Note to self: Blog the Teeswater, the Teeswater, the Cheviot, the 18-ply, the Russian Underpants challenge, the Infamous 8-ply, and the combs.

Teeswater

Once upon a time, there was a recurring theme in a spinner’s life. This recurring theme was an incredibly beautiful, and incredibly long, longwool, and its name was Teeswater.

I heard tales of this marvelous stuff when I was but a wee spinner (this was in the high and far-off times, O Best Beloved - nearly two years ago!), and I shivered with anticipatory delight, because here, clearly, was the Grail of Longwools, the very Granddaddy of Longwools (literally, in fact, because Teeswater is one of the parent breeds of the wonderful Wensleydale). The vision of long shiny curly Teeswater began to haunt me.

For complicated reasons having to do with Hoof and Mouth disease, there are no purebred Teeswater sheep in the US. There is this fascinating thing (please note that I use “fascinating” here in its lesser-known sense of “extremely dull unless you happen to be as geeky as I am”) called the Breed-Up program; through which, thanks to imported semen and a hell of a lot of hard complicated work, US breeders have been developing an increasingly pure cross - I think they’re now producing a sheep that is somewhere around 98% pure Teeswater. But the real and rare breed itself, the true original Teeswater, is to be found only in the UK. And the very best of that pure and true original Teeswater comes from one place and one place only: Higher Gills Farm.

One day, not quite a year and a half ago, a wonderful thing happened. I ordered some little thing from Beth at the Spinning Loft. It arrived in a box that was, well, a little too big for it, and so of course Beth - who had already infected me with the longwool love - had packed it with ample padding. Which padding was soft and shiny and curly and… long. Which padding proved to be a few ounces of those legendary Teeswater locks.

I gasped.

I played just a little with the long soft shiny, and then I carefully put it away, because I was still new to the ways of fleece and I knew I was So.Not.Ready.For.This.

One day, a couple of months later… another wonderful thing happened. I was corresponding with Tsock Flock club member woolforbrains, and I must have waxed eloquent about my fascination with Teeswater, because not long after that I got a package in the mail from England, and it contained… several ounces of the same wonderful Teeswater locks.

Then one day last fall… another wonderful thing happened. Actually a wonderful thing within another wonderful thing, because it happened at SOAR. (Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard about SOAR yet, have you.) During SOAR I got to meet a lot of the imaginary friends who live in my computer, and one of them, SarahW, brought me a gift: half a pound of - you guessed it - Teeswater locks, from you-know-where.

But wait… there’s more. Just when I’m thinking my cup runneth over, along comes another imaginary friend from inside my computer, and danged if yet another wonderful thing doesn’t happen. This time it’s Chalyn, another Tsock Flock member, home on Christmas break from veterinary school in Glasgow. (Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard about Chalyn’s visits yet, have you.) How she could even afford the airfare, after what she must have spent on gifts, I don’t know; suffice it to say that MORE THAN TWO POUNDS of Teeswater locks from you-know-where constituted only about half of the loot I brought home from that meeting.

Christmas indeed. Here I am with three pounds (POUNDS!) of some of the loveliest fleece on earth, come by in the nicest way imaginable, and obviously if I don’t start spinning the stuff I am some kind of a danged fool. What am I waiting for?

I’m not. Not any more.

There are three kinds of fiber acquisition and application. There’s the fiber bought for a particular purpose; you set out to find it because you have a certain project already in mind. There’s the fiber you buy because it oooohhh-shiny speaks to you, even though you’re not sure what it’s saying; this fiber will marinate in stash until its message becomes clear, because until then you don’t know how you want to spin it. And then there’s the fiber that you just spin. And spin. And spin. Because the the making of the yarn is enough in itself. Anything that may happen to it afterward… well, that’s a possibility for tomorrow, but the spinning is now, today, this minute.

As of late December, the Teeswater was now, today, this minute. I scoured it in batches, and I started flicking it and spinning it right from the lock. (Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard yet about my obsession with spinning from the lock, have you.) And when I say “lock” - well, I’m talking 14-inch staple AFTER maniacal flicking, AFTER all the debris and tangles and brittle tips are removed.

(You’ll have to forgive me here. Do I have pictures of all this beautiful fleece? Yes - somewhere. I know I do. But it was six months ago.)

I’ve been spinning it on-and-off ever since. Filled six bobbins with singles. Spun two good-sized skeins of mediumish laceweight just from the flicking waste, carded up with some silk. I’ve saved the last few ounces of locks because I hate to come to the end of it all - but I’ll probably spin these during the Tour de Fleece, because after all the sheep are making more. And the other day, in the interests of clearing the decks for said Tour de Fleece, I ran a Ply-a-Thon and plied up all the singles to date. (Unlike many people I know I didn’t really need to clear bobbins - I only have one bobbin per wheel, so I wind everything off to storage/plying bobbins, of which I have quite a collection. But I still like the idea of the gesture, of starting the Tour with a fairly clean slate.)

