More on Navajo Plying and Musings on Handprocessing Fleece

Still enjoying my purple fleeces - here they are drying out back, by the way, along with fabrics for sewing some summer clothes for my daughter (a project I finished WEEKS ago, yay!).  

I don't leave the fleeces to dry exposed that way, though -- I'm too worried about squirrels stealing some or leaves landing in it or someone next door mowing their lawn and the wind blowing the clippings over the fence into the wool - not to mention a bird flying overhead and having a terrible toilet accident or a gust of wind scattering the whole lot over the hedge and into the wide world.  I feel like I don't want to add any more dirt into the wool to clean out than I already have to.  So I lay another layer of gauze fabric over the top (like I have underneath to keep the wool from falling through the clothes rack) and pin it down with clothes pegs.

The fact that there will be VM (vegetable matter, like seeds or bits of leaf and grass) that has to be combed or picked out from the fleece is one of the ways we pay for cleaning wool by hand rather than getting a mill to do it.  But the thought of using chemicals to break down the VM as they do in mills bothers me on many levels.  Not only the addition of these chemicals to our environment, but also the wool suffers and loses some of its softness, some of its bounce and luster.  I know some mills are better than others, and I also use mill-prepared wool for spinning on some projects.  But one thing I love about the many types of wool that there are is each wool's own particular qualities of texture, softness, lustre, sproinginess, how it takes dye ... and I love yarn that combines a bunch of these different fibres and mixes them into a lovely melange where they each promote and display each other's beauty.  So more and more I prefer to prepare my own fibres by hand, simply picking apart the fleece by the handful and allowing the bits of VM to fall out, or if there's more than the occasional twig or leaf, combing it all out.  I guess it makes me feel connected to my yarn.  But time consuming?  Yes.

A short entry today, after all that environmental musing.  My batt building blocks are once again based in purple with additions of whatever struck me as I sat pondering alone in my craft room, dishes done, children on their way to bed, while the old CD player entertained me with murder mysteries borrowed from the public library.  Ahh, libraries.  

You should be able to recognize most of these purples from what's drying on my rack in the
first picture, plus I added some of that lovely grey from the other day, fuchsia and blue -
altogether including the following fleeces:  Corriedale, Border Leicester x Bluefaced Leicester,
Romney x Merino, Bluefaced Leicester x Romney/Cotswold, and Bluefaced Leicester x Shetland

I always have trouble photographing batts - the pictures just don't do justice to reality.  I guess I should experiment more with the rolling and twisting up that Etsy sellers do to try to get across to us how lovely their creations are.  The problem is the DEPTH of the batt, and the amount of colour and fibre that gets hidden inside.  So here's the top of the batt:

Wool batt lying flat - you can see some of the colours and shimmery shine from the BLxBFL locks

And then here is the same batt, pulled in half along the grain, and each half flipped 90 degrees to show a cross-view of the layers of colour:

It really puffs out thick when you take it off the carder -- consider that this is probably about 1/2 inch thick on the carder -- here each half is a good 8-10 inches thick.

Then spinning the initial single from the batt:

Although I only carded this batt once together so the colours wouldn't mix too much and those purple locks would kind of stay together a bit, the different wools were already well combed or carded by hand, so that this batt is spinning very easily and I don't have to do any pre-drafting to get a nice even ply.  

Drafting is when you kind of pull the wool out and feed it into the wheel (I guess that's one way of putting it).  Pre-drafting is when you do some initial drawing out of the wool to loosen it up a bit, almost into a thick pre-yarn, before you actually draft and spin.  This allows for a more even thickness to your yarn and more control for the spinner, especially when you're in the early stages of your spinning life.  Really experienced spinners (which I do not consider myself to be) seem to do very little if any pre-drafting no matter what they're spinning from. They just have the most amazing control over their wool.  

For a really lumpy bumpy yarn, you often don't want to do any pre-drafting, because the unevenness of the fibre as it comes off your batt is part of the random beauty of the yarn.  But for this yarn, I wanted to spin something more even (but not completely even -- I always like some small variations in my yarns).  

