Keeping the catchup short and sweet (scroll down for dog stuff and whatnot):
Wheel Wound Wednesday!
The plastic cup on the footman that goes over the bearing on the wheel has flanges of a sort so it can pop over the bearing and then be held tight by a ring. The instructions talk about removing the cup from the bearing with a twisting motion, so I was holding it with the sides of my thumb and index finger instead of my fingertips and it pinched a bit of skin out.It didn’t hurt, but it surprised me, as I was talking to someone at the time. I hate bleeding in public.I go to the spinning group straight from work, so my hands and nails are generally a mess from being washed a zillion times. So, um, sorry about all the hangnailies, hope it doesn’t offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities. I keep my nails really short, because, well just trust me, it’s better that way. Fiber Friday
Remember the 80s merino/tencel 50/50 blend I showed on the wheel a while back?
I finally got around to taking a picture of the two ply made from it:
This spins up like buttah, so it’s easy to make a low twist soft and silky single but I think next time I spin this up, I’ll spin with more twist to I can have a plied yarn with a more extreme angle of twist and more bounce. It’s 172 yards and 2.5 oz, and 10 wpi. Hmmm…a Rosechapeau from Hilari?
I finished spinning the 80s merino singles to make a 3 ply worsted weight, and have plied up four skeins:
There are differences among the skeins, in colors, in singles spun and the plying, although they are less dramatic in person.Two of the skeins have an embarrassing “tag” sticking out, a little section of single which plied back on itself and then went into the plied yarn, like a little quarter inch two ply arm wavin’ howdy.
This comes from me not paying enough attention and letting slack get into a ply and letting the twist run along past it. I didn’t use my ghetto homemade plying card and I really should have.
The Victoria’s lazy kate is not tensioned, so the bobbins spin a little more freely and it makes it easier for that to happen. After the first time I saw that (when skeining up the first bobbin) I stuck a sports bra on the middle post of the lazy kate, and it provided resistance so the lazy kate was tensioned. (Why a sports bra? It was on the floor next to the spinning chair. I’m a slob.) The next bobbin after that, I had cleaned the house and thus the sports bra was nowhere around the spinning chair. I lifted a paper towel from a nearby table and wedged that around the middle post. That worked just fine. Then, one of the dogs must have stolen the napkin to shred as it was nowhere to be found with the fourth skein. No biggie, I thought…nope. Upon skeining, I found another little tag. Dangit.
Hypothetically: you could cut the little tag, but then the ply could work loose and form a loop, or worse an end waving out there like a frayed little piece o’ spinner’s shame. You could knit it just as is, and hide it to the back of the work and hope it doesn’t flex to the front, but really…you should cut the yarn on either side, treating it like a knot in the yarn.
Ugh, I hate ends.
So, here’s the skein breakdown (not interesting to anyone but me, but since I’m always losing these scraps of paper I write stuff down on…) 168 yards/2.4 oz, 176 yards/2.5 oz, 190 yards/2.7 oz, and 230 yards/3.2 oz. So that’s 10.8 oz and 764 yards at 9-11 wraps per inch.
I have two bobbins left, one with .6 oz, and another with 1.9 oz. So, plenty of yarn for another skein, but I have to attempt winding .6 or so of the second bobbin into a separate ball for makin’ the 3ply. Sigh. Dork.
So…I thought I had 14 oz of this stuff…I wonder where the other .7 went? I guess I pulled out more disorganised portions than I realised. I’ll probably find a little bit of it somewhere…oh wait, I remember where the .7 is. A sample two ply I made way back when. Never mind me…talking/thinking/typing aloud.
Anyway, even if I do manage to use all of that leftover 2.5 oz and end up with another 176 yards, that leaves me at 940 yards…cutting it a bit fine, even for a worsted gauge st st V-neck sweater of snug fit for me, I think. Anyway, that’s counting yardage before it’s made. It may end up a manly matching hat, mittens and scarf set. Ooh la la.
I guess the fiber key to this section of the post was 80s merino, straight up and the mixed half and half of tencel. Huh.
So let’s make that the marketing monday blurbo and get that over with eh? Yeah. You can click here to look at prices if you’d like to buy some to spin yourself (please note the new put up amounts including 5 oz! –1 oz to play with for sampling, 4 oz to do a little project with–) but they are undyed. In the new year, after we get back from the month long hiatus, I’ll have dyed fibers for sale.