That’s just under 2,500 yards of Teeswater 2-ply, plus a skein of silk spun from mawata and a remnant of Bond spun from combed top. (Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard about the Bond yet, have you. Or the combs. Or the mawata.)

(See all those tags? That’s part of my Tour plan: developing good handspun-labeling habits. Bet I don’t need to tell you why.)

Glamor close-up of the Teeswater:

Ditto of the silk:

Bonus effect from the Teeswater - another 1,000 yards spun from the waste:

That’s about 80% Teeswater flicking waste (I flick in two passes; the debris from the first gets thrown away because it’s all garbage and brittle tips and such; the second batch gets saved for the carder) and 20% tussah silk. It’s about the same grist as the other yarn, but has a smoother hand because it’s more processed at the prep stage. That’s what I love about spinning from the lock (Oh, that’s right, etc.) - you end up with a yarn that bears a really strong visible resemblance to the original staple.

Teeswater story does not have its happy ending yet - but it’s only a matter of time.

Cheviot

Once upon a time - oh, never mind. Long story long: at some point last year I got a note from Dan telling me that he had found some Romanov, and was I interested? Of course I was; what’s a Tsarina if she’s never spun Romanov? Then he casually mentioned that there was also some Cheviot available from the same source - extremely reasonable prices, etc. Well, I had just destashed a Cheviot cross because I wasn’t enthralled with the dryness and overall texture, but I’ve had fleece dealings with Dan before and I had a feeling about this - of course I went for it. (Oh, right, you haven’t heard about my fleece addiction yet, have you.)

Excerpt from Dan’s report after fleece acquisition:

I predict liking of the Romanov…. The Cheviot is small and cute….

He was right on both counts. After a preliminary sample, the Romanov is still on the back burner until I can decide how I want to work with it. But the Cheviot…! It’s more than “small and cute” - it’s some kind of a freak. A sport. A mutant. It’s unlike any Cheviot, or indeed any other downs wool, I’ve ever heard of let alone spun. It’s incredibly fine and soft. I sat down to spin a few sample locks, and next thing I knew I had this crazy-fine singles. I swear I hardly felt as if it was me doing the spinning, at all - the Astonishing Freak Cheviot was calling the shots, and the shots were fine and delicate and even. Also mesmerizing.

When I finished spinning the sample I set about plying it, and that’s when the mayhem really started. I tested a few inches plied back on itself into a 2-ply, and it was clear that the yarn was still going to be ridiculously fine. So I doubled that. And then I doubled that. And then I had an eight-strand plying ball… and that became yarn. A 23-yard sample of fingering-weight 8-ply yarn.

Seriously. That blue strand? That’s a bit of our 4-ply custom millspun sock yarn, for comparison.

Dudes. Fingering 8-ply.

I’m still not sure how it happened. It just… happened.

But wait… there’s more.

A couple of months ago I joined a discussion on Ravelry about improvised Lazy Kates. This is a subject rather dear to my heart; I confess I’m proud of my own plying rig. So I sez on this forum, sez I:

I use my squirrel-cage swift as a Kate - if I had enough old straight needles I could do up to an 18-ply on it if I wanted (no, I’m not really that crazy - maybe - but it’s nice to know one’s limits). And lately I’ve taken to putting it on its side, slightly leaning away from me. That way gravity is your friend for the tensioning aspect, because if the bobbins are not horizontal they won’t free-spin and back-spin. Makes a huge difference. The other day I used this rig for a 4-ply with super-fresh lively singles and had no trouble at all.

And a certain wiseacre replied…

Oh, I don’t know… I’d love to see you do 18-ply…. I would bow to your greatness, then.

So I thought, OK, maybe I am that crazy - maybe at any rate I want to call her bluff.

And now - I’m doing it. I’ve combed up a big whack of the freak Cheviot. I’m going to spin a mile of it for Team Suck Less, and then spin a little more… and then I’m damned well going to make 100 yards of 18-ply out of it. It will, in fact, be my Stupid Wheel Tricks Challenge for Team Russian Underpants. And when it’s done… I’m going to demand that bow.

Can it be done?

It can.

Of this I am sure, because yesterday I did a trial run.

I spun up 11g of that Cheviot top at my normal speed, and I clocked about 120 yards/hour. Even if I don’t step on it, at that rate I can produce the mile in under 15 hours.

Behold the Counting Swift/Skeinwinder; no way I’m winding 18 bobbins of superfine singles by weight:

Behold the 99-WPI singles:

Behold the 225 yards of Cheviot singles wound off for future use:

And behold the 1-yard 18-ply sample:

I plied it on a spindle, of course, but at 13 WPI the full run of it will certainly fit through my antique orifice.

With room to spare.

The Tour de France rides today. Let the spinning begin.

