Two Art Yarns (with Grannie Stacks) from One Batt -- Colour Matching

Because I often get different ideas for yarns as I put colours together for a batt, I enjoy carding a few batts with the same colours and then spinning a couple of my ideas to see how they'll turn out and compare.  I can never spin ALL my ideas, but maybe that's a good thing. 

Sometimes it's fun to start a story at the end, so here is what I got from this particular set of batt ideas.  One ply from each of these yarns has been spun from the same multicoloured batt.  I chose different colours for the second ply, creating two completely different looks:

If you look closely, you'll see that each of these yarns has intermittent "grannie stacks,"
or piled-up twists of yarn, throughout.  These add concentrated colour, texture,
and definition to the yarn, and they just make me happy.

I was in the mood for yellow/peach/orange/pink, and I assembled different wools from my dyed stash and combed and carded them up.  This is what I came up with -- I didn't use a whole lot of the darker orange, in the end.  I'm hoping the picture reveals not only the colour differences but suggests the texture differences as well.

Fibre includes Cormo, Corriedale, Mohair, Merino, Romney x Bluefaced Leicester,
Border Leicester x Bluefaced Leicester, Lincoln Longwool,
and a bit of BLFxSilk top that I had leftover from another project

All spun up into my first single, it came together something like this:

Naturally, and true to my general way of doing things, I next forgot to photograph my lovely assembly of purples from which I spun another single to ply with the first.  And a "single" or "singles," dear non-spinning friends,  is one single strand of yarn made from twisted together fibres as is, without wrapping anything around it, just on its own.  For this yarn, I'm taking two singles and twisting them together, or "plying" them, to make a two-ply yarn.

I did manage to remember to take a photo of me making the second single, though, and you can get some idea of the different purples that went into it from the carded batt I'm spinning from -- well maybe if you enlargen the pic by clicking on it.

Here are the two singles before plying.

This yarn -- my inspiration for the two yarns I'm talking
about now -- is from a previous blog entry,  HERE
and you can find it in my Etsy shop HERE

What I decided to do was spin two-ply yarn with beehive grannie stacks, similar to the yarn on the right, but instead of those long even coils of colour, there would be stacked-up coils, and instead of using the multicoloured single for the stacks, I'd use the solid-coloured one.






So here I am plying the two singles, or twisting them together (in the opposite direction to that in which they were first spun).  I hold the two singles tautishly out ... 

... and then slide my hand up, allowing the wheel to twist them together.

After every three lengths of regular plying, I put in a grannie stack.  This is wrapping one ply (in this case, the purple one) around the other in the same small area, creating a little stack, and then continuing to ply normally.  So here I'm getting ready to make my stack, holding the purple single out to the side ...

... then I let the wheel spin it around in the same spot, angling my purple ply up and down a bit to spread out and stack the yarn.  I'm holding the other single way back with my other hand, because as I twist and wrap the purple single around the other single, the other single is untwisting, and if it untwists too much it will pull apart.  By holding it further back, I'm distributing the "untwist" over a greater length of yarn.

When I'm happy with my little grannie stack, I continue plying normally.  

Here it is on my spindle

My high-tech lazy kate is there on the floor.  A lazy kate is a contraption that holds your spindles
full of yarn and allows you to unwind them as you ply.  There are some
very gorgeous ones out there that you can buy.  This one is made from a cardboard box
with a couple knitting needles punched through the walls.  My spindles fit perfectly
on the needles.  The biggest trick is remembering WHERE the needles are when you want
to knit something with them.

And all finished.  The little stacks will make little purple shouts of colour in whatever it's used for.

You can see this in my Etsy shop HERE

For the second skein, I wanted to ply with yellows.  I used the same yellows that were in the multicoloured single - here they are again:

Carded into a batt and spun in the same way as the other yarn, this time with yellow grannie stacks, it came out like this:

This is also in my Etsy shop HERE

Changing the colour of the second single really makes a big difference in the overall look of the yarn.  If I'd had enough of those multicoloured batts, I would have plied another skein with peach/orange, and yet another with pinks.  Ah, so much to do, so little time...

Check it out in my Etsy shop

Check it out in my Etsy shop

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)

Experiment - Navajo Ply with inclusions, Plied Twice. Plus ME trying out blogging.

It's spring, so sheep are getting sheared and people like me who love new fleece are enjoying their Laughing Place.  I've been doing a fair bit of washing lately -- which I love to do, believe me, not just because of what's waiting when it's all done, but the whole process just feels good somehow -- but it's hard to resist taking a break to play.  And why resist, after all?  The dirty fleeces still waiting aren't going anywheres.

I was in the mood for BLUES, and now that my husband found me a second slow cooker sitting out on someone's curb the day after a neighbourhood yard sale (thank you everyone for not buying it), I can dye twice as much at a time. I like slow cooker dyeing because the fleece doesn't get disturbed in the dye bath and doesn't felt.  

There they are drying:

From top left clockwise: Romney x Merino, Cormo,
Border Leicester x BFL, BFL x Romney/Cotswold

From top left clockwise: Cormo, Lincoln Longwool,
Romney x BFL, Border Leicester x BFL

 Can't resist showing off the lock loveliness -- don't you just want to do something fabulous with all this gorgeous blue?

RomneyxBFL, Cormo, Lincoln Longwool, BFLxRomney/Cotswold, BLxBFL, RomneyxMerino, RomneyxMerino

I recently watched a few YouTube ads for an Ashford Country Spinner (my dream wheel) featuring Steph Gorin from Loop doing cool things (I love it when people share their ideas and give tutorials for free -- so generous with their talent!). In this particular video, she Navajo plies corespun yarn, inserting locks and various other items, then teardrop plies the whole thing.  

Sounds fun.  Seeing as my wheel is significantly smaller than a Country Spinner (I have an Ashford Traditional with a jumbo flyer) I thought I'd try something of what she did, but smaller.  Also, no non-wool insertions; I'm going to stick with locks.

I've been getting really into combing. It's so luxurious.  I even comb first when I'm going to card batts.  I just love the wool top when you pull it off.  The locks weren't all the same length, but close enough.  I don't think things necessarily have to be perfect in this department.  They carded beautifully and soon I was spinning my corespun.

Ready on my combs

After two passes with the combs:

                                                And pulled off in top:                        

I love love love the blues, and decided for a nice pow of colour to use some green locks to ply in -- these are all BFL-cross fleeces, except the far left, which is Cotswold.  

First catch the locks into the loops of your yarn as you Navajo-ply it ...

Then ply the whole shebang - this is plied on a bright blue mill-spun wool yarn with silver and purple metallic thread autowrapped.  It hasn't been washed yet in this pic, it's straight off the wheel.

A great weekend project, I think, very enjoyable accompaniment to the murder mysteries I usually listen to whilst spinning.  I'm not quite done -- either the skein or the mystery -- and it looks like this is going to fill my spindle twice over once it's all plied together.  But I like the yarn, very chunky and textured and I love the colours and what the locks do after the second ply.  Still thinking of blues, though.  I think I'll be delving into these fleeces again for my next skein.

(LATER)

Here's the yarn, washed and set - as you can see in the second photo, it's super bulky (2-3 wpi) and all told about 19 yards long.

You can see it in my shop here

In my Etsy shop