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 🙂
Brother motorized drum carder
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!
Three views of my new bobbin. The fiber is from a Cotswold named Ruby 🙂
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
No, I’m not freaking out about Corona virus. I’m trying to keep dye off of my hands and clothes!
Yarn is weighed and presoaked before dyeing.
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.
As the dye takes up into the yarn, the yarn gets a deeper color, and the dye bath becomes clear – all the dye ends up in the wool. It’s almost magical. The dye here is nearly “exhausted”, or absorbed by the yarn.
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.
Waiting for colors to “strike”
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.