Last time you got the people.

Now you get the stuff.

This is partly the last of the MAS&W wrap-up, partly sequels, partly… I dunno, I don’t have to categorize everything, do I?

For starters, I did some shopping.

Remember how I bought these at NHS&W?

Remember how I said that I will never not buy kid mohair locks from Buckwheat Bridge if I’m lucky enough to have the chance?

Yeah. Two weeks later, there they were at MA and I went back for more. A lot more of the exact same… plus a few others.

All grist for the batt-making mill, but I also have an idea in mind for those two specific colors, the teal and the - what would you call it? - I think of it as a midnight violet. Maybe I’ll even play with it a bit during the Tour de Fleece - we shall see.

I also bought some undyed locks in a range of marvelous natural silver-greys:

I can’t believe I didn’t get any of these for me - they were a personal shopping commission for my friend Sarah, who needed something soft and shiny and silvery-charcoal-y to fill a gap between pale greys and blacks, something that would work well with pygora. If I’d specifically petitioned the universe to invent something perfect to order… this is what it would it would have come back with. And nobody had to do any inventing - I just strolled in and there it was; it’s only the loveliest kid mohair on the planet, and it was right there in a big bag, and I just plunged in my hands and pulled out an enormous double handful and said, yessssss this is it plz kthxbai. Done.

Speaking of grist for the batt-mill… I also picked up some banana silk:

Loving the colors and the shininess; jury’s still out on the blending texture. It’s slippery stuff and it keeps trying to sneak out under the drum when I’m not looking; I don’t trust it. It is NOT the boss of me - but I’m not the boss of it yet either. A good flicking helps keep it in line, but that gets a bit labor-intensive.

Still… ooh shiny, ooh purty colors, ooh keep working with it.

The one other thing I bought - again a planned purchase - was a spindle. At long last, after many months of coveting, I have a sweet little Turkish Delight to call my own.

I’m not sure exactly why I waited so long, except that for some reason I had an odd feeling that this was a spindle I needed to buy in person rather than on-line. So as soon as I could get away to AmyBoogie’s booth I made a beeline for the Jenkins box and rooted through and checked out every single one there… and as usual the spindle I came away with was not the one I thought I wanted. I thought I was in love with the Bolivian Rosewood, and she had one and it was indeed very lovely - but when it came time to say “this one and no other” it turned out I was referring to

It completely charms me that he marks them this way, and that he also signs each one on the edge of the arm.

And how does it spin? It spins like… it spins like… well, really, similes are pointless and silly, because it spins like a Jenkins Turkish Delight, and what could be more enchanting than that?

Here endeth the purchases (I was good!), but here beginneth the gifties. I love my friends, and this is why. Actually, I lie - no, it isn’t. But… it couldn’t hoit.

There was more mohair. Patrick had mentioned to me at NH that he was having some locks dyed in a deep wine-red. Sure enough, so he was, and at MA he brought me some.

What is not to love about that?

Don’t know yet whether these will fall into the maw of the batt cave or become a project in themselves; we will spin no wine before its time, and these need to marinate in the stash for a bit before I’ll know what I want them to be.

This doesn’t:

I know that LOOKS like two pools of molten caramel, one of them with cream swirled into it… but actually it is baby camel. Below, 100% baby camel; above, baby camel semi-blended with silk, 50/50. These were a gift from Cathy-Cate, and looking at this picture made me realize that I have got to head up to the stash RIGHT NOW and add these to my Tour de Fleece basket. I don’t care what they’re going to be - I just need to spin them. Because, seriously - why postpone joy?

But wait… there’s more.

Not only did I shop for Sarah, I received something from her by special courier - Lynn brought generous samples of Bowmont fleece to play with.

Saving these for a lock-by-lock treat. I love me some fine crispy crimp.

Last but by no means least, Jesh has started experimenting with bottom whorls. When I saw a picture of this first work-in-progress prototype I told her it had to be MINE… but I didn’t expect her to present it to me. I didn’t even have to steal it from her bag! She just GAVE it to me!

All day Saturday I carried it with me and spun on it wherever I went, and wherever I went it evoked the same reaction: WHATISTHATLETMETRYOMGWANT.

The whorl is ingeniously assembled out of a pair of coordinated drawer-pull cover pieces - kitsch made magically un-kitschy.

The spindle is tiny (why do I ALWAYS forget to put something in the picture for scale? - anyway the whorl diameter is maybe 1-1/2″? something like that) and light and beautifully suited to the kind of laceweight games I love to play. Alas, I didn’t get to keep it long - it had to go back to the shop for further development. Jesh was trying out a new glue, or something, and we learned the hard way that either it hadn’t fully set or it just couldn’t quite hold up to the sweltering heat of that weekend. Well, that’s what you get for being in on the ground floor when something new is still in development… you end up bereft of your new toy while Ms. Perfectionist continues to perfect it. It’ll be worth it, mind you, because she’s also making some slight adjustments in weighting and balance that will make it even better. And then… then I’ll get my baby back and I sure hope she’ll have plenty of material to make lots of little brothers and sisters for it, because I think it could become a hot seller.

