Spinning Johnny's Yarn Shop and More

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?

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.

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…

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.

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.

(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!

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.

This is my very first pair of mittens. I’ve been knitting for perhaps ten years or so, but haven’t ventured too far. Scarves, of course, but hats, a few socks, and even a couple of small sweaters for little friends (plus I spun the yarn from Jacob fleece). I had never tried mittens, thinking they would be complex. But other than keeping track of a few increases and decreases, mostly between two stitch markers, it’s just knitting. The pattern came from Berroco, and was in a rip-off pad at our knitting Guild. I had a ball of Lion Brand Hometown USA bulky 4-ply, and pulled out two sets of double-pointed needles (DPNs). 

DPNs have always frustrated the hell out of me. I rarely had enough tension in the stitches to hold the needles, so they’d fall out, I’d lose stitches and everything would fall apart.

Practice makes perfect they say, so I figured I’d practice. And it worked! I no longer fear DPNs. 

It seems I never knit anything just once. The first mitten took about four stabs at it before it looked like a mitten without a thumb. Using the rest of the ball, I managed to get to (after two or three stabs) about three quarters of a mitten. I have to admit I felt betrayed! I took the label with me on a trip to my LYS (Walmart), and found another ball in that colorway. So I bought enough at $2.49/ball to make three more pairs to boot. These red mittens are really #2 & #3 in my mitten-knitting career. And Peggy loves them! Custom-made mittens!

Oh, and I kind of like the DPNs now. I’ve ordered two more sets – shorter 5” needles in “carbonized” bamboo. 

A picker is a device (looks more like a torture device!) that separates wool fibers from one another after (or before!) washing. Washing tends to make the wool clump up, and it’s difficult to deal with in that state. Enter the picker. I’ve seen much larger pickers in factories, but this is fine for home use, once I get it laid out and working like I want.

The nails are bright-finished 16d finish nails that I got at Home Depot, and I used a bench grinder to clean the nails to a nice sharp point so the fibers don’t snag. There are about 150 of these nails in the whole picker, 63 of them in the sled, and another 96 or so in the bed. I was too busy avoiding bloodshed to actually count the nails… These suckers are sharp.

A note to anybody who needs a sawhorse or something like it, I find the Black and Decker WorkMate to be quite handy. My in-laws bought it for me one Christmas, and it’s a great tool. I might need to buy another one. $25 at Amazon, with free shipping if you subscribe to Prime. Much the same pricing at Walmart.

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These are pictures of my picker – while I followed some information that was on the internet, and actually at one point purchased plans to make a picker, this is really my own design, and right now it’s substandard. It doesn’t work like I want it to.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that the nails are not at the correct angle – I went for a 15° angle, which is way too shallow. Other pickers I’ve read about have the nails as low as 45°.

I have purchased more wood and nails to make another attempt at it. This time the nails will go in at about 45°, which is much steeper than I think they should be, but seems to be the commonly-used angle. Commonly used typically outweighs my own sensibilities, with good reason.