My spindle full of spun single yarn, with a strand of plied yarn over top

Because plying yarn untwists the fibres a bit, the colours open up and soften, the wool gets a bit squishier as the twist is released.  You can see the stripes of colour in the plied strand run parallel because the twist has been released, while in the single they're twisted diagonal.  Navajo plying, which is three-strand plying, produces a nicely rounded yarn.  Some day I'll remember to photograph the process...

Two spindles - on the left the spun single, on the right the plied yarn feeding in.

And here it is finished:

Quite a hefty skein at 216 g (7.6 oz) measuring 70 m (77 yards) and bulky at wpi 4-5
You can see it in my shop HERE

And a few other Navajo-plied yarns I just added to my shop:

A mix of Bluefaced Leicester x, Romney x Merino, and Lincoln Longwool in many greens
This is available in my shop HERE

I spun this from start to finish at Upper Canada Village during a spinning demonstration
for the Ottawa Valley Weavers and Spinners Guild - many pinks, a touch of blue,
and the shiny curl of Mohair - You can find it in my shop HERE

What Went Into That Batt - Two Art Yarns

Bulky Two-Ply Yarn HERE

Corespun Yarn HERE on Etsy

 So I've been a bit less than productive recently for various reasons, and thus have fallen a bit behind in both spinning and blogging. Life can get complicated, as we all know.  I'm always appreciative of the calming influence spinning lends to my mental knots.














These two yarns have been sitting in my ready box for awhile.  You can tell they  came from the same family, can't you?  But a different feel, a different heft, different use, and all in the way they were spun.  The fellow up above was plied and one to the right corespun.  One day soon I'll do a little entry on corespinning but this blog is all about putting together the batts they came from.





I was dreaming about some purple yarn, and wanted to use these lovely fleeces, being as they were colours I couldn't resist.  My idea was not to card them, or hardly at all, just run them through the carder along with a bunch of other wool and hopefully keep some of the curl and lock integrity.

Border Leicester/
Bluefaced Leicester Cross

Border Leicester/
Bluefaced Leicester Cross

  

So for me, designing a batt for yarn involves my starting colour idea (in this case purple) and unloading all my bits of this and that in purple that I've dyed and put away, digging through it all and seeing what I like and what will work and what I feel like using.  Sometimes my idea changes as I find fleeces I'd forgot I had that overpower my initial impulse.  One bag of lovely I found in this exercise had some lovely purple dyed locks that had done me the wonderful favour of fracturing (I do believe that's what happened), which is when the dye kind of splits up into its composite colours. Aren't they great?

These locks were dyed in the same pot, but because I don't stir almost at all during the dying process, they came out very differently from different corners of the pot.  As for the fracturing, that's from the amount of citric acid I used, or the heat, or some chemical issue or other ... dyeing is still a brave new world of adventure for me - I love it! Taking some of the lighter and some of the darker and combing it all together produced the combed top up above.

After I collecting some purples, I cast about for some other colours I felt like adding, and came across some lovely Cotswold I got from Wooly Wool of the West and dyed this fabulous golden yellow.  And there's no coming across something like that in your stash and putting it back again, so into the pile it went.

It's combed into top on the left, and in its curly glory on the right

And then all of a sudden I was hit by grey fever, and absolutely needed some grey - natural grey, the kind sheep grow all by themselves, instead of those rendered grey by me through the magic of Jacquard acid dyes.  In fact, my grey fever was such that I'm going to have to make some grey yarns pretty soon -- all grey with this and that here and there.  But in this particular purple creation, grey will be a condiment.   

Shorter stapled (the staple is the length of each
individual strand of wool), super kinky (that's the crimp)
and oh so soft

Longer staple, more lustrous, soft but not as soft
as the darker fleece

These are both BFL (Bluefaced Leicester)--Shetland cross fleeces from Jody's Little Smoky Blues.  So for those of my friends who are kind enough to read this and don't understand what I'm talking about when I say things like that, a crossed fleece is the result of different breeds of sheep having offspring.  Their wool can have aspects of one or both of the parents to varying degrees.  Look at these very artistic comparisons:

Uncombed locks - quite a difference, even though they're both BFLxShetland

Woolen Fiddleheads - you can tell which combed top
came from which fleece - they're both soft and wonderful to spin,
but the left is more lustrous, and the right is softer

But oh my, because now your eyes have seen so much grey it's hard to remember what we're aiming for.  Maybe it will come back if you see all the combed and carded fibre ready to be put together into a lovely batt -- and a batt is made when you card (kind of like brushing) together wool so it more or less is kind of all running in the same sort of direction.  Not perfectly, but more or less.  You can do these with locks of wool to help open them up and make them easier to spin (like brushing your hair makes it easier to get a job, maybe) or with wool that's already carded or combed to mix together colours and amalgamate it all together.

