Spinning Johnny's Yarn Shop and More

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73 de Les N1SV 2025-04-27

Back at the beginning of the year (2024, that is) I volunteered to be Newsletter Editor for the local radio club (Nashoba Valley Amateur Radio Club – NVARC). I also started a monthly column in the newsletter – Working POTA in which I regale the crowds of my adventures in the field making radio contacts for Parks On The Air (POTA).

In the throes of excitement over becoming editor and writing a column, I voiced the intention of making 500 (yes, five hundred) radio contacts each month for the year 2024. I’ve managed to do four months. I still have about 200 to go for the month of May. Conditions have been horrid for much of the month, either from a weather perspective (I don’t like setting up in the rain) or from a space weather perspective (those Coronal Mass Ejections that make pretty Northern Lights ruin radio for a few days).

Yesterday (20 May 2024) I managed to get out on a nice day. I made 66 contacts from a little corner of the Oxbow NWR that intersects the Nashua River, so it counted as 132 POTA contacts. These “two-fers” are my salvation when time is tight and I have to make a lot of contacts.

I used a 20 meter delta loop antenna strung from a tree and staked out at the ends. The base was about 5 feet off the ground, and I’m guessing the apex was around 30 feet. The support was 10# monofilament fishing line. I staked it out with a couple of tent stakes and some orange paracord. The antenna itself is orange. If the pedestrians can’t figure this out, I’m sorry. I can’t make wire blink.

Coverage was pretty good into the Midwest, but I noted late in the activation that the antenna was not plumb, and the Europe-favoring broad side of the loop was pointing at a sub-zero takeoff angle (i.e. pointing below the horizon, not above it).

This is a quick plot of the contacts that I made during the activation (thank you, QSOMAPS.COM). Or so I thought, but then I counted. I had 66 contacts in the log. There are ~33 “balloons” on the map above. Each balloon, it turns out, represents a grid that I worked, not a call. The pattern also reflects that the antenna broadside was not exactly East-West, but about 10-ish degrees CCW from that. The spot that would have straightened the antenna out both vertically and directionally proved to have been paved and thus impenetrable with my tent stakes.

Kind of a cool and rainy day, with Coronavirus restrictions in place, and I swear I’ve seen that episode of Friends at least 50 times. Sounds like an excuse to stay in the basement and card.

I think this fleece is from a Leicester sheep named Emily, but I haven’t dug deep enough to find my process tag 🙂

This fiber has been picked on my “new to me” Pat Green Triple Picker. That’s a subject for another day. After being carded twice (I might go three), I’ll diz it out for spinning.

One might well argue that this fiber is too long for carding, but I think it’s right on the edge. The yarn will tell.

About 18 months ago Peg and I were at the Adirondack Fiber Festival, and Peg all but insisted (please don’t throw me into the briar patch) that I purchase an Ashford eSpinner 3. I succumbed to her wishes and carried the new wheel to the car. I wrote about my plans in December 2018.

I made a few uninspired attempts at a bobbin design, but the project just found itself on the back burner. Until… I found a plea on Facebook for bobbins for an Ashford jumbo – double-drive.

After designing and printing a bobbin for my new friend[1], I set to improving the design for my bobbin, which was too fragile. After a few shots at it, I have a bobbin. and it even works!

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These are printed in Polylactic Acid, or PLA. I have some ABS to play with. It’s the stuff of which football helmets are made. Really tough stuff.

[1] I haven’t actually met Grace, but I designed and printed a bobbin for her (with several failed prints), and mailed it to her gratis, so she must be a friend, right?

I’ve recently entered into an agreement with a yarn shop in Western Massachusetts to sell my yarn. For the past few months I have been spinning, and spinning, and spinning. Now that I have sufficient inventory, it’s time to dye some of the yarn for sale. Plain white yarn can be rather boring.

I’ve dyed yarn before, but never with an eye toward reproducing the color I wanted, so I read up on the subject (internet, of course, but Gail Callahan’s book Hand Dyeing Yarn and Fleece is a great resource). From several sources I encountered the underlying theme of “1% dye stock”, which harkens back to chemistry classes of the past. A 1% dye stock, matched gram-for-gram with the “weight of goods”, provides a “medium” shade of the color, whatever that means. (It turns out that a “medium” shade is just about perfect.)

Peggy selected four colors of dye for the Spring Line – in the picture above, from left to right are “Duckling”, “Ballerina Pink”, “Hyacinth”, and “Sea Spray”. All dyes were from Dharma Trading. For a 1% dye stock, I weighed out 20 grams of each dye powder into a cup, and added a squirt of very hot water to mix that evenly into a paste, to make sure that it’s all dissolved. That paste got diluted into enough water to yield 2,000 ml (2 liters) of dye stock.

I used vinegar as a mordant again. A mordant is a chemical that helps the dye absorb into the yarn. As these are “acid dyes”, an acid mordant is the right choice. I could have also used citric acid crystals, which I also stock, but that’s more expensive than vinegar.

After the dye stocks were made, it was time to dye. For each of the colors, I pulled three skeins of yarn from stock and weighed them. It’s important, for reproducing a color again, to know how much dye and how much wool was in the mix. This time around I’m even writing a dyeing journal so I can remember what the mixes and ratios are.

