WnS Ep. 191: So-no progress!
Dear Spinning Circle,
Live Stream: Saturday, March 20th @ 8:30am PDT ** note the time change **
Direct YouTube link here.
Thank you for being here today, especially those who were able to make it to the Live Stream. I appreciate your time spent here in this place with me. You are most welcome. I hope you feel most welcome because you are welcome here.
Enjoy the show!
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If you are curious about what happens in our community, please click the links below, reach out to me: rachel @ welfordpurls (dot) com, or reach out on Instagram/Ravelry/Slack (if you are a Patreon member, @welfordpurls_admin).
On & Off the Bobbins
Disdero Ranch Romney – carded; Ashford eSpinner 3; short forward realigning fibres as much as possible
On & Off the Needles
In Progress – Knitting
Shifty by Andrea Mowry
slightly larger gauge on 3.5mm // US 4 needles; Westcoast Colour Falkland & Polwarth + Silk spins here, here & here
Magnolia Bloom by Camilla Vad
adjusting gauge; tight neckline so deciding what to do …
Custom Woollen Mills 4-ply CVM
Community Participation
For March, tell us about Spring or Fall in your area of the world — share in the episode thread here or comment below here on YouTube!
Breed & Colour Studies – Shetland
Clare shares via Ravelry: My friend WMcN and I dyed a pile of Shetland, white, light grey, moorit and dark grey. Each base in each batch were dyed and then spun in exactly the same way. A straight 2 ply, from a centre pull ball. Here’s a few of the results. I’ve never dyed different base colours before – only white. I must admit I prefer the muted tones of the dyes on the light grey. They are my definite favourites.
Barb shares via Slack: Finished my B&C yarn. Made a 3-ply after stripping the braids and spinning from the same end. Ended up 11 epi with a 20 degree twist angle. Also spun Shropshire the same way and plan to knit Sian sweater using Shetland as contrast.
Martha shares via Slack: I haven’t finished the whole project yet, but here’s 2 skeins of Shetland from Katrina for B&C study! I couldn’t wait to share them any longer! They’re both combo spun using all 3 half braids I ordered in each, and I did a bit of combo drafting in the red 1 too! There’s 1 bump left, I separated out the colour groups from each braid so theres 1 skein of dark, reds and then the orange and naturals is the 1 I have left.
Tamar shares via Slack: I haven’t gotten my fiber yet for B & C but luckily I did have some Shetland in my stash I won months earlier from @welfordpurls_admin . This is spun long draw from pin drafted roving. My long draw skills are lacking so this was a great opportunity to practice. With long draw I always tend to over twist my singles past the just twist locked stage and end up with a yarn that resembles more those spun from a worsted prep. I set out to make lace with a softer ply twist. This is 420 yds/3oz and I feel that I have improved. I just let go with this spin. I didn’t worry about WPI/consistency too much and focused more on taking my singles to just the right twist point where they didn’t fall apart but had enough twist to keep it together. The end resulted in what I wanted. This is soft, airy, and a little reminder of improvement.
51 Yarns – Group B
Holly shares her Tweed yarn exploration via Ravelry: Sigh… this has to be the most over-worked yarn in the history of yarn making… lol – maybe not quite, but I sure gave it a run for my money. This tweedy fiber (which I purchased because I could not find any sari silk that wasn’t back ordered) was purchased from Paradise Fibers, and I do like the content and prep. I spun really fine and chain plied it because who’s going to notice any little bumps in a tweed yarn (and I like chain plying).
Luxury Fibres ALONG
Kathi shares via Ravelry: Since this year’s plan for my spinning is “more play”, I decided to include the recent advent calendar into my exploration of luxury fibres. It consisted of 12 x 50g tops of wool-silk-sari silk blends in different percentages (actually it was a 12 days of christmas calendar, but I opened the parcels every other day during advent – much more manageable than 24 samples!). Part of the samples I spun as my default yarn: 2ply, spun cont. backwards, with a twist angle around 30°. The sari silk had a beautiful tweedy effect, I absolutely love the colours of these yarns. They could be less dense, but I that might be a side effect of the hight silk content. True to my plan to play more, I decided to explore corespinning a bit more – I loved my corespun sample from last year’s 51-yarns-SAL; the green and the right one of the two coral skeins are simply corespun; the two yellows and the red one are corespun and then spiral plyed; the left coral skein is core spun and then supercoiled. Since I loved the spiral plying so much, I spun the blue fibre as a spiral ply: one singles spun fine, the other one thicker, and in the plying I played around with the plying angle, letting the thicker singles spiral around the thinner one to a more or lesser extent. Pure play, and soooo much fun! I love all these samples, and I had so much fun playing around with the different spinning and plying methods! I plan to knit something out of the tweed yarns and use the arty yarns in various weaving projects. More play, since I only recently started dabbling in weaving!
Ingrid shares via Ravelry: I have some more plying to do but I desperately want to swatch this bfl/clun forest and “shop” for a pattern.
Jackie shares via Ravelry: I finished the Forager using the Merino D’Arles I spun up in January. I love the look of this sweater and the yarn is so bouncy and round
Deb shares via Ravelry: The scary next step of this project! This is Rams & Ewes
Jenny shares via Slack: 240 g of Fleecewood Leicester lamb fingering weight, next to skin softness.
Zero to Hero
ianelay shares via Ravelry: I carded these fibres together, with colour layered over each other, and with one pass through the drum carder; got almost 1200 y of 3-ply light fingering: (image looks more blue than in real life); and finished this Tidewater Tee. To use a British-ism, I’m feeling quite chuffed about it! It was also interesting to see how the distinct brown/white/grey/deep purple fibres blended in so completely into the purple, adding only subtle variations in the colour.
Dana shares via Slack: I finished knitting Stephen West’s Painting Bricks shawl over the weekend. I used some handspun from Nest Fiber Studio. I’m so happy with the shawl, it looks like stained glass to me!
Thank you so much for joining me today!
Until then, Happy Spinning!
