Would it be cheating..
.. to send the lamb fleeces to Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill for cleaning and carding into roving? Even if I don’t have a means to card the wool? I hope not. *smile*
I think I’ll pr’bly still wash it at home, though I might just box it all up as is and send it off to them. I think I have about 3-4 lbs, but I’ll have to figure out how to weigh it (if I dump it all in the mesh sack and weigh myself with the sack and then just weigh myself and subtract, that should be pretty close). I just need to figure out whether I’m willing to pay them $8.25 a pound to get it back in usable form… Considering how inexpensive the fleeces were, I’m tempted. For $33 plus shipping, though.. hrm.
In other news, I think I’m going to bring Rogue with me to the cabin this weekend and seam it up. It’s getting chillier here in the evenings and that means it’ll soon be sweater-wearing season! I’m also going to bring up the Blackberry Ridge Blue Willow cardigan sweater kit (with blackberry trim) my sister got me for Christmas last year and try to get it started. This one scares me a little because it’s really gorgeous and I don’t want to screw it up, but I also really want to wear it, and that won’t happen until I finish it! I’ll have to look tonight to see what needles I need for it – I think last I checked, I didn’t have all the needles I’d need, but that might have changed.
Might as well be WTF Wednesday..
Conjoined squirrels. Nope, not kidding. Unfortunately, the story did not have a happy ending. 
Here’s a happier story about “George”. I drive by this farm on my daily commute and we usually notice George and what he’s up to.
Too bad George wasn’t in the Cornell Dairy Store to fend off Cornellia’s kidnappers.
Brought to you by my morning headline scan.
Quickie.
Started spinning the rest of the superwash merino last night. It’s slippery stuff and I noticed that I tend to spin thin at the start of a skein (likely because the spindle is lighter and it’s easier to spin thin with a lighter spindle (or so I’m told)), so that combined with the slippery means I drop the spindle more often. I am trying to spin thicker, but that whole consistency thing is still a work in progress.
Need to clean more Clun Forest fleece, but I’ve been dithering on how. I still need to figure out suitable drying space and that’s the sticking point at the moment. Maybe I’ll run out and look for some sweater drying racks over lunch or after work. It would be cheaper to make my own, but I’m impatient and don’t want to take the time to figure that out and do it properly.
Have some data work to do this afternoon*, though, so I’m not sure I can escape for lunch and still get it done. But it’s for a meeting tomorrow morning, so if I don’t get it done this afternoon, I’ll likely do it from home tonight. Which will cut into the washing/spinning time, but since I need the day job to pay for the hobbies, it’ll have to be okay.
*Which really doesn’t tell you much.. let me try to elaborate.. much of what I do is count beans and format tables that contain the bean counting. I do a lot in Excel with frequency counts, in other words. This is tedious and really not something you need someone with my training to do, but it needs to be done and I’m the only one in my office**, so I get to do it. When I refer to “data work” I’m usually referring to something more involved – either querying our eccentric and quirky and non-normal (in the database structure sense of the word) data system, and/or actually creating statistical models and running analysis, usually in SPSS. The later is more in line with my background, and I find it much more interesting, but it’s also not seen to be as “necessary” as the bean counting stuff, so it often has to wait until the bean counting stuff is done. And it seems that there are always more beans to count, and different ways people want them counted, so the bean counting is almost never done.
**Though there’s talk of me getting a student worker for 10 hours a week. This will be good if it’s someone I can train to use Excel well because then I can run the bean counts and pass them off for formatting. I get giddy thinking about how much more data work I might be able to do if this happens. Yup; there’s a reason my Margi’s nickname is “Data Call Girl”***.
***Someone else is “Data Slut” – because she’ll purportedly do anything for data. Upon hearing this, I stated that it had to be *good* data, which meant I was christened as something appropriately more selective. *shrug*
P is for Plied Yarn.
Yeah, I know I’m doing things out of order and I’m missing an “O” post, but I have the “P” post ready and don’t want to wait to post it until I come up with a suitable “O” post. Sorry!
As alluded to earlier, I plied my first yarn* this evening.
First, here’s a shot of the singles. Again, this is superwash merino lambswool in “steel”. The singles were a little rough in spots, but it was mostly pretty consistent. The weight varies from laceweight to near fingering weight throughout the skein, but I was hoping plying it would even most of that out.
