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.

Saori workshop with Louise Cook

I was lucky enough to attend a Saori workshop at the Waikato Area Education Day. I've spent many hours looking at Saori weaving on the net and this style has influenced the scarves I wove in May and June where I used lots of different weft yarns. One of the tenets of the Saori style is to decide what to do with the weaving after it is finished - that is a very different approach to my usual one. Saori is a free style of weaving and one becomes absorbed and immersed in the process. For more see Saori philosophy  Louise is the sole accredited Saori tutor in New Zealand.

Samples of Saori weaving from the course.

And a rich brown scarf

Here the warp threads included corespun natural dark brown alpaca with red and gold silk. I dyed the mohair weft to match.

 You can see the effect of the extra twist in the corespun alpaca. It gives an interesting wiggly effect.

Blue green lacy scarf

This is my favourite. I love the colours.