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Socks

I have recently had some success knitting socks. Being the antisocial dork that I am, I taught myself to knit, so I’ve had to break some bad habits (such as total disregard for stitch counts, stitches-per-inch, you know- those fussy bits.)

I’ve joined a knitting guild, though, and peer pressure (OK, maybe it’s pride) has made me step up my game… Rough edges and dropped stitches simply don’t pass muster.

So, after years of knitting I have finally achieved an expertise that might be optimistically termed “intermediate”, and have the minimum skill as required to knit socks… Herewith, the proof!

For the knitters, I can’t point to a particular pattern as this is an amalgam of whatever toe I felt like doing, finding a heel I could understand, and Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-off..

The self-striping yarn worked pretty well, eh?

Yes Sir, Yes Sir, Three (er, Four) Bags Full

I just returned from a day trip to Waldoboro, Maine, to retrieve some 16 1/2 pounds of roving I had professionally processed into roving. Four large bags were waiting for me. This is the result of 19-odd pounds of fleece from three Romney sheep. I apologize for not knowing their names.

This is a LOT of roving!

I had purchased the fleece from farmers who raised the sheep for their handspinners-quality fiber. I then cleaned them to remove as much of the leftover crud as I could find (not all, as it turns out…) and bagged them loosely for the trip north or processing. I was headed to Fiber Frolic and arranged to drop off the bags there.

Nancy at New AIM Fiber Mill washed and picked it, then carded it to roving, all ready to spin.

For those of you that are number people, 19.2# of dirty fleece washed out to 16.9# of roving so there was but 2.3# of waste, including dirt, sheep sweat, lanolin, and (some) of the bits of hay and bedding I missed. But this roving is just beautiful!

The ribbon makes it easier to find the end…

Nålbinding

I’m a sucker for “slow cloth”, and stumbled upon nålbinding, a technique that predates knitting and weaving.

I have yet to figure out nålbinding even after viewing several videos, but I made a couple of needles for the craft. Made of poplar, the were fashioned using a utility knife and sandpaper after sawing a blank from scrap wood.

Dizzing the Night Away

While one can spin directly from a carded batt, it’s easier to spin if it’s in “roving” form, which is a very loose strand of mostly-aligned fibers.

This transformation is accomplished using a “diz”, and I have no notion of that word’s etymology. Or entomology, for that matter. A diz is just something with a hole through it. Mine is a piece of wood:

A bit of fleece from the batt is pulled through the hole, and the fiber is pulled out one side while being stretched out, or drafted, to make it fit through the hole. Simple, really.

Fiber in a batt
Fiber drawn through the diz
Working on it!
And now I have a big bag of roving…

(Oh, and that bit of paper in the bag is a processing tag. It’s a bit of a Tyvek envelope with the fiber and (hopefully) the sheep’s name, written in Sharpie. One tag goes into each wash bag so I can track which is which, as I often process multiple fleeces.)

Happy Spinning!

The Importance of Carding

After a fleece is washed, there are several other steps to prepare the fiber for spinning. First, the fleece should be “picked”, which breaks up the clumps into wholly disorganized fibers.

The next step of carding aligns the fibers by passing them through a set of brush-covered rollers. The more passes through the carding machine, the smoother the yarn.

To wit, here is a picture of a fleece batt that has been carded once, and one of a fleece batt that’s been carded five times.

You get to guess which is which.

My method for carding is to further break up the picked fiber and feed tiny bits evenly across the drum.

Subsequent passes find me pulling tufts of fiber from the end of the prior pass’s batt and feeding them perpendicular to the axis of the drum, which further breaks the fiber clumps.

Five passes produced a very smooth batt. More “rustic” yarns can be done by carding less and having more lumps.

This fleece is from a Leicester wee named Emily.