I didn’t take any pictures as I wound the “bracelet” for Andean plying, mostly to spare anyone what could be interpretted as an obscene gesture. *smile* I wound it up on my hand, but by the time I was finished, there was no way it was going to slip over my wrist. I ended up just sliding it off my hand and it held together well enough that I just spun from it as if it were a center pull ball. It worked pretty well, though I did run into one rather large tangle that took a bit to work through.
As an aside, a full drop spindle’s worth seemed an awful lot to try to wind around my hand. As I neared the end of the winding, I was afraid I was going to start losing loops off my thumb or the end of my middle finger. I think for smaller amounts, winding around the hand will work okay for me, but I’m going to try Rosemary’s paperback-and-popsicle-stick trick next time (isn’t her red yarn beautiful?!).
The hardest part was that I couldn’t remember which way I “normally” spin the spindle. I’m pretty sure I spun the singles clockwise, so I plied the yarn counter-clockwise and since by the time I reached the end of the “bracelet” the yarn was more or less naturally plying in the same direction, I’m guessing that was correct. But it’s something I’m going to have to remember to make note of until I learn to tell just by looking at the singles themselves.
Because of the tangle it took me a little longer than I wanted to wind the “bracelet” and ply the yarn – pr’bly about 3 to 3.5 hours total (we watched one DVD of Aeon Flux and one episode of Carnivale, which I think works out to just over 3 hours). Not the most time efficient, I’m sure, but not too bad for my first time plying!
I feel like I might have overspun the plies, but I’ve been warned that when plying if you don’t spin it enough it will fall apart. I’ve also been warned that plied yarn grows when you wash it, so what might look like overspun yarn turns out to be just fine.
You can also see in this picture the vendor information and the rest of the roving I have yet to spin. I really can’t recommend Ursula’s Alcove enough – she’s a very knowledgeable spinner and terribly friendly and helpful, especially for folks just learning. Nor can I complain *at all* about the price for this roving (especially after some of my more recent purchases!).
There’s still some residual twist in the yarn – not sure if it’s from overspun singles or overspun plies – so I wound it off onto my little niddy noddy and will steam it to set the twist in the next day or two.
In the end, I’m happy with the plied yarn. It’s slightly thicker than I’d been aiming for, but still well within sock knitting weight. It’s much softer than I thought it would end up, too, which is good. I’ll pr’bly run some reinforcement yarn in the heel when I knit them, or drop down a needle size to do the heel flap so it’s a more dense fabric, but otherwise, it should make lovely socks.
And since I steam set the twist on the most recent skein of Shetland singles so I could use my niddy noddy, here’s a shot of those, too:
Still haven’t figured out what to make with the Shetland – I have quite a bit of it, but as it’s really my first handspun, I’ve found I’ve been terribly picky about what I consider suitable for it.
* Or at least, my first successfully plied yarn!
N is for trying something NEW!
So, yesterday, I got a big bag stuffed full of two lamb fleeces and I really couldn’t wait to dive right in and try to wash some. I read some good web tutorials, got some advice from much more experienced friends and then just dove right in. Rather than post each picture of the process separately, and in keeping with the theme of the post, I’m trying some NEW and posting a “film loop” of the 7 photos I took during the process.
The first picture in the loop shows the supplies I started with – 2 large rubbermaid bins (at the recommendation of Jennifer as she suggested it would be easier to just transfer the fleece from one bin of hot water to another than to find someplace for it to sit while I emptied and refilled a single bin), a bottle of original scent Dawn dish detergent, a large mesh laundry bag (I looked for lingerie bags but couldn’t find any at the local catch-all stores, and was too impatient to wait until we could get into town again), and, of course, my Big Bag o’ Fleece(tm).
The fleece is raw and I believe not really skirted, though I could be wrong on that. There’s plenty of vegetable matter and sheep poo in it, but in selecting bits to try to wash first, I tried to avoid anything that looked really nasty – and actually, those bits will pr’bly just get pitched. In the end, I pr’bly tried to wash too much at once – some of the inner bits didn’t really get clean, though it appears that the lanolin is largely gone, so the detergent did it’s job.