I always pretend I don’t care what a tool looks like as long as it works well - and in fact it’s no pretense that if a choice must be made I’ll choose function over form every time. But it’s not a BAD thing to have an excellent tool that also happens to be adorably cute, is it? Such are both these small spindles in their entirely different ways - the Jenkins Turkish Delight and the Jesh, um, I don’t know what its name is so for now I’m calling it Drawers-in-a-Twist.

That’s it for the MA loot, as such, unless you count the fact that thanks to my diabolical plan of Tom-Sawyering Jesh into doing so much of my spinning for me, by the time I left for my slow careful trip home I had ALL the singles spun from my Romney sock batts. These are the ones I mentioned last time, the ones I called “Petrel,” the ones I made for me. If you think you’re seeing a touch of that Buckwheat Bridge teal in here, then you think right and you’re not seeing things:

(Dang color balance. Real color is somewhere squarely between those two.)

As soon as I decently could after getting home and unpacking, I set myself to plying…

… and finishing…

… and now I have a geeky thrill’s worth of 3-ply sock yarn, 375 yards or something, that I only wish I had time to knit.

Here endeth this phase of Blog BACKlog.

I had big plans for filling in the other columns - the regular bACKlog and the Right Now updates, but I’ll have mercy on you and limit those to short-cuts for now.

Right Now: I Coulda Beena Contenda; I Am a Contenda

In the Right Now Department, two items.

1. I didn’t like to mention it while I was still struggling with it (doesn’t do to scare the customers too much), but now that the problem is solved I don’t mind telling you that a week or two ago Club Tsock #3, “Two Cassandras,” was really kicking my sorry butt. I had this very fancy high-flown concept for one section of it, something to do with tangible metaphors for the forces of history and divinity, for irony and reversal, for free-will and destiny, for curse and blessing; something that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt could be rendered into a visual/textural interpretation; but there was a huge gap between concept and realization, a precipice on whose brink I stood feeling like an idiot - couldn’t figure out whether I was a chamois or a lemming. I’m on the other side of that gap now, though I still can’t tell you whether I leapt it or bridged it or flew over it or got shot across it from a cannon (hmmmm, where’d those bruises come from anyway?). It was a design gap, not an execution one - the result is challenging to think about but not difficult to knit. I was going to run on at some length here about the philosophical and metaphysical implications of the way I defined the problem and chose the solution… but I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear that I waited a little too long to write it down, and now all that pontification has quietly evaporated from my head like last night’s dreams. I can’t remember a thing about it. But I’ll have pictures soon.
    
2. ON YOUR MARK.

   The Tour de Fleece starts tomorrow, and I am as ready as I know how to be. Got my team logo decal on my cup-holder (thanks, Kelly!). Over the past couple of days I’ve cleared some decks and done some rearranging and organizing of stash and tools. Last night saw a Ply-a-Thon of outstanding singles - I’ll show you the yarns next time - and a clearing off of storage bobbins and a choosing of fiber; the night before saw a Card-a-Thon of mildly epic proportions; today I pulled apart the CPW and scrubbed out the business end of its tilt-tension mechanism but good…

   

   … oiled everything that could be oiled, and reassembled it all in working order…

   

   … and there it stands, champing at the bit, pawing the ground, straining every nerve for the sound of the starter’s pistol.

   GET SET.

   At its feet, the first wave of candidates.

   

   Clockwise from top left:

   Abby luxury batts in Peaches; my own blend of BL and silk; three selections from David at Southern Cross Fibre: Polwarth roving in Sunburnt Country, luxury batts in Kangaroo Paw, Polwarth batts in Koala. As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to add the baby ca(ra)mel/silk. On mature reflection I’m probably going to pull the two batches of 100% Polwarth for marination purposes - I don’t think I want to spin them without a plan, especially not when I’m going for a personal speed record. The others - I don’t know yet what the YARN is going to be but at least I do know what KIND of yarn I want to make out of them - so they’re good choices because they’re all conducive to smooth drafting, and they’re all things I can just blast off and spinspinspin till I drop or run out.

   Tomorrow, then. Me and my CPW. Each of us like a giant refreshed, ready to Suck Less. Bring it on.

BACKlog: Right to Privetcy

I would like to state for the record, please, that I am not fond of privet.

I recognize that properly tended it makes for a useful hedge, in a good-fences-make-good-neighbors sort of way. But it annoys me. I don’t like its insinuating ways. I don’t like the smell of its blossoms. I especially don’t like the smell of its blossoms when it trumps the scent of honeysuckle, as inevitably it does. I consider it a cruel joke that these two bloom at the same time, almost as cruel a joke as the olfactory conflict between Scotch broom and lilac.

