It's extremely springy and boingy, and will make a wonderful sweater, though I may have to rethink the extensive cabling I had planned. I think that might make the sweater too heavy. Perhaps a plain stockinette background, with one cable up the front and sleeves or around the neck. Must think...

Today was another milestone for the green aran sweater:



The singles are all spun. It was a sad moment when the last bit of the last batt passed through my fingers onto the bobbin.



So where am I in the process? Probably about a third of the way.

• wash
• sort
• dye
• pick
• card individual colors
• divide for blended batts
• card twice for blending
• spin
• ply
• wash
• swatch
• design a cabled sweater
• knit

Those last two steps will take a while. I have enjoyed every step of this project so far. Now, on to plying!

The spinning has commenced:



Seven of 30 batts turned into singles this weekend.

I'm LOVING spinning these batts. Effortless, fluid, beautiful. I switched my technique a bit after sampling some more. I'm now doing a long draw, but still smoothing down the singles and compacting them just a bit as they wind onto the bobbin. As in the original chain-plied samples, I'm doing lower-twist (not minimum-twist, but on the low side) on the singles, and will ply just a bit beyond balanced, to give the finished yarn bounce. On my various samples, at least, this gave an elastic yarn with good resistance to abrasion, but still nice and lofty and soft.

I don't even have to predraft the batts at all. I just tear them into 4-6 strips and spin spin spin.

TA DA!



The carding is done! Thirty batts, made up of fifteen colors, carded three times: once as separate colors, twice to blend.



All together, the batts weigh 3.0 pounds, fluffily fill two plastic containers totaling 114 quarts, and cover a tabletop measuring 13.5 square feet.



Overall, I'm quite pleased at how consistent the batts are. There is some surface variation (streaks of color), but if you squint at them, they all look pretty much the same hue and value. I took these pictures and am writing this post immediately after finishing the last batt (notice the time of this post), so the middle of the night lighting leaves something to be desired and the color is a bit off, but you get the idea. Hopefully the consistency carries through to the yarn.

One other thing I did this week was to spin another experimental sample skein, just out of curiosity.



The original sample is on the top, the new one on the bottom. What I did this time was to take one sixth of a batt after only one blending pass through the carder, when it was at the layered stage, and spin it like I did the first sample, including chain plying. I just wanted to see how the layered batt would spin up.

The outcome was pretty much as you would expect it to be. The colors were more distinct, less blended, and the red especially was very noticeable.



Granted, if this were a true 3-ply rather than chain plied, it wouldn't have been quite so obvious, but even so, the singles themselves often had long stretches of nearly solid red or chartreuse. It's a pretty yarn, but not what I want for my subtle heathered sweater yarn.

So now I know.

Well, it's Monday again. Also, it's March. Is it just me or are the weeks of 2009 just flying by? I actually got a lot accomplished at work today, most of Mount Laundrypile folded and put away, the bathrooms cleaned, and am cautiously optimistic that this week is going to be better than last week (which was less than steller for many reasons, none of which were really that terrible by themselves, but when combined led to what seemed like an insurmountable wall of frustration and grumpiness).

I binged on the spinning over the weekend, accomplishing what may be my personal best to date in terms of volume and time:



This is contract spinning for Tanglewood Fiber Creations; 16 ounces of cashmere/silk and 16 ounces of camel/silk. Two full pounds of singles for sockweight yarn. Spun in ~10 hours over three days. Each two ounce ball took 35-40 minutes.

I love it when the fiber drafts as easily as these preparations did. Long draw rocks.

I've also been carding, and have tipped over the halfway point on the green Corriedale batts. I have 16 of 30 done and ready to spin.



The sweater carding may possibly be done by next weekend!

And then there was a swatch...



Just a quick sample, to see what the color blend looks like when it's knit. The above photo is the most accurate rendering of the color that I've gotten so far. Sort of a greeny browny gray mossy heathered dark green, with subtle specks of the red and chartreuse. I was aiming for a complex color with lots of depth. Accomplished.

We likes it, precioussss...

I was finally, finally able to get back to working on my sweater wool this weekend. Has it really been a full month since I had that lovely table full of carded batts? The first thing I had to do was to divide up all the single-color batts and recombine them for the blended batts. Honestly, I think this step was the sticking point for why I haven't worked on this since I got everything carded the first time. The logistics of managing all that recombining were a bit intimidating.

On to blending! I have 1380 g (3.0 lb.) of washed, dyed, once-carded wool, in 15 colors; a total of 30 batts. Each batt worked out to about 45-55 grams, which is a workable amount for the carder, so I wanted to end up with 30 blended batts as well. I needed to split each batt into 30 pieces.