Jennifer recommended that I pre-soak the fleece before the first washing if it was really dirty. I figured a pre-soak couldn’t hurt and after seeing the nasty, nasty water from the pre-soak, I’m glad I did it. Ew!
I did two washes and the water from each step got less and less dirty, so I felt pretty good about that. I also did two rinses, just to be sure and the water from the last rinse was pretty clear, so I took that as a good sign. It also helped that Meehesh, who was raised on a farm and has helped her mom wash fleece *lots* of times, was over and could help reassure me that, no, I didn’t felt it, and yes, I’d done the right things.
Meehesh helped me take it out of the final rinse and held my hand (well, you know what I mean) as I put the wet fleece in the washer for the spin cycle. I used the delicates cycle and didn’t let it spin all the way out – I was too nervous that it would be too much agitation! – but it came out just slightly damp and completely unfelted. Whew!
We spread out the fleece to dry on some baking racks in the bathroom and left the bathroom fan on overnight. In spreading it out, we found some bits that didn’t get as clean as I’d have liked, but again, I think that’s just because I tried to wash too much at once. I turned it over a bit before going to bed so that the bottom could get more air circulation. This morning, the fleece is pretty dry, though there were still a few slightly damp bits that I turned up, so it’s still spread out. Again, at Jennifer’s recommendation, I plan to put the clean(er) fleece in a pillow case for storage.
A couple other notes:
1. I barely made a dent in my Big Bag o’ Fleece(tm) with what I washed. Guess I’ll be spending a lot of time in the next week or so doing this! For the next few days, though, the fleece will have to hang out in a rubbermaid bin as we’ll be busy.
2. The staple is shorter than I’d hoped – in some places it’s only about an inch long – and there are some bits that are clearly unspinnable (face fleece and the like), so I’ll need to sort that stuff out when I card it.
3. I will definitely need to card it. I had a romantic hope that I would be able to spin it right off the lock, but there’s really no way I’ll be able to do that. So I’m going to need to beg or borrow a set of wool cards in order to go any further with the process.
4. The large mesh laundry bag worked very well. I just need to not overfill it next time.
5. I need a better drying arrangment. Meehesh was telling me about her mom’s drying racks, which were made of something similar to the mesh that my laundry bag is made from, stretched out on wooden dowling and stackable. The mesh laundry bag was only about $5, so I’m thinking of stopping and picking up a couple more to cut up and make into drying racks. Conveniently, I’m going to my parent’s this weekend and mom sews and dad’s a woodworker, so I’m sure we can put something useful together.
All in all, though, very untraumatic and surprisingly unstinky. The water was a bit yucky from the first rinse, but I guess that’s to be expected. I have a lot more to process, which is a little daunting, but it’s not difficult, so I’ll just have to work through it.
And now I’m off to find some good combs to add to my birthday and holiday WishList!
Progress of another color.
Nope, still no more scraping on the porch. Jack slept poorly last night and woke up with an achy and generally unhappy shoulder that meant he wasn’t sure about trying to spend a couple hours on hands and knees to finish the scraping. No worries; our house is 90 years old, so it’s pretty easy to find other things to do if I am feeling motivated.
And I was, so I decided to strip more varnish in the dining room. The main doors and such are done-enough for now, but I’d been dreading starting the 8-inch floor board, so decided I might as well stop putting it off and give it a go. And it is tedious – the taping is futzy, the quarter-round piece of trim at the bottom is annoying, it’s a fair amount of time contorted on hands and knees – but it’s not difficult and I got the larger piece finished (about half of the room). There are two smaller pieces, one of which might get done yet this week, and one that will wait until we’re ready to re-stain it all because it requires moving a rather large cabinet/pantry to get to and since it holds all of our dishes and a fair number of our kitchen appliances, we only want to have to move it once.
While I was waiting for the strip goo to do it’s magic, I got out our little Ryobi Corner Cat sander (ours is the corded version, though) and sanded the door frames and window that had already been stripped. While I was doing that, Jack came down and decided to try to clean up the kitchen side (the painted side) of the one door frame with the heat gun. Both the sanding and the heat gun paint clean up worked well and Jack got the underside bits of the door frame that I can’t really reach safely, so all in all we had a fair bit done by the time we decided to stop for an early dinner (we usually eat a late-ish breakfast and an early dinner, and skip lunch, on days we’re both home).