What I really hate, though, is the way it grows, when untrimmed, to second-story-window height in no time at all, really - a matter of mere years of neglect - and becomes a dense impenetrable forest that spreads its leventy-kazillion nasty little blossoms all over the neighborhood with a special emphasis on my driveway, where on day after day of the recent monsoon (I swear it has been raining for at least 12 out of every 9 days for the past two months) I find them piled thick and deep in a drenched layer that completely covers my car. The only thing worse than a metric ton of tiny privet blossoms is a metric ton of tiny waterlogged and rotting privet blossoms.

The stuff’s indestructible, to all intents and purposes, so there really isn’t much specialized skill involved. It’s just not that hard to take a strategic trimmer to it a couple of times a year, is it? Really, is that so much to ask?

Yup, I hate me some severely neglected privet, hate it a lot. Hate hate hate.

Especially when it’s in my own back yard.

Dudes.

I said something incredibly silly in yesterday’s post, and nobody called me on it. Including me, because the full scope of my own silliness didn’t come to me until this afternoon.

The silly thing, and I quote, was:

Colorwise, not exactly what I had in mind - I need some darker red silk for that - but interesting, I think.

I was pondering a related problem today - the fact that I wanted some darker-than-natural-tussah silk to blend with a natural grey/brown wool and I wanted it TONIGHT or at any rate BY TOMORROW MORNING for a project I wanted to take with me this weekend - and I was sadly facing the facts that that just wasn’t going to happen and that I didn’t have an acceptable substitute on hand. And then it hit me, with all the force of ten line squalls.

Dye.

Duh.

Look, I’m not a dye artist, nor do I even consider playing one on TV. I’m not entirely ignorant on the subject, but basically most of what I know about dye is what I’ve picked up by osmosis from working with REAL dyers - that, and of course my knowledge of color theory from my training and experience as a designer, most of which lately I’ve been applying by blending fibers in different colors, some already dyed (by others!) and some not. If you’ve been reading here for a while you know that I have occasionally, in non-mission-critical situations, dabbled with food coloring, but only for the simplest of effects. To all intents and purposes, dyeing is something I am not set up for and it’s something I don’t do.

But there is one thing that I do know how to do with dye, and thanks to Jennifer’s careful coaching I know how to do it properly and I have the equipment and everything:

I can overdye small amounts of yarn/fiber with small amounts of black, like nobody’s business!

That honey-colored natural tussah? could be grey… or darker steel-grey… or almost-black-grey… in a matter of minutes.

But wait… there’s more!

Suddenly a whole new vista opens up, a new vista of intriguing darker shades. The too-bright red silk. The too-bright green silk. The too-bright blue silk. The too-bright red mohair. The too-bright green mohair. The - well, you see where this is going. All those obstacles to the jewel tones I wanted to play with… gone. Vanished.

And thus it is that on the eve of a sheep & wool festival, for once it is I, not Jennifer, slaving over a last-minute dye pot.

I break out my trusty bottle of black Rit - actually, for the first round I break out my not-so-trusty bottle of black food coloring, and I learn that “break” is the operative word; i.e. that that particular dye breaks intriguingly when applied to silk. The results are probably usable for something, though I won’t be sure what until they dry. Overdyed reds and blues, not really a problem. Natural silk and overdyed green… somewhat peculiar. Fair enough. I have plenty of material to work with and I’m just testing.

OK, so THEN I break out the trusty bottle of Rit, and I set to work in earnest. And to make a long lather-rinse-repeat story short… about an hour later I’m drying eight small batches of silk and two of kid mohair locks, almost all in appealingly dark shades. Lightening slightly as they dry, but I can already tell that I’ve got what I want, at least for this go-round, and tomorrow morning before I load myself in the car I will be a jewel-toned blendin’ fool.

Red Silk, Before & After

Blue Silk, Before & After

Green Silk, Before & After, Food-Coloring Version Far Right

Natural Silk, Before & After, Food-Coloring Version Far Right

Red Mohair, Before & After

Green Mohair, Before & After

Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering… I discovered some time ago that an oven with a pilot light is not only useful for making yogurt and starting seedlings; it is also a GREAT way to dry fiber in a hurry.

Oh yeah, baby. You want something darkened, I have got that down. I haz teh mad skillz. Bring it on.

Is it just me? or has Pattern Purdah been coming around more and more often?

I think it’s just me. And I also think Pattern Purdah has been coming around more and more often.

At any rate, I’m freshly, if only very temporarily, out of Pattern Purdah now, having just sent off the files for Club Tsock #6. Unfortunately that doesn’t herald a Big Blog Reveal, not yet. Because #6 has been the Tstealthiest Tsock of the 2008 Tseason to date. So I have to keep a lid clapped on it until it’s not only shipped but received and discussed.