I was originally going to do this by weighing each batt, doing the division, and weighing out each piece. That quickly went out the window, for fiddliness and because my scale doesn't do tenths of a gram.

Instead, I split each batt down the middle, split each half in thirds, and pulled each sixth into five pieces.



It was easy to do, and the batts were carded well enough that doing it this way was "close enough" to even. The resulting 30 chunks of wool went into 30 separate grocery bags. (Please don't hate me for the shocking number of plastic bags I found in my cupboard. I'm horrible at remembering to bring my canvas bags to the grocery store. I promise I'll do better - I'm quite embarassed by this plethora of plastic! When I bike to the store, I bring my own bags/backpack; it's those spur of the moment grocery stops when I'm in the car that do me in. I should just leave the canvas bags in the car, and remember to put them back there after unpacking the groceries.)

Anyway - 30 separate piles of wool. This is what my living room looked like after all the batts had been divvied up.



Each bag had its handles tied and went back into the big box, so the wool chunks wouldn't fall out and get mixed up. By this point, it was about 1:30 am on Friday night/Saturday morning, and I should have gone to bed. I didn't, though. I kept one bag of wool tufts out and had to see what it looked like carded. Hee hee! I just couldn't go to bed without seeing what the blend looked like.

This jumble of tufts:



turned into this batt after one pass through the carder:



I layered the colors onto the carder in order, first all the greens, then the teals, then chartreuse, then red, then brown. It came off the carder a lovely puffy layered rainbow.



That's pretty, but I want a more homogeneous blend for this yarn. So I split the batt lengthwise into four pieces:



pulled off chunks, attenuated them a bit, and sent everything through again. After the second pass through the carder, I had this batt:



Now that's what I'm talking about! The colors aren't completely blended into mud, but overall the effect is even. Uniformly streaky, I guess. Every section of the batt has every color, at some point in its thickness.



The wool carded up beautifully, without neps (yay!) or clumps. Fluffy, puffy, softy, lofty; this is pretty wool. I'm very happy with the blending. I was going to do a third pass, but that would have blended it too much. I want to be able to see the sparks of the accent colors in the finished yarn.



By this time it was 2:00 am. Like a good little girl, I rolled the batt up, put it in the storage tub, and went to bed.

This morning, I tore off one sixth of the batt to spin a test skein.



Love love LOVE it! This is pretty much the exact yarn I was aiming for. This sample skein is chain-plied, but the final yarn will be a true 3-ply. Other than that, it's just right.



This sample is:

28 yards
8 grams (0.2 oz)
10 wpi
1587 ypp

I spun this semi-worsted, with a forward draw from the end of the strip of batt and very lightly smoothing in the twist, but also allowing the twist to enter the drafting triangle. It's very lofty and elastic.



This is so incredibly satisfying, to go from a raw fleece to that yarn.

I spent lots of time the over the past few days doing woolly things. I do love a fiber-filled weekend! I finished picking the rest of the uncarded sweater wool on Saturday and Sunday, but discovered along the way that several batches needed another wash. Fine wools are just so greasy, and I guess I tend to be conservative when I wash wool. I'd rather be careful and do an extra wash later down the line, than risk felting the wool. As it is, I practically have to tie my hands down when I'm washing wool, because I can't. stop. poking. at. it. Criminy, just set the timer and walk away, Sue... I would like to state, for the record, that no part of Buttercup's or Herkel's fleece felted!

I've been considering getting some Power Scour to try out. I've heard good things about it on Ravelry, and think maybe I'll give it a try. I currently use Dawn to wash wool, and am happy with the results, but after washing Buttercup I realized that even with the concentrated Dawn, it takes a LOT of soap to get a finewool fleece clean. The hype reviews I've read indicate that Power Scour gives comparable results to Dawn, doesn't take as much, and it is better suited to lower water temperatures. Even though I don't usually add any boiling water to the basin when I wash fleece with Dawn, if Power Scour gives the same results in my hottest tap water, using much less product, I'm willing to give it a go.

Those five batches weren't super-greasy, but enough to leave a pretty good film on my hands while I was picking, and I didn't want that gunking up my carder. Plus, VM falls out better if the wool is squeaky clean. So anyway, I finished picking everything Sunday night, and then washed the five batches that needed it.Last night and tonight, I got the rest of Buttercup's wool carded through the first time. What a glorious sight in my dining room!



