The seasons are turning: an update of sorts

Today marks three months since I moved to Hobart, and it's distinctly autumnal out there today: a sunny day with a cold wind. I found a house to rent while looking for a property to buy, and it has a large converted garage that is technically a bedroom but which will make a great weaving studio. My furniture arrived a month ago, but as I've either been away or had house guests for that time, only the household essentials have been unpacked. The room that will be my weaving studio remains full of boxes, the torture device loom still wrapped in the heavy paper used to protect it during transport.

I've not been entirely unproductive on the fibre front. I've met a lot of lovely people here and have been overwhelmed by how welcoming the local guilds and knitters groups are. Tomorrow I'll be attending the Bothwell Spin-in. And I've knitted a couple of things, including this rather natty Lanesplitter skirt:



I've also finished knitting, but not seaming, the time-intensive knitting project of a whole woman's sweater knit with fine laceweight handspun camel and silk on 2.75 mm needles, the beginning of which I documented more than a year ago (clicky).

This coming Sunday will be my first free day at home in a month, and will also probably be the only free day I have at home for the next month. I hope to get my loom built, and will document the process. I've decided that the first warp in it will be for tea towels, but not what they will look like yet!

Farewell loom...for now

My loom is in bits. Lots of lovely chunky wooden bits. My goodness it was dusty!

There's a very good reason for the "in-bitness" of the loom, because my weaving room has been turned into "packing central". I've accepted a job offer that was too good to refuse and will be making a major international move in a couple of weeks. When I finally land on my feet, it will be in Hobart, Australia.

So that's the last I'm going to see of my loom for the next 3-6 months. The next time it emerges, it will be an antipodean!

What became of the sheep

Oops, I've been having such a busy time I didn't post the end result of what became of the sheep!!!

Here's what happened:


I made a pseudo-boucle and knitted some of it into an ickle lamby.


The tail cracks me up.

The busy will remain for another month or so, because I'm working on cramming as many major life events as I possibly can into November, including just accepted a new job and resigned from my old one. More on that soon. In the meantime, there's actually been quite a bit of weaving and knitting going on....must take photos.

The sheep

There's still a sheep covering most of the spare floor space in my studio.

I washed it - I think - weekend before last, and what with having a lot of wet, rainy weather and a damp house I still keep finding damp spots in it. So on the floor it sits, and every day I check it and turn bits over in the hope they'll dry. But yesterday, I finally got on to the carding bit.

My drum carder is an Ashford, with a fine set of teeth. Perfect for this kind of wool. I've been pre-selecting the wool and choosing the softest, whitest parts of the fleece to card for the first batch. I run the wool twice through the carder. In the first pass, I break the fleece up into tiny locks with the staple intact and run them through it. It's important not to overload the carder or you end up with an uneven result. Then I doff the fleece and roll it into a rolag. You can see the metal doffer (like a lone metal poker) in the image below.
This gives me a long rectangle of carded fleece, which I break up again into thin pieces and run through the carder again. This breaks out a lot of uneveness in the fleece and gives me a nice smooth piece of fibre, with all of the individual hairs pointing in the same direction.

Four hours of this work resulted in this (pen for scale) :
12 nice, large rolags of fleece which have barely touched the whole fleece, but are enough to get me started. I'm pleased with how even this yarn is turning out. It's possible to get it quite fine, but I'm working towards a DK-weight 3-ply yarn (for strength, softness and longevity) so I'm not spinning as fine as I normally do.
I set to on the spinning in earnest last night, and hold hopes to have the first bobbin of yarn completed by the end of this weekend.

Fleece!

I've had a bit of a fleece bonanza lately...although it's not like I need any more raw fleeces to add to my stash! I was at a steam fair a couple of weeks ago, and picked up a couple of alpaca fleeces from a couple who keep four alpaca as pets and had brought them along for the public to see. But they're going to have to go into the stash for the meantime, while I deal with the beauty above.

The fleece in the photo above came into my possession last week. I'll be spinning it, but it's not mine. It's from a sheep of unknown breed, and is one of several pet sheep that the owner keeps. The story goes that one of his neighbours had a daughter who would always ask to be taken to see his little boy, but what she really wanted to do was be taken to see the sheep. Many, many years later, his son and the neighbour's daughter have decided to marry. The sister of the bride is a friend-of-a-friend and asked me whether it would be possible to spin the fleece from one of the sheep in time to make something for them. How can you resist a story like that?

So: the first thing to do was clean and sort the fleece, and toss the lot in the bathtub with a pile of dishwashing detergent. I'm fortunate in that I have a huge old cast-iron bathtub, but even so the fleece filled it completely.
I can tell you, even a clean-looking fleece can hold a surprising amount of dirt! It took four rinses of water to get the water running relatively clear. The fleece then spent two days hanging around, wrapped in a sheet on top of the washing line, to dry. Compare. Before:
After (colour not true, this is beautifully white but it was a dark rainy morning when I took the photo):
It's a lovely soft fleece and I think I'm going to enjoy playing with it. I'm going to aim for a DKish weight, probably 3-ply yarn, and may play with it a bit as well. I'll post more about it as I go.

ps: I actually found a happy hour in which to WEAVE, a week or two ago! I'm hoping that free time to do so can become a bit of a habit again, after the reallyreallybusy period we've had this year eases a bit this week.

It's been a long, long time since I've updated this blog, and that has a lot to do with my complete inactivity in the fibre realm. I loosened off the tension on my loom when I went to sea in January, and haven't done so much as tighten it yet, far less weave a single pick. That's largely because other things are going on in my life. I find myself with little time to slack off on a computer at work at present, and no inclination to look at one once I'm home. In addition, I've been doing all the spring jobs in the garden and working on renovating a flat. Busy!

I've not been totally inactive, however, as the photos below will show. I've still been knitting a little in the evenings, finding it something relatively brainless I can pick up for half-an-hour and put down again. I'm working on a project at the moment that I'm making up as I go along, but I also finally got around to seaming up the sweater I knitted over the xmess break last year. In the finest tradition of yarninmypocket, here's a bathroom-at-work shot:


I made this in some handspun alpaca, in a chocolate brown which unfortunately doesn't show the detail very well in a photo. This is a really simple knit, done mostly in garter stitch, with some increasing and decreasing for shape, and yarn-over-needle increases to make the pretty increases which create the cowl neckline and lacy effect up the sleeves. A close-up of the cowl neckline:

Although I knit this to guage, the small size was still a bit too big for me (just because I'm tiny, I think), so this hangs off my shoulders a little. But that makes it a lovely comfortable sweater which is perfect for those days when you want to hide the body. And the alpaca makes it lovely and snuggly, too.

Another first....

Today, for the very first time in my life, I knitted in public.

Our cruise is drawing to an end and I was unable to do my normal work while standing my survey watch. So, as I was tired, I fetched my knitting and worked on that while watching the data come in, to keep myself awake.

Yet another step towards turning into my mother!