Nevertheless… I have reason to feel triumphant, even if I can’t really share my triumph yet.

I get a brief respite from Purdah, and then I have to leap right back into it. As soon as I can see straight again, I gotta finish prepping Roxie for her public release. Not to mention that I’m already up to my ears in preparing for Tsocks #1 and #2 of the 2009 club season, and organizing all the welcome-y stuff and the site-update-y stuff for the transition. Also not to mention that the strangely-attractive-but-potentially-very-riled-up mob is baying for Swan Lake and I have been promising to deliver SOON.

So it’s about to be a very chaotic and confusing time, even by my standards, and in the course of it all various knitting projects will be hopping in and out of stealth status so fast it’s already making my head spin.

Not that that is anything new, come to think of it.

Anyway, to keep you from noticing the sporadic, and intermittently semi-unsatisfying, nature of the knitting content around here… I’m going to fall back on a touch of misdirection.

Look!

Over there!

It’s soft and shiny!

And it’s dirty and greasy!

It’s…

WOOL.

Yeah, I know, big whoop, right?

Right. Damn right.

A week or two ago I received this box from Beth.

See how it’s positively bursting at the seams? This picture was taken after opening, and it was all I could do to shove the box back together and keep the contents from popping free.

I still don’t quite understand how it was possible to cram all of this into that one little box - the woman is truly a champion packer. A thousand clowns?

Way better. A dozen fleece samples.

There’s a story here, of course - in fact, there is back story and there is front story, and there’s probably sideways story as well - and I’m not going to be able to tell it all at once, especially since a lot of it is still evolving. I’m going to be working on this project gradually and fairly methodically (You! You there in the back row! STOP LAUGHING! I MEAN IT!) - and I’ll be coming back to update it here periodically, especially when I need another dose of OOOH LOOK SHINY to distract you from the paucity of satisfying knitting content. Suffice it for now to say that what we’ve got here, lovingly selected by Beth from her amazing inventory, are two raw ounces of each of the following:

• Merino
• Corriedale
• Polwarth
• Blue-Faced Leicester
• Border Leicester
• Lincoln
• Romney
• Wensleydale
• Dorset Horn
• Shetland
• Icelandic
• Jacob

- accompanied by a couple of pages of notes from Beth about breed characteristics - and I’m gonna scour them all, process them all, and spin them all, taking copious pictures and notes along the way, and eventually, at the end of it… I will have [A] learned something and [B] knitted something unique and marvelous. I hope.

After a bunch of preliminary photographs and measurements (ooooh, I’m being scientific! and ooooh, how I wish I could record the smell and feel of each sample as I can its appearance!) I started tonight with a sample lock of each, as a sort of get-acquainted gambit.

I’ll get into close-ups later on, as opportunity and need arise… but for now here’s a little teaser panorama:

That’s one unwashed and one washed lock of each, side by side for comparison, and already my brain is as overfull of new sensations and realizations as the box was of wool - already I feel as if it’s about to explode.

Not that that is anything new, come to think of it.

I may have mentioned it before. As a side-effect of the way my collaboration with Jennifer has tended to insulate me against garden-variety yarn lust over the past couple of years, my immune system has become severely compromised where spinny stuff is concerned. Fiber. Spindles. Almost no self-control at all.

So I’m sure you can imagine what happened at Yarn Camp.

Yes… here comes another Representative Loot Roundup. (And speaking of roundups… thank you for all the love to Golden West!)

Also - some of the other fallout from Yarn Camp, in the form of stuff I learned to do and am now at risk of wanting to continue to do. In short… blended batts.

I can’t possibly show you all the loot. Seriously. I can’t. I can barely look at all of it myself without getting really scared. (And please notice I am not even mentioning the ingeo.)

But here are some highlights. In no particular order. This is some of what followed me home via USPS:

Upper left: Incredibly soft oatmeal BFL. Below that, a bump of cormo that Beth forced on me. Srsly. Top center - Spunky Eclectic silk, colorway “Rhubarb.” There were two of those and I nabbed ‘em both. I also got two of Beth’s last four braids of Abby silk - one of them is “Coral” and the other “O’Hara” (heh). Underneath? Devastating Romney from Elemental Effects (no linky, but Beth carries her stuff - go look on the shop page, because I’ve already bought the ones I wanted, and of course it’s all about me). No picture can do justice to the colors. They look solid, right? They are not. They are blends of rich depth and subtlety I can’t begin to despict, so I barely even tried.

There was also a big bag of Abby-batt samples, most of which became gifts to local spinning buddies. Ditto the two lovely Briar-Rose BFLs. And Beth gave me a bag of sample fibers I haven’t properly explored yet, including silk noil, camel/silk blend, Norwegian top, and I don’t know what-all other goodies. Oh - also another Spunky Eclectic toy - hand-painted BFL.