Have you ever seen how big ten pounds of Kona Superwash is?
My gigantic, unscoured, sportweight superwash lover…So much for “short and sweet” catch up, oy. Random: so I was just leaving a comment on Elabeth’s blog and I made a cheesy pun. Then I thought, “whorling dervish?” That would be a cute business name! Maybe better than this foreign language name that makes so many people go “leebahlahbah whatnow?”! So google turned up no whorling dervish, and no server responded at whorlingdervish.com…but my host, dreamhost (a host I’ve been very happy with and a good recc from MJ lo so long ago, and they give free hosting to charities, how cool is that?) says it’s taken. Bummer.
My downstairs neighbor asked me if I know how to crochet or knit and if I could teach her and I nearly snorted my brains right out the back of my head. I believe I said something like, “I’m not much of a hooker, but I rock the knitting house.”
Fershizzle, I’m all up on the knizzle.
Anyway, I’m going to try and get together with her sometime this week to spread the knitting virus.
Pomona/Angelina is doing awesome, and proving that her Mommy is a good one and she’s made a lot of progress with her. She’s been coming out for snuggles and hanging out in the living room of her own free will and snoozing on the couch.
Fast asleep:
So freakin’ cute. I love this beautiful girl, but I’m really glad she has a great home and that her mommy has let her visit us.
The boys are doing well at the kennel. When I do a turnout shift, I let them out on the slab together after the shift (they go out with a bigger group together during the shift too) and we play a little. A bunch of dogs got adopted this weekend (Nick and my favorite among them) but not Snuggle and Kilt. Snuggle has an adoption lined up, but he’s had that twice before and they just seem to evaporate. He and Kilt are both so normal, so easy, it’s a bit funny that they’ve been so long at the group. It’s partly a testament to how fantastic all our dogs are, really. Compared to the all breeds rescue work we used to do, there’s a rare few that Nick and I wouldn’t want to have in our home.I had a dye workshop on Saturday. It was very small since most everyone is caught up in holiday madness, but it went very well, and the students went home with some beautiful handpainted fiber and yarn and some new skills, knowledge, and confidence. The next date is the third Saturday in February, which hopefully will be warm and sunny, because this kitchen is a bit small and while that is sort of the point (you don’t have to have a big honkin’ separate studio! although boy wouldn’t that be awesome) people still need space to paint and work comfortably.
The other night I had the television on and It’s a Wonderful Life started. I’ve never seen it before so I watched it (and marveled at the marketing, the commercials seemed very much geared toward women with catastrophic brain injuries [seriously, the desperate lameness of the yoplait commercial “dating a masseuse -shh!–good” makes me want to punch something. Same with diamond commercials.]) and really liked it…but I turned it off when he started being mean to his family. So I guess I still haven’t seen it. I’ll put it in my Netflix queue.
And WHOA. A few days ago I looked at the prices for going to and from D.F. (Mexico City) from/to San Diego and was irked to find them over a thousand dollars for the both of us, after taxes etc. So when I looked last night and could snag the roundtrip tix all told for $800, I did, although I was worried that this was the start of a drop and they’d go lower and I’d be “d’oh!”ed. I told Nick about this and he said, “Yeah, and now we won’t look at the prices anymore.” We both don’t have much of a stomach for fluctuating values.
But I did look.
And ¡jolín! Wow, I’m glad I bought those tickets, as the price has jumped right back up. The industry is a mystery. Is it exchange rate? Demand? Some sort of ridiculously complicated algorithm?
I am so excited abut this trip. I’m going to teach a beginning spinning class at our local library on the sixth, then -boom!- off on the seventh for 29 days of aventura pura…pues lo que espero. I wish I wasn’t going to miss TNNA, I wish I wasn’t going to miss a month in the “industry’s high season,” but…it’s Mexico. A country I love–I’ve been to more states in Mexico than I have here in the U.S.of A. And Guatemala and Belize. Whee!
If you were a cold sleeper going to a place with lows of 40-50ºF, do you think you’d try to get away with one of those polar fleece sleeping bags (like from L.L. Bean), or go with a real sleeping bag?
