Making Yarn -- New thrills

Apparently, my embroidery wants its own style of yarn.

Shetland Hogget singles.

My default singles, spun over months on a 19 gram spindle
then plied to suit for knitting or tapestry ,
 has been perfectly satisfactory for years.
Now, however, it  seems lumpy, thick and inconsistent.

So exciting, then, to pick up my 11 gram turkish spindle,
bring all my attention to the drafting triangle
and try to produce a yarn that glides through both needle's eye and fabric.  

2 ply cormo, 6,700 yards per pound

Exciting, that is, until I need it a bunch of it.... now.... and haven't spun it yet--
which was the case with the exhaust baths of last week's lichen experiments,

The last thing I wanted to do was churn out yards of unsatisfactory yarn only to reject it later, so against what I thought was my better judgement I stuffed strips of carded white batts into the dye jars
hoping I could work with it when the dyeing was done.

I much prefer dyeing skeins to fleece.  At least I used to. 
But it seems to me that one of the great thrills of being alive 
​is getting to change your mind.
The batts turned out fine.

With virtually no stirring and the most gentle of rinses,
the wool (once dry), was ready to attenuate and spin
to whatever size my kuchulu and I thought we could make.

This was so thrilling that I dumped the remaining lichen liquor into the pot
and threw in some uncarded but clean white fleece (in net bags this time)
to suck up whatever color remained.

The fiber turned out a honeyish yellow slightly darker than I wanted,
but happily that is the kind of thing I know how to fix.

 
I'm a bit of a stickler for well prepared fiber.
Indeed, it usually works out the best if I do all of my  preparation for not only can I tailor the technique to the yarn I want to spin, but there is also no one to blame but myself if I'm unhappy with the result.
Luckily, I love the whole process
and that is a good thing since
the smooth, fine, heathery yarn I had begun to imagine
depended on a fair bit of it. 

---

I've had this drum carder since 1985 and though the cloth is a little rough it still works beautifully. I've changed the drive belt once.

I teased and carded each color  individually
(every batt twice through my Pat Green Drum Carder ),
 then tore the batts into strips and  blended them with a third (and sometimes fourth) card.

testing the blend

Nothing to do but wind it on a wrist distaff and spin.

Bead or Button +
Bracelet +
cord, leather, cord or strip of worn out sheet in a pinch=
Wrist Distaff (indispensable hand spindle accessory)

My first one
was anything but simple:
Hand spun/dyed silk,
card woven into a band,
embellished with a collection of charms from my past
including a tooth to remind me of the days when sawing the jaw off a bear while its fat gently--and stinkily-- rendered into lard on my wood cook stove was all in a day's work.

---

I have come to realize that all that jingling history
gets jangled with the fiber and makes a mess of careful carding.
Not worth the effort.

What is worth the effort
is pursuing the question of what depth of  brown I'll get
from this pot of late season black walnuts,
and how much more of that white fleece I should devote to the experiment.
I want to embroider in dark, dark walnut brown.

There is much to look forward to. 

​Including, as you can see below, the Second Palouse Fiber Festival
here in Moscow, June 17 - 19 2016
Turns out I'll  not only be teaching at the festival
(Weaving a Bag on a Box and simple Indigo Katazome),
but will also have a show at the The Pritchard Gallery a few blocks away
that opens that very weekend.

Be interesting to see what I'll have made by then,
beyond lots of really fine yarn in a variety of earth tones.