The Year of the Snake

2013 is the year of the snake.  I celebrated back in January with my fiber pals at Raveloe.  We dyed long thin sock blanks to look like snakes.  Everyone had their choice of what to do next.  I unravelled mine and knit socks as intended.



I am happy with the results, and even though it was January, I figured I was sort of done with the year of the snake and wouldn't think about the Chinese Zodiak again until January 2014 or the next time I ate in a Chinese restaurant with the Zodiak placemats.

Silly me. 

My property has a pleasing amount of wildlife living on it, or at least passing through.  It feels good to see lots of plants and animals around the yard; I feel like I've made good choices and have created a healthy eco-system.  We tend to see one or two garter snakes around the place each summer.  There is a creak running along the edge of our property and because of that there seem to be a lot of frogs, and frogs are a favorite food for garter snakes.

For whatever reason this year we have many more garter snakes than we have had in the past.  In the spring I would see at least 2 every time I worked in the yard or flower beds.  I started trying to count them based on size and markings, and I think I tracked at least 6 different snakes.  They make me really nervous when I mow the lawn, because as I mow I see them quickly slithering away from the mower.  If they head for a flower bed I figure that they're safe, but sometimes they make bad choices, like slithering into the unmown grass, or onto the concrete sidewalk where I know they won't stay until I'm done, or back towards the mower, so I had gotten into the habit of picking up the ones who made bad choices and carrying them to the flower bed.  When I did this two weeks ago, I found out that while garter snakes are only mildly venomous, I am one of the lucky few people who have a reaction to their bites.  Not terrible, but my hands puffed up for a day, and that snake was set into the flower bed less gently and from a greater distance than the others.

Then last week my worst fears came true, and I inadvertantly hurt an animal.  I'm still upset about it and don't know how exactly it happened, but now there is a snake in our yard that we have nick-named "stumpy."

Finally yesterday morning I was doing some landscaping before going to work.  We had some topsoil left over from the spring and had stored it in the yard on a tarp.  We folded the tarp up over it a few times to try to keep it dry.  When I unfolded the tarp it was FULL OF SNAKES.  Like 2 in each layer.  One was a baby, which was super exciting to see, but I'm a little nervous now that I know about the allergy, so I left the tarp open and walked away, hoping that they would leave.  I had  to keep checking under the tarp before shoveling the dirt so I wouldn't accidently hurt any hiding snakes with my shovel.

So yeah, it's definitely the Year of the Snake at my house.  What's next year?  I hope it isn't the Tiger yet.

A Good Day to Dye

I haven’t done any dyeing at home since before getting married. Once I was married, it seemed unfair to ask the other two members of the family not to eat any food in the kitchen all day because it would be contaminated by my dye.  There is an extra stove in my basement, waiting to become a dye stove, but so far no one with the know-how has had time to install a 220 line and hook it up.  Lately, I’ve gotten really antsy about waiting.

I finally realized that now that the boy has moved out, whenever my husband goes on a business trip, I’m home alone, which means I have time and opportunity to dye in the kitchen without poisoning anyone.  I’ve had a project in mind for a few years now.  The various fibers have been stored away waiting.

 

From l to r:  Purple, navy, and green wool; purple, navy and green tussah silk; grey angora; and black wool.

The plan is to blend a heathered black.  I have over 2 pounds of wool, plus 8oz of silk and 4oz of satin angora.  What isn’t shown in the picture is that I dyed the majority of the fiber black (over a pound and a half).  The 3 other colors together make up about a third of the total weight.  I’m hoping to get a black with a dark rainbow that shines out here and there, kind of like an oil slick.

Some observations/stuff I learned while doing this:

• ·         I need to dye more often!  Far too much of the process was unnecessarily nerve wracking because I couldn’t remember enough from the last times I’ve dyed, like how much fiber  each dye pot holds, or how quickly the dye starts absorbing.
• ·         Angora doesn’t take dye very well.  As I watched the angora resist dye, I realized that I must have already read or seen that somewhere before.  I used just as much black dye on the angora as everything else, and heated it for just as long, but it’s hardly grey.  I’m not worried about this in the final project, as it’s such a small portion of the overall weight I doubt it will have any negative effect on the color.  I’m hoping it’s just enough angora to add softness and a slight halo to the finished yarn.
• ·         Good record keeping is everything it’s cracked up to be.  Even thought I haven’t dyed in ages, it was easy to figure out my color formulas based on my samples and records from previous projects.
• ·         It pays to clean the kitchen, weigh the fibers, and do the math the night before.  Again, because I don’t do this often enough, I had to spend considerable time reviewing Color in Spinning to find the formulas for calculating how much of each assist to use.  Doing the math the night before allowed me to use my dye time much more efficiently that day.
• ·         Wet fiber won’t dry while clumped together.  Enough said.
• ·         I need a giant salad spinner to whip the water out of my dyed fiber using centrifugal force.
• ·         I want more time in my life to dye, card, and spin.
• ·         I really like green and purple.

from l to r:  wool, satin angora, and silk, all pre-soaking in synthropol in preparation for dyeing.

New Drum Carder!!!!!!!