Now I'm ready to blend!

Backing up a bit to recap, last Saturday was a majorly fibery day. One thing I did was to start spinning the brown Border Leicester/Romney wool. It's drafting like a dream now, after carding, and should be lovely yarn for an outerwear garment. I think I have four batts left to spin, then will 3-ply the singles and add the yarn into the pile of odds and ends that may eventually become another sweater.



After two batts of that were spun, and I picked a couple batches of the Buttercup wool, I broke out the combs and made a few nests of Herkel's wool.



I'll work through the 150 grams of wool I reserved for the froghair shawl as I get a chance. There's no rush on this, since I'm not even done spinning the first 100 grams I combed. This is definitely a long-haul project.

Then, just for kicks, I carded up one lock of Herkel's wool on my hand cards, and spun the resulting rolag on my Cascade spindle. This was the first time I've tried wool on both the hand cards (only done cotton before) and that spindle (only used silk before). The results were quite lovely:



That little sample skein weighs barely 1 gram (my scale doesn't register amounts that small very well, and fluctuated between "0" and "1"), and contains 28 yards. That works out to about 12,700 yards per pound, 2-ply, and roughly 70 wpi. It's very soft and squishable.



Apparently, there's nothing you can do to Herkel's fleece to make it look bad. Flick it, comb it, card it, use a wheel, use a spindle - it's all good....

Oh, what fun this is! I spent all evening yesterday and most of the day today playing with fiber, and I don't feel the least bit guilty for the housework that didn't get done. Here are the results, complete with a ridiculous number of pictures.

I started with some Buttercup sweater wool last night. As with the brown, this is the first carding (just picked and one pass through the carder), to get it ready for blending. Mmmm, squishy.



After I finished the red batts, I had to try a different fiber. I just couldn't wait to finish all the Corriedale before testing something else.

I have had a piece of an alpaca fleece in my fiber closet since 2003, a gift from a friend. It is lovely, and I haven't found the right project for it yet, so it has been just waiting there, like a treasure in the bank. Last night, I decided its time had come. I still don't know what project it will become, but it was time to graduate to becoming a batt or two.

This is a cria alpaca blanket. A cria is a baby alpaca, and has the finest, softest fiber of all alpacas (...beautiful...), the blanket is the portion of the fleece from the back and upper sides, and is the finest and softest of any given fleece (... incredibly gorgeous...), and this particular fleece is a natural colored true inky black (...heart-stoppingly breathtaking...).



Natural-colored jet black cria alpaca blanket. It really doesn't get any better than this. The staple length is about 4", it has a gentle but well defined crimp, has no guard hair at all, and is so incredibly soft that you can't even really feel it. The carder did a great job. I picked the locks open and sent it through three times, and the result is a thick, puffy, even batt of pure deliciousness. It is so black and soft and non-reflective that it looks like a black hole in all the pictures I took. It looks like that in real life, too.

Ability to card super fine alpaca: Check. Huge success. Hooray!

Today, I did another batch of Buttercup's wool, this time one of the two chartreuse batches.



Again, one time through the carder. I picked open the second batch of chartreuse, but it felt a little greasy still, so I washed it again and will card it tomorrow. I also picked open the lighter teal batch, in preparation for tomorrow. Here's the progress so far.



After finishing that, I saw that the bag of black alpaca was still sitting next to the carder. I couldn't resist any longer. I needed to make a blend.



I weighed out 35 grams of the black alpaca and 15 grams of some tussah silk that has also been in my stash for many years (This bag of tussah never ends. I bought 1 pound of top from eBay shortly after I started spinning, and have been using it off and on since then. Every 100% silk spinning project I've ever done has been from this fiber, and the ball of top never seems to get any smaller.)

I started by putting a good layer of alpaca on the carder, probably about a third of the total alpaca. Then I added a layer of silk by toploading. Silk by itself is so fine and slippery that it tends to stick in the lickerin drum, and is hard to card alone. Toploading is just that: apply the silk directly to the large drum while it's turning. You lay the section of top gently against the drum and let the teeth grab it, while holding onto the other end. It puts a nice even layer down. I put about half the silk on in this first layer.



I followed that with layers consisting of another third of the alpaca, the rest of the silk, and the last third of the alpaca.



The batt looked like this after one pass. Not very blended.



I split it lengthwise into four strips, pulled chunks off, and spread them out into thin layers before feeding them into the carder.