Lovely purples nestled in amongst my golden Cotswold, some red Romney lamb locks and golden-orange Border Leicester x BFL (and now you know what the X means), my purple locks that started it all, and my grey-fever greys, which also includes some uncarded locks there on the left

This went only once through the carder
to maintain texture and colour integrity
to a certain extent

Now for carding fun - I wish batts were easier to see in photographs -- you can never see very much of a batt in one shot PLUS for me, I just have to touch everything so just looking can be very frustrating... At any rate, I got a lovely mix of purples for depth and subtle shifts in purpleness, plus kapows of other colours all throughout.

Now it's time to spin.  For my plied yarn, I spun one ply -- a thicker one -- from the batts I made here:

This is a strip from the batt (I just pulled away a strip of wool straight through the 
thickness of the batt) alongside my yarn still being spun on the spindle

The second batt, and the wools that went into it - I carded this twice, to blend the colours more.  The dark burgundy in the middle is actually a blend of BFL and silk - the only mill-carded wool I used

Then I needed a second strand of yarn to ply (twist together with) the first.  I wanted it thinner and less poppingly colourful, so I carded together the wools on the right to get the batt here on the left, and here it is below on my wheel being spun:

 Plied (or twisted) (or spun) together:

Fibres include Romney x Merino, Corriedale, Cotswold, Romney lamb, Border Leicester x Bluefaced Leicester, Bluefaced Leicester, Bluefaced Leicester x Shetland, Silk

And here below is the corespun yarn, a blog entry about this method of spinning is in my future.  Very quickly, in spinning this kind of yarn, the wool is wrapped around a central yarn (or core) of some type, so the angle of wrapped fibres is different than the twist of regular yarn, the colours show up differently and the yarn hangs and works differently.  

Now that you've seen where they came from, here are my yarns again, washed and dried and ready to go:

Plied Yarn available from my Etsy shop - a 47-yard skein, super bulky at 3-4 wpi

Super bulky, as you can see!

And here's the corespun with bright zinging colours - also in my Etsy shop
this one is  60 yards long, and chunky weight (5-6 wpi)

One Batt, Two Art Yarns -- And Washing a Fleece

There was still lots of blue fleece left from my recent art yarn post and I remained possessed by a yearning to do more blue-themed yarn before moving on to another colour.

I was about to embark on a batt-a-thon when I was interrupted by a gloriously sunny day, one that demanded to be taken advantage of through the drying of a newly-washed fleece.  Being only an in-between-time fibre artist -- having work, children, husband, household affairs, friends, family, and a recent fabric sale that led to extravagant purchases on my part accompanied by lavish promises of summer fashions for my daughter -- I have to grab my fleece-drying days as I can.  If it means putting off other fibre-related fun, alas, so it must be.   And don't get me wrong; I love washing fleece.  I love transforming the richly-scented bags of wonderful that the perplexed postal carrier lugs up to my door into ready-to-use ooh-la-la. As it is shearing time, and as I have a few newly purchased raw fleeces I can't wait to dig into, it was easy to comply. 

The chosen one was a beautiful 6.5-lb Corriedale from Rupperts.  

No VM in this lovely covered fleece with amazing staple length.  Some of the raw wool almost
looked clean already, like maybe this was an indoor sheep or something.  