And of course… the three Greensleeves spindles.

I am such a fraud. I keep pretending that I don’t care what a tool looks like as long as it works well… but ha! I am as much of a sucker as anyone for the well-made eye-candy. (I was frankly relieved that I didn’t fall in love with any of the Louet wheels I tried, because… I don’t like the looks of them either. If one of them had turned out to be THE wheel… it would have been a terrible struggle.) Mind you, every one of these spins like a dream. But I am deeply shallow, and it was definitely the beauty that sucked me in and held me. I mean… just LOOK.

Ethan Jakob. Bird’s-Eye Maple and Tulipwood, Maple shaft. My new go-to spindle for sock singles.

Vixen. Honduras Red Heart. I already have an older Vixen, a little heavier than this one. Don’t care. Had to have. New go-to spindle for silk frog-hair.

Connie’s Mjolnir. Bois de Rose and Pommel Bubinga, Mahogany shaft. The beauty of the bunch, which is saying something. The photograph doesn’t begin to do it justice, especially the deep blood redness and mirror finish of the middle part of the whorl. I can just sit and gaze and gaze at it.

And it bears repeating: three demon spinners. I can’t tell you the weights because every one of them has a copp in progress. But they’re all light. I think the Vixen is under 1/2 ounce. The other two are around an ounce - the Ethan a touch under, the Mjolnir maybe a hair over.

There’ll be more to say about the copps, too. What’s on the Mjolnir (I can try to photograph it but I will probably fail) is a generous sample from an insane Enchanted Knoll batt, given to me by Ellen. Who, BTW, was a lot more Full of Win than I in at least one respect: she DID take a picture of the Wall O’ Fleece…

Reproduced by permission - thanks, Ellen!

… not to mention a number of other good pictures of the event, including a great one of my armpit - check out her Flickr set.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, what’s on the spindles. Well, that has some backstory.

These are five of the batts we made in the two carding classes (there were a couple of others, but we spun those):

I don’t remember every detail of what went into these, and I didn’t have my act together to take notes, but fortunately I can just look them up here on my handy-dandy handout… oh wait a minute, no I can’t, either. But I did weasel a list out of Abby a couple of days later.

The green is the first batt we made: wool (mixed, domestic) and alpaca; the pale lavender is merino (some dyed, some undyed) and tussah.

Top: “Clown Barf That Works” - merino (some commercially dyed, some hand-dyed) and high-class dyepot scrap, i.e. bits of red and green cashmere/bombyx that didn’t come up to standard; plus some mustard-colored tussah. Bottom: tweed - merino and carbonized bamboo, with tweed elements in the form of scrap cashmere and tussah noil.

This was the second batt we made Friday night - two colors of hand-dyed merino, and some undyed tussah silk. I have Big Secret Plans for this one.

Well, I got these out a few nights ago and studied them some, and thought back to what it was like doing them and what there was to learn from them… and I got kind of fired up. So I trotted out one of the reasons I’d bought the drum carder in the first place. Remember the grey sock yarn in this post? The sample I made then was blended on the fly, using fingers and a dog slicker, and it was kind of a hit-or-miss process. But now we have the tools to do it in style… so I trotted out more of those fibers, and I made my first fer-realz sock batt. And here it is:

Approximately 60% merino, 25% silk, 15% tencel.

How does it spin? Like a real sock batt!

The new yarn is essentially the same as the old, which you’ve seen before -

- 4-ply sock yarn, about 20 WPI. But spinning it is entirely different, and exponentially easier. And that is what I’m spinning on the Ethan Jakob.

So then a night or two later I got REALLY ambitious, and I broke out the components of the scary blend I’ve been salivating over for months. And lookie…!

That is tussah silk (dyed in Kelly’s indigo pot) and English angora (sent to me by Pam). Proportions - approximately 90/10. Not a blend for the prudent or the faint of heart.

Luckily, I am neither.

And did it work?

It worked. I wanted a fine silk laceweight with a subtle halo.

I got it.

Even more so after a little abuse and some swatching and blocking and more abuse:

So that is what I’m spinning on the Vixen.

And I figured out or unvented some stuff about the process that may or may not be old hat to old hands, but for what it’s worth, here it is.

First problem: I knew both from reading and from Abby’s classes that silk is tricky to card and that the way to work around that is to “sandwich” it between layers of something less slippery, like wool. Which is fine if that’s what you’re blending it with, but what if you’re blending it with a MUCH smaller quantity of angora, which though not slippery is in itself tricky to handle? Here’s my answer. A thin layer of angora. A not so thin layer of silk. Another thin layer of angora. Blend. Then break the resulting demi-batt up into two pieces, and use THOSE as the bread for another silk sandwich. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Keep adding silk between layers of increasingly silk-laden bread until the proportions are right and the blend even. Is it the right, the canonical way to do the job? Dunno. Did it work? Yup. Like a charm.