The weights and dyes I used were:
360 ml of Sea Spray for 358 grams of yarn
390 ml of Hyacinth for 388 grams of yarn
390 ml of Ballerina Pink for 388 grams of yarn
510 ml of Duckling for 504 grams of yarn

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After weighing the yarn, it is soaked in a 25% vinegar-in-water solution, which is about 1.5% acetic acid. The soaking step opens the fiber up to accept the dye and also eliminates air bubbles in the yarn that would prevent the dye from getting to the yarn. Artistic effects can be added by controlling how well-soaked the yarn is, with dye penetrating better in some areas.

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Tongs are used to gently move the yarn around in the dye, and keep the yarn from sitting at the bottom of the dye pot. Notice the Tyvek labels to identify the yarn and list the yardage.

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After the yarn is dyed and drained, it’s twice rinsed in clear water to remove the vinegar, then hung to dry.

After the skeins are dry, I’ll rewind them into nice skeins, attach labels, and package them for shipping to the yarn store.

Postscript:

I believe I’ve discovered another of those “don’t do this” issues as well. The yarn in duckling had just been plied and skeined, not washed. The thee skeins in duckling were uneven in color take up. I believe it’s because the yarn wasn’t clean enough. Live and learn.

While I’m certain I am not the first knitter to come up with this, I can at least claim ignorance of others’ work in the field.

If I am the originator of this idea, I claim copyright!

I was knitting a mitten (hopefully the first of two) and often have trouble with lost stitches, especially if the cats want to “help”.

Enter the lowly rubber band. Slip a loop over one end of folded needles, a quick twist, and slip the other loop over the other end of the needles and you’re all set.

With all that yarn I’ve spun, I was wondering what to do with it. A recent Knitting Guild meeting featured Fair Isle knitting, which involves two or more colors of yarn to make pretty patterns while you’re knitting.

I have a ton of yarn, having spun 12 pounds of Romney roving last winter (with 17 pounds in queue for this winter), so I’m not about to buy yarn for this. Thus, Dye Day.

This actually occurred over the course of two days, exclusive of drying, as it’s been raining for the past few days.

The “acid” dyes I use set, or attach to the fiber, with heat, and acid acts as a mordant, a chemical that aids the reaction. In my case, I’m using acetic acid as my mordant. Better known as vinegar, this particular acid is dirt cheap at what, two bucks or so a gallon? I also used about a teaspoon of Synthrapol, a surfactant that helps the dyes disperse.

The dyeing was done in two batches as the red was an afterthought (have you met me?) The blue came first, and other than adjusting the intensity by simply increasing the amount of dye, was super easy. The dye completely “exhausted”, meaning that all of the dye was absorbed by the fibers and the dye bath was clear. It’s almost magical when you see it.

OK, I’ll also admit that the second skein of blue was an afterthought as well, so the dye pot was too small. It’s my smallest (of course I have more than one…) and the yarn was rather crowded, leading to an uneven dispersion of dye. The skeins are somewhat variegated but I can certainly live with imperfection.

The red dye was a pain in the patoot! I have (and ultimately used) four colors of red. The first go was too orangey, so I tried another, adding some red but not overpowering the orange. Two more variations of “red” got me close to what I wanted.

It’s easy to see that the yarn is less crowded for the red dye, and the color, once I got there, was much more evenly distributed. The red dye did not completely exhaust, so a little bit of orange water (like a tablespoon of Tang in a gallon of water) went down the drain, and the yarn rinsed clean.

While not quite dry, here are the results:

Overall, I’m pretty pleased. Of course, the bar was low because it’s all just an experiment.

Happy Spinning!

I have not been doing a lot of spinning lately, at least at the wheel. I have been playing with my spindle and knitting, though, so I’ve not been totally idle.

But I finally finished spinning the singles from Emily, a Leicester ewe whose fleece I purchased in 2017, and washed that summer. I had drum-carded the fleece after not doing a great job of picking it.

After dizzying the fiber from the carded batts, I spun “singles” (often mistakenly called “single-ply”) mostly using a modified backward long draw. I clearly needed the practice. Let’s just call the yarn “rustic”.

I have five skeins of about 150 yards each, for about 750 yards total. And I only had a golf-ball-sized ball of leftovers, which I chain-plied.

I wound the 3-ply yarn into 2-yard skeins on my PVC tubing winder and tied the skeins in four places to minimize tangles.

Washing “to set the twist” is done in very hot water. Two washes also cleaned out the remaining “grease” in the wool. A couple of rinses and it was out to the line.

After drying the yarn is rewound, and the length is marked on the “work-in-progress” tag.

Skeins are twisted into bundles and put aside, hopefully to be sold.

I have been spinning for six or seven years, I guess, using what many would recognize as a spinning wheel. Many years ago I failed horribly spinning on a spindle, but I’ve seen several friends in the community making yarn the really slow way (the Vikings used spindles to make yarn for ALL their cloth – even the sails of their ships). I thought I’d give this a try.

Well, this picture is of my second spindle, a so-called Turkish spindle. I snap the spindle shaft between my thumb and ring finger, and gradually pull fiber out and let the turning spindle twist it into yarn. After I get about a meter of yarn spun, I stop and wind it onto the cross arms.

The Turkish spindle differs in that it has crossed arms rather than a disc, like most (like my other spindle). When the yarn is wound in a particular pattern (over two, under one), a ball of yarn that pays out from the center is created. I’m having fun but it’s really slow to make yarn this way.

I get a lot of funny looks when I do this in public, but explain what I’m doing and how I do it. I also explain that I spin because knitting isn’t weird enough, and tend to win them over, but I’m amazed at the number of people who have no concept of where cloth comes from.