There are so many excellent online instructions on how to wash raw fleece, I won't go into my whole process as it is like many others (super-hot water, blue Dawn, vinegar, no don't agitate whatever you do...). I will show you my nifty set-up, though.  I was lucky to be able to get giant, used food-grade plastic containers online.  I use them both for washing and storing fleece.  After the initial soapy soak, I find the fleece (which is divided amongst several laundry bags) wants to float and fight its way out of the water, and I have to keep struggling to keep it submerged until pretty much the final rinse.  To solve this problem, I set a colander into the top of the big container, gently forcing the fleece down, and weight it with a bucket of water (which goes to clean-up or garden-watering afterwards).

colander pushes the fleece below water-level

bucket of water holds it there

That's 6.5 lb of raw fleece soaking away

I know, what's with the waist-high bathtub? The people who owned our house before us ran a dog-grooming business.  This tub is perfect for washing fleece and yarn and making felt -- any kind of big wet job your sink can be too small for -- although first-time visitors tend to be taken aback on seeing the heavy chainlinks embedded in the walls at either end . . . really, it's not that hard to get my kids to have a bath!  And don't worry; we do have a normal bathroom upstairs!

Raw, unwashed lock

pure white, washed lock of Corriedale

As you can see, the fleece cleaned beautifully and combed into the most marvellous top -- how could I resist using it immediately?!

Having washed another fleece and put the sunny, hot day to good use, it was time to get back to my blue batts.  To that end, I combed and carded some of each of my blues above, plus some more blue fleece I had, and added a few colours I couldn't resist.  

My crafting table, ready to start carding the batts - see my little white nest of Corriedale? 

This assortment includes Romney x Merino, Corriedale, Cotswold, Romney lamb, Cormo, Merino, Lincoln Longwool, Bluefaced Leicester x Corriedale, Bluefaced Leicester x Romney/Cotswold, Border Leicester x Bluefaced Leicester, Bluefaced Leicester cross (can't remember what it was crossed with...), representing sheep from Little Smoky Blues, Wooly Wool of the West,  Aye Sea Ewe, MMF Wool, Aspen Grove Farm and Rupperts, mentioned above.

I carded them using the "sandwich" method as described here by Ashley Martineau of Neauveau Fiber Arts.  I like the way this method randomly blends parts of the colours and leaves other parts standing alone.

I had enough wool for four batts, which would make two skeins of wool on my wheel.  Two I wanted to use for a two-ply, teardrop-plied yarn, using the batts for one heavier ply, and some gorgeously lustrous BL/BFL for the other, which I would spin much thinner to create that nice teardrop ply.  Here they are, tempting me to spin them:

Resistance, as they say, is futile

Here's the single from the batt:

And the finished yarn:

A good 55 yards (51 m) long, and very bulky at 4 wpi. You can find it in my shop HERE

I decided to spin a supercoil yarn with the other two batts, because I was in the mood, and I wanted to see how the colours compared after plying.

First the long single from the batts:

You can see this is a lot thinner than the other one

Supercoiled yarn is spun by coiling a single like the one above around a core yarn.  Sometimes I use 8/4 cotton warp, but this time I used a wool-nylon mill-spun purple yarn.  Wool hangs and handles differently than cotton, of course, so using a different core will allow you to manipulate the finished yarn a bit differently.  I used wool for this skein because I felt like it (so often my reason for doing so many things...).

Here I am spinning it:

There's lots of extra twist in the singles so it holds together okay as a coil

I like to measure off the yarn I need for the core ahead of time, wind it into a butterfly, and let it hang down as I spin. I know a spindle full of yarn is going to spin me about 25-30 metres of supercoiled yarn, so I measure it off approximately and if I run out I can always tie on more.  With the butterfly dangling below, I can allow the extra twist that builds up in the core to unwind as I spin.  Every so often I stop and let the unspinning dangling core catch up with me.  

My dangling butterfly of inner core yarn, which I help untwist
with my left hand as I'm spinning, and
the kinky outer yarn angling in from the lazy Kate

I do this because I really don't like the way supercoil yarn cores overtwist when I spin them.  And even if I run the core yarn through the wheel in the opposite direction ahead of time to make up for the fact that I'm going to be adding twist to an already twisted yarn, it still overtwists, plus I'm now trying to manage two overtwisted yarns and the whole drama starts to drive me crazy.

Here's the finished yarn:

The colours came out more purplish than the other skein - it's about 36 yards/33 m long

And here it is in my SHOP

Well that was fun.  Now on to other colourways...