Exploring weaving

A month before Christmas my grandson discovered a new way of weaving in a children's book. He was very excited about this idea. So on the first morning of the grandkids' holiday with me this summer we made looms and began weaving. We'd woven several times before but never with a loom. The next morning they finished. Just look at the concentration.

The shoe boxes with iceblock sticks worked well for the older two..

 A couple of weeks later the oldest sent me this photo with the message "Hi nana, I designed and made it all by myself!" What amazing creativity.

Bunny

A spinning group I belong to chooses a different fibre each year for its members to experiment with. In 2015 the fibre was bunny
Two years ago I had a love affair with bunny. I was given two "fleeces" and I happily played with them, discovered mouse nests and sorted them by length into various boxes. I spun them into beautiful yarn for hats for small children and added bunny fibre to felted berets. Please see posts June 2013 . When I was offered some bunny I thought fine, that won't be too hard, I've done it before. But it was. In the meantime I had fallen heavily for Gotland curls. We've been together for over a year and there's no sign of the relationship ending. I coped with the first sample by adding Gotland curls as bunny tails. 

I forced myself to do a second sample many months later. It was supposed to be bunny whiskers. Fibres are my play time. It made no sense to force myself to spin a fibre I didn't relate to. I made a really bad job of it. The day after I'd knitted a sample of bunny whiskers I was back to my beloved Gotland.

Fingerless gloves

It's many months since I posted - now I'm in catchup mode. The wool I spun in the previous post became super warm fingerless gloves with a border spun from Gotland locks. I was lucky to be given some Gotland fleeces and I'm in love with their curls.

Courageous Carding

My carding has become very circumscribed by convention over the last few years. Yesterday I took a baby step towards freeing my carding. With some grey alpaca as the bread I made a sandwich with scraps of merino from previous cardings, spun it, loved it and kept making more until I'd used the whole bag of scraps.


I've still got a long way to go. My next carding challenge is make every sandwich different and see what appears on the wheel

 Here's the single - with some silk too.

I soaked the single in hot soapy water then moved a plunger up and down to begin felting the single to stabilise the twist. I lost my rhythm every time the plunger stuck to the bottom of the bucket.
Then I removed the skein, pressed out the excess water, folded it in half, gently rubbed on Sunlight soap and felted the skein in a bamboo placemat NOT very much. As soon as the skein started to stick together, I reskeined the yarn, then rinsed it in cold water. It's easiest if I wind the skein off the bobbin onto the skein winder and then I use a niddy noddy for the second skeining. I found that I could get away without any more felting and reskeining.

I took out the saturated skein snapped it twice then hung it to dry. I always get quite wet during the snapping but it straightens out the yarn so well I don't mind. I hung it out sopping wet to dry without any weight.
The finished skein is soft, light and airy.

First shawl

and first knitting using a single ply. Is it a ply if it's single?
The merino came for Tracey White at Inspire Fibres. It had a multitude of colours that I didn't want to merge together so I spun trying to keep as much of one colour together as I could.

This glorious fibre sat on its bobbin for months while I tried to decide how and what to do with it. After asking for ideas from the New Zealand Art Yarn community of Facebook I settled on a garter stitch shawl. 
The energy released as I took it off the winder.

I felted it slightly as I washed it then hung it to dry with a weight. Weight being a technical term for a plastic bottle of water. This works very well as you can adjust the amount of water in the bottle to give as much pull as you want.

Once I'd started knitting I realised I'd need more yarn so I spun some lavender merino. After soaking the shawl I pegged it to the line and gave it a few tugs downwards. I didn't have to weight it.

 I love it, so soft snuggly and versatile.

Starting them young

Last week I was in Wellington playing with yarn with my grandchildren. They like weaving so we made cardboard looms out of the tops of pizza boxes. The kids, aged 6, 4 and 2, had fun choosing from art yarns I'd taken down.

Wearable art

Creativity flying as a butterfly

Creativity blossoming

 Another day we collected sticks and magically transformed them.

Saori weaving

These are a some more shots of my saori weaving. The first thing I tried was to weave just some of the warp threads to make the "tails". I used 2 strands of 2 ply yarn that I had dyed and it produced interesting colour changes.

Fractally dyed yarn gives are lovely blend of colours.

Here you see the effect of simply inserting some fleece locks into the weft. Lower down are beehives in thick and thin yarn.