Recently my friend Mary Ellen made reference to the happiness that can come from purchasing something new. Not just anything, but think about when you were a kid and spent months saving up allowance for something really special. I remember spending about a year saving up for my first stereo, and I loved it from the first day I had it. It seems like something changed, either from childhood to adult life, or in our culture since then. Now it's more likely that Ill spending months paying off a previous purchase, instead of saving up for the future. The last thing I saved up for was my spinning wheel about ten years ago.

Unlike many spinner I only own one wheel. I do have some extra flyers, 3 sets of hand cards, and 2 sets of combs, but they were all acquired over 5 years ago, and one of the sets of carders was used and practically free.

So when a very slightly used drum carder came up for sale by a member of my guild, I decided that now might just be the time for a new equipment purchase. I didn't save up, but I'm counting this as my up-coming Christmas money, well spent. After spending about 3 years hand carding wool for my purple sweater set, I think it's high time I treat myself to this lovely time saver.

Behold, the Fancy Kitty Kitten Drum Carder:



The lovely woman who sold it to me decided that her life was too short for fiber prep, and she could happily spin prepared rovings from now on. I don't blame her--our guild has several very talented dyers who sell their work. I've decided that life is too short for hand carding. Either way, she was so over fiber prep that she gave me a bag of fibers she had planned to blend on the carder, and a partially finished batt.

The thing is that I like dying, and while multicolored rovings look great, and make for very attractive multicolored yarns, they necessitate very simple knitting. What I've discovered about myself is that the knitting is my primary goal, and I prefer to work with simpler yarns that allow for more complex knitting. I've made the mistake of trying to do colorwork or cables with visually complex yarn, and it just becomes a muddy indistinct lump that I spent a lot of hours on. So for me a drum carder makes it possible to buy a fleece and dye sections into related colors I can then card together for more subtle heathers that will still allow cables or lace to dominate visually. Or I can dye for individual skeins of closely related solids for a fair isle.

Of course this will lead to buying fleeces. But it saves me the cost of shipping and processing, which is what I used to do. And did I mention it saves me the time of hand carding to blend colors? Life is too short for hand carding.

So I ran home, put the drum carder on the kitchen table, cranked up my audio book, and started cranking fiber through.



I quickly discovered that I had questions, and that none of my spinning books had answers. How do I only own spinning books that refuse to address the drum carder beyond acknowledging it's existence?!?!

For instance, as I worked, there was a lot of fiber staying on the licker-in. I kept trying to remove it and feed it back through, but it kept ending up there. Then I realized that what was on the licker-in looked like this:



Could it be that unlike hand cards, drum carders separate out the neps and short crap? I checked the internet. The internet had way too much information, but it seemed to confirm that yes, it did separate this stuff out on purpose! So I stopped trying to undo the help the Kitten was offering, and put that crap aside.

I already know from my fleece study experience that I prefer to flick card first, removing as much of the short and tangled wool as I can, before either carding or combing. It seems the same will be wise with the drum carder, and produce the kind of smooth batts I prefer to spin.

Eventually, I made this:



and this:



with the fibers the original owner was so kind to pass along. I was a bit dissatisfied with dizzing the blue roving off the drum. Too much fiber was left behind, so I will probably tear the pink batt into strips or into a roving to spin. It was way too time consuming to diz off some of the roving, and then still have to remove a small thin batt of what was left. It will be much faster to remove everything together as a batt and then deal with it from there.

At this point I got excited and went off on my own. I love to spin cotton, and a little while ago a friend gave me this:



a bale of cotton. That puppy must weight 20 pounds. I was going to hand card punis from it, but that was going to take the rest of my life. The carding cloth on this Kitten looks just as fine as on my cotton hand cards, and if it all goes to hell I might waste, what, one or two ounces out of 20 pounds?

I didn't really find any guidance on doing this, but I was also too cocky to look. In the name of science, I experimented.

First I fed in the cotton in the usual way:



and about half of it stayed on the licker-in. Not good. So I added it the other way I'd been shown, directly onto the drum as I cranked.



This was much more successful. 3 or 4 times the amount added in only left this:



on the licker-in.

I removed the batt, split it, and recarded in thin layers a few times, just like with the first 2 batts.

Then I had to decide what form the carded cotton should finally take. A batt seemed too big and loose, and like it might fall apart before it ever got to the wheel, so I tried 2 things.

I dizzed off a roving which was generally frustrating. So then I tried rolling the batt around a knitting needle to make a puni, just like I would have done with hand cards.



I got 4 fairly thick punis from one batt:



as opposed to this mess of roving from the other:



I got in a little time on the wheel this morning, and as I suspected the punis are quite nice to spin from, but the roving is a bitch. If I wasn't an experienced cotton spinner I would have thrown the roving out the window! At this point I'll still spin it up just to see what I get, and keep examining how the 2 preparations work. I may try making the punis just a little smaller to compare, but by and large this will now be my go-to for prepping that bale of cotton.

So thanks very much for the drum carder! Now I need more time to knit and spin. I don't suppose I can do that this week instead of putting up the tree, making cookies, and cooking Christmas dinner for both sets of parents? I thought not.