So I thought, to help me keep motivated to post a little more, and with a bit more substance (to better reflect my life, o’ course) I thought I’d try the whole day-theme thing. Like Marketing Monday ( a shameless shop update feature day) or Technique/Tutorial Tuesday (some technique I’ve done/learned in the week), Wheel Wednesday (either what’s on the wheel, or a review of a wheel), Fiber Friday (a fiber I’ve been spinning, breed stuff if I can dig it up), whatever although this might merge into a Spinning Saturday, or Spinning Sunday, although I was kind of thinking of a Doggy Domingo day. Y’know. We’ll see if I can sustain any kind of blogging pace at all.
Those astute Sesame Street kids out there will immediately gasp, “But there’s no day that begins with the N sound! Is this the end of knitblogging?” (I’m not sure how much a difference that would make to my content really, sometimes it seems I haven’t knit in days.) No, but I’m hoping this will help me focus a little more.
Woolarina Wednesday is just to say, hie thee on over to the shop and get some pretty yarns and benefit a good cause. Go to Paula’s blog and scroll down to the December 2nd entry for more details about what’s going on and the charity to benefit: So Others Might Eat.
“Wheel Wednesday” isn’t always going to be about a particular wheel, I think usually it’ll just be about what’s on the wheel, what spinning project is going on and how it’s going, but this week, because I’m still freakin’ excited about the new toy, it’s about the Victoria.
I scanned the instructions for the Victoria/s95/s96 in and converted them to pdf. They are available here. I did do a little video on youtube of setting it up, but the sound is all out of sync and it’s a bit weird.
I think I’m going to start trying out jumpcut.com instead, since they have editing ability, and if there’s one thing I need, it’s editing. I also did a vid of putting it away, but in talking about the bag I went over the 100mb limit (that both youtube and jumpcut have) and the camera needs its batteries recharged before I can reshoot that, and I’ll update this with a video of spinning on it, and all its little pieces.
I was a bit annoyed when I first opened it up and saw the bobbin. That bobbin is not the “standard Louet” bobbin we were told (and I told people who asked) it would have.
The s17’s bobbin is on the left, the Victoria’s bobbin on the right.It is a nice bobbin, and larger than the Lendrum’s, but given how expensive Louet bobbins are, I think that was a bit of a bummer. BTW, on a local note, I’m going to get the contact info from Margaret Tyler, the local spinning guru, of a local woodworker who has expressed interest in making bobbins and see if he can produce them/replacements for a better price. I’ll update this when I know what’s up.
I admit, I was wondering how they were going to work out the scotch tension setup with the standard bobbin, but I figured that they were going to have the scotch tension run over the largest groove and the poly band over one of the others, which isn’t really scotch tension. But I thought, huh, maybe that’s why there are only two ratios listed in the info, which seemed kind of lame. So, I was still excited, but had some reservations.But it showed up with real honest to goodness scotch tension, very light and small and spinning great, so I’m happy. The ratios are 1:6, 1:9, and 1:13, which are in the range of most spinning wheel’s ratios for their “regular” whorls. (Lendrum is 6, 8, 10 to 1) And while I’ve read on the Spin-List that someone has already spun thread thin on it, I am looking forward to trying the high speed whorl (although I’m wondering how they’ll do that, as the whorl seems pretty well fixed on the Victoria, you can unscrew it through the back, but that doesn’t strike me as terribly convenient for interchanging speeds). And I heard a jumbo flyer is coming out soon. The bobbins will be available in January from Louet.Anyway, I’m going to do a comparison video set, to compare the ease of set up, spinning, bobbin changing, between the Louet Victoria and the Lendrum folding wheel, because I think seeing it in action is better than all the typing I can do. I do think it treadles more easily than the Lendrum, requiring very little pressure, and the wheel stops when you stop moving your feet and doesn’t roll back. It’s easy to start in the right direction without using your hand, and the draw in is smooth. I think it will replace my Lendrum.
I’ve spun up a full bobbin of the dyed 80s merino and have decided to keep going with the singles spinning for a 3 ply. It’s spongeygoodness.Random: I went to my first tea party on Sunday and thanks go out to Nancy for putting on such a big yummy spread (heehee). Hilari brought some amazing poppy seed lemon rosettes. I brought a cake from the same people who made our wedding cake, but we were too full to eat it, so it was just divvied up and brought back home. I really prefer buttercream frosting to whipped cream frosting, I could have sworn the counter girl said the cake had buttercream. Oh well. Live, learn, still eat cake and get porky.