You want the layer of fiber to be thin enough to see through, for maximum carding action and to avoid jamming the lickerin drum. If you feed too much through at once, it will let you know by being hard to turn, and fiber will collect on the lickerin. With the Strauch carder, when you get it right NO fiber collects on the lickerin drum other than short second cuts. Those sort of sit on top of the lickerin teeth and can be picked right off.

The batt looked like this after the second pass through the carder. The silk is still a little clumpy and not thoroughly blended, but I think with a good predrafting or pulling the batt through a diz, this would be very spinnable. Alternatively, use it as is for a textured yarn.



I was after a smooth blend, though, so I kept going. I split it into four strips and pulled off chunks as above, and sent it through a third time.



This is much more blended, though still not completely homogeneous. Actually, it looked a lot like Louet Merino/silk top.



I sent it through a fourth time, though, just to break up the silk streaks a bit more.



The finished batt of 70% baby alpaca /30% tussah silk weighs 49 grams, and is incredibly soft. It looks like tarnished silver.



Ability to card super fine silk blends: Check. Be still my heart.

Possibility of hyperventilation and dizziness from the sheer beauty of this blend is a real danger. Must remember to spin this sitting down.

:-)

Oh. My. Goodness.



Ok, seriously? I love this carder. It is solid, well built, does exactly what it is supposed to do, and does it very well.



Ooo, shiny. That yellow sticker isn't kidding, though. Keep your hands away from the business end of this machine!



The bonus fibers it came with were: 8 oz of tussah silk, 8 oz of white mohair, 4 oz of fawn alpaca, 4 oz of bamboo, 4 oz of faux cashmere (nylon, very soft), and 4 oz of Icicle (also nylon, very sparkly). I'll be doing lots of gleaming blends after my sweater batts are carded up.

I started out tonight with the compacted Border Leicester/Romney roving. I knew that whatever wool I put through the carder first was likely to pick up a bit of dust and grime from the manufacturing process, so I didn't want to jump right in with the good stuff. This wool is not something that I'm deeply emotionally attached to, so if it was totally wrecked I wouldn't be heartbroken, and a little grime wouldn't even show anyway. If it's there, it will wash out.

The wool went from this compacted and slightly matted roving that wouldn't draft easily:



To this, the inaugural First Batt:



A lovely thick and lofty batt, ready to spin. Since I was just loosening up existing roving, I only did one pass through the carder, and it did a great job. It's ready to spin. That first batt was 34 grams (1.2 oz), but the rest were slightly heavier. I'd say 55 grams (~2 oz) is about the limit for this carder, and you'd have to load it carefully and evenly. I carded all the Border Leicester/Romney in about half an hour, and got 6 batts (4 biggish ones and two smaller ones).

Yum.



These will be very nice to spin, and are a huge improvement over the matted roving. Just lovely.



I took a break for a late dinner, and put Emma to bed. Then I dove right into Buttercup's fleece! I've been thinking over the past week or so about how I want to approach this yarn. I want the end product to be a well-blended, smooth yarn, suitable for knitting cables, and I want the color to be fairly consistent from skein to skein.

To achieve this, I decided that I would card each of the dye batches separately first, just once through the carder. This will even out each color within itself and make the wool easier to work with. Since I dyed in 100-g batches, there will be two batts from each batch. I'll have to keep this in mind as I'm blending, and take some from each. For the two main colors (green and brown-green), I will have many batts of each; 8 of the green and 6 of the brown-green. It will be a lot of jumbling-up. I will probably do it by weight, and calculate how many grams from each batt individually, to keep the proportions the same in each finished batt.

In any case, to avoid damaging the carder the first step is to pick the wool. This just means manually opening up each lock, literally pulling the fibers apart from one another with your fingers. This lets most of the VM fall out and lets me pick out any second cuts and neppy clumps that slipped by my first inspection before washing. Not that there really was much VM or many second cuts in this fleece. Buttercup's fleece is a very nice Corriedale, well sheared and skirted, and coated fleeces are always a pleasure to work with.

I started with the brown batch. On the left you see the picked wool, and on the right is the first batt, after going through the carder once. ONCE! Isn't it pretty? I was really pleased, and somewhat surprised, to see how it came out. That batt is almost spinnable as-is, smooth after one trip through, from picked locks! I expected the Border Leicester/Romney to come out nice after one pass, since I was re-carding roving, but this was just a picked mass of wool! Beautiful.



I finished up the brown batch, and have it safely stowed in a storage tub. I can't wait to see that tub fill up. The carder does such a nice job, and I'm over the moon that it's mine. I forsee a long and happy relationship.

As long as I'm careful of those teeth!