After dinner I was still feeling a bit restless and decided to attack the rest of the door frame with the heat gun. As I’ve mentioned, there are at least 7 coats of paint on the woodwork in the kitchen (except for the new doorway into the bathroom, which appears to only have one coat). These seem to have been applied on top of the existing varnish, so when you heat it all up with the heat gun, the varnish goes gooey and the paint more or less just peels off all in one piece. It’s not quite that simple, but it’s also not anywhere near as scraping-intensive as the porch has been.
And I’m happy to report that though I’m now more achy than I was, one of the three door frames in the kitchen is now completely free of the offending light teal green paint. I’d post a picture, but it’s still a bit sloppy, so I want to clean it up a bit more first. It also will need a final coat of the strip goo because gooey varnish is annoying to scrape with a heat gun in one hand, but one coat will be infinitely preferable to the 6 or so it took to go through all the paint!
Tomorrow I have to head into town for a couple hours for a meeting for work and we have to run a few errands (need to get a poster frame for the crane poster I got at the bookstore clearance a few weeks ago; need to get more strip goo; need to stop and deposit a reimbursement check), so we might be less ambitious at home, but you never know.
In knitting news, I got Sensational Knitted Socks today from Zooba and have a feeling it’s going to become one of my staple reference books for socks. I’m also contemplating making socks with some of my handspun, knit on a smaller than normal needle to make a more sturdy fabric. I’m a little unsure of how they’d hold up, but I think I might give it a try with some of the Shetland from Cate and see. I need to get another project on needles before we leave for the Cities since I don’t want mom to see her holiday gift (even though she picked it out) until Christmas!
Melancholy, but getting better..
Despite what was not a bad weekend, I find myself in a melancholy mood this evening.
Friday night at the fair was a little odd, but not terribly surprising. When you’re sitting at a booth for the Child Abuse Prevention Council, it’s really not very surprising when people don’t want to stop and chat, I guess. I mean, no one wants anyone else to think that they might *need* information provided by such a group, and in all honesty, the booth was not really all that inviting. So I spent a couple hours hanging out with a very nice, if rather shy, 16-year-old girl and answering occasional questions about HCWR. And knitting. I got several inches of mom’s Panobo shrug finished, but, you know, since she checks in here every now and then, no pictures. Yet. *tease*
I also touched base with a couple of folks running for state office in this area. This is by far the most .. bizarre effect of being involved with the BOD for HCWR. Local candidates *remember* who I am when they meet me. It’s .. odd, especially for someone who tries to stay behind the scenes. But a couple local candidates have gotten to the point where they’re *people* when they talk to me, not *candidates*, which I have to admit makes me want them up there in the state legislature all the more. Knowing who they are behind their platforms and campaign materials goes a long way toward me believing that they really do believe the same sorts of things I do. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but talking to one candidate about how exhausting it can be to get up and milk the cows, then run out and pick up his grand-daughter before heading out to a community parade, followed by a brief appearance at a different community on the other side of the district, and then by a stint at the county fair, only to look forward to having to milk the cows again when he gets home.. *shrug* I trust him. I trust that he really *does* want to do this because he cares about the *people* in this district. Yeah.. not sure that really gets it, but.. yeah.
Saturday was good, if ridership was lower than we’d hoped. But everyone who rode was really wonderful. Just Good Folks(tm). There were some frustrations with the map, some confusion about the sheer number of different raffles/drawings/give-aways that were happening throughout the day (there were, I think, at least 5, which is admittedly a bit of overkill), but mostly, folks seemed to enjoy themselves and enjoy the route we planned. I kept a list of the things people mentioned that could have been improved, or that were confusing, so next year we’ll be able to make it an even better experience.
Today, we tried to sleep in, but there’s a new ‘hound somewhere in the neighborhood that starting howling at least four times between 3 and 5 a.m. Ugh. We sleep with the windows open because it’s cool enough that way, but had to shut the bedroom windows at 4:30 a.m. just to try to snatch a few more hours of rest. Fortunately, we didn’t have any really solid plans for the day – just a quick run up to the county fair to check things out (and pick up lawn signs for the aforementioned candidates) – so we both napped in front of a movie this afternoon. The porch didn’t get scraped, but that’s not such a big deal. I’m sure we’ll work on it sometime this week.