Second problem: Of silk and angora, which is the more flyaway and more subject to static electricity, especially at this ultra-dry time of year, especially if you’re working near a radiator? Oy vey, flip a coin. Put them together and they spell chaos, fine wisps all over the place clinging to everything. And the trusty spray bottle of water, while it does help to damp them down while you’re blending them, goes only so far when you want to take the batt off the carder and actually do something with it.

Sudden brainstorm:

Detangling spray. (I like the kids’ version better than the grownups’, because it smells inoffensively apple-y instead of perfume-y - same stuff, though.)

I have long and bitter experience with the static electricity problem, because my hair is very fine, almost as flyaway as any of the above fibers. This silicone-y stuff has saved my bacon more times than I can possibly count. The trick is - you don’t actually put it on your hair; you spray just a little of it on your hairbrush. And miracles ensue. So the other night, as I was spraying water not only on the fiber and in the air but also on my face and hair, in a vain attempt to get any of them under control… I bethought me of this stuff. Eureka. Light-bulb overhead. Went and got it, and sprayed just a very little of it on my hands. And miracles ensued. I could pick up my batt, and I could re-blend my batt, and I could handle my batt, and I could twist up my batt, like nobody’s business! And it went only where I wanted it to.

So that is the Miracle of the Season for me - the miracle of the batts.

And miracle or no miracle it fills me with a slight sense of foreboding… because now I keep thinking of other blends I want to try, and of other things in my fiber stash that would be even more wonderful if I mixed them with… still other things.

And something tells me that people who become blending fools… do NOT suddenly find themselves cutting back on their fiber purchases.

Time to go out and buy more bins.

Ahhhhhhhhh. I have spinny FOs. So good for what ails ya.

I also have a knitty FO, but you know how I am about that - don’t like to show the FO pictures when I’m struggling through Pattern Purdah.

Of course, this one is SOCLOSE to finished, and after some doubts and vicissitudes I’ve ended up being SOPLEASED with its quirkiness, that… oh, OK. Here’s a little teaser:

That’s actually the penultimate version, not the current one, and obviously it was originally meant to be a picture of the beads rather than of the sock itself. Still, you can see the corner of a lime slice on the right. And a bit of the upper tip of the saguaro cactus. And a little of the salt-encrusted rim of the glass, with the pale foamy-frothy-melty part of the drink showing through. No? Yeah.

Full reveal on that one coming soon.

Meanwhile - I’ve finished spinning the cashmere/tussah.

It’s really hard to tell sometimes whether I’m more a process knitter or a product knitter - even harder to tell with the spinning. Hardest of all with something like this, because it was so delicious to spin that I couldn’t stop, and as I came toward the end I felt really really driven to finish and at the same time I really feared the post-yumminess letdown.

In the event - it was OK.

Yeah, there was a little regret that my superlovely spinning treat was all gone. But having the finished yarn in my grubby little mitts goes a long way toward making up for that (and I haven’t even started swatching with it yet!).

About 840 yards, I think - 2-ply, roughly 3360 YPP, haven’t bothered to measure WPI. Soft and shiny like I can’t begin to describe (though I’m thinking the skein could use a little more abuse to bring out its subtle halo just a tiny bit more…?). Supremely strokable.

By way of comforting myself for coming to the end of the beautiful soft shiny stuff… I turned my attention to another kind of beautiful soft shiny stuff. Now I’m obsessed with this:

That’s the Merino/Tencel I got at Rhinebeck from Creatively Dyed, about 58 yards, Navajo-plied to keep the colors from barber-poling. I’ve since wound this plied yarn onto a bigger spindle - I’m now using the Hatchtown Production, which can hold a LOT - so I can make a bigger skein instead of tying a bunch of little ones together. As I finish spinning each copp I’m splicing it on and plying, and I think I’ve got about 200 yards so far - also the hang of the Navajo thing, which I must say is big fun.

And I am in love, in love, in love. Remember “Ashes of Roses”? I don’t know if this colorway has a name, but it might as well be “Ashes of Rose-gardens,” what with the soft fadey silvery pinks and the soft silvery grey-greens and the soft silvery almost-whites. It’s ridiculously smooth and easy to spin; so much so that I keep telling myself I should probably start spinining something REAL and CHALLENGING just so I don’t get too soft and spoiled. And then I tell myself to shut up, and I go right back into the happy trance and just keep on spinning it.

Plies up nice and even, too - and shiny.

I’m right back in the same cycle. Can’t stop. Don’t want it to end. DO want it to end, so I can see the full scope of the finished skein and knit something out of it. But don’t want to have to stop.

Then again, when I do have to stop… well, then I can go fall in love with the Merino/Seacell. Or maybe the Yak/Silk. Or the Icelandic Lamb blend.

It’s all good.

It’s all very, very good.