This year, I hadn’t planned on any knit, crochet, or woven Christmas stuff. And usually when I do make such plans