In spinning news, I’ve been working some more on the Shetland from Cate. Now that I have some more wool coming in for my small but growing stash, I figure it’s safe to spin what I have already. I still have a bit of the Shetland to spin, but that’ll allow me to compare it with the merino I have coming. I also got an email this evening from my friend on the farm with the Clun-Forest sheep telling me that even though I wasn’t able to make it out to help them shear, they set aside not one, but TWO(!) lamb fleeces for me!! I can’t wait to get them and take my first foray into cleaning and processing raw fleece. And with two fleeces, I’m sure I’ll have enough to make something really wonderful from the yarn. So in the span of about a week, I’ve managed to go from a small but manageable fleece stash to more fleece than I know quite what to do with (well, not really.. I already have ideas for what I’d like to eventually make with most of it)! *squee*!!
And now, after writing this post (and a few intervening emails), I’m happy to report that I’m no longer feeling melancholy. Instead, I’m rejuvenated and off to spin some Shetland and wonder about the joys(?) of cleaning my first raw fleeces.
Drive by..
Still here.
Cate is once again my hero this week.*
I did get 3 lbs of merino roving (!) and I’m off work all next week, so I’m sure I’ll start to spin some of it. Can’t wait! I’m thinking of trying to spin it so it’ll be DK-weight (I think.. I always mix up which of DK and sport weight is lighter) when plied so I can make a sweater out of it.. I even have one in mind (one of the ones from Inspired Cable Knits, but I can’t recall the name at the moment), so here’s to ambition!
In the meantime, I’m off to sit at the Child Abuse Prevention Network booth at the county fair tonight and to try to sell more raffle tickets for HCWR’s rally raffle tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll be running around for registration and manning stops all day and then helping out where I can in the early evening for the Rally. Sunday we’re going to try to finish scraping the porch so we can investigate renting a floor sander Monday or Tuesday and apply the sealant Wednesday or Thursday.
* For those interested, US News & World Report annual college rankings were released to the public today; they were released under embargo to colleges on Wednesday, but apparently US News only notified Public Relations folks of this, so those of us in IR were left in the dark unless our PR folks clued us in. Mine didn’t, but an off-hand comment from Cate did, so I was able to track down the rankings and get copies, which ended up being a good thing because I’ve talked to two members of the press so far today already. (CRAZY! Who wants to talk to an institutional researcher for a news story?!)
*mubletypeg*
The prophesized summer slow down has finally arrived. This week is slow.. it’s only Tuesday and it’s s.l.o.w. And while this should be a great opportunity for me to work on some of those other projects I have in mind, I’m having a hard time motivating to start something new that I know I won’t be able to finish before I get crushed under the boot heel of oppression caught up in the fall frenzy.
The cucumbers in my garden seem to be growing at a near-perfect rate. I’m getting one-per-day-or-two, which means I get to eat garden fresh produce every couple days without getting sick of eating cucumbers ad naseum. Here’s hoping next year I can get cukes *and* tomatoes..!
I’m tempted (*a LOT*) by the roving Mary Kay is selling. I am pretty sure I can justify the Khaki and Peacock merino, but I’d really love to get one of the larger lots of either the Rambouillet or the Bio Clip(!!) Merino. However, at $2.50 an ounce.. ouch. :/
Which reminds me, I’m not going to be able to go help shear Clun Forest lambs after all. The shearer had a conflict, so they moved the shearing to this weekend instead of last weekend, and I’m committed to the motorcycle rally for HCWR all day Saturday, so there’s no way I can get out there to help. Which I’m pretty sure means I won’t be able to get a fleece because they have a deal with the shearer where he just takes all the fleece so they don’t have to figure out selling it and I’m pretty sure they won’t want to be bothered trying to keep one out for me if I’m not there. So I’m bummed, but I s’pose there’s always next year.
Oh! But it appears that Stephanie, aka The Yarn Harlot, will be within striking distance September 10. She’ll be at Yellow Dog Knitting in Eau Claire, WI. Who’s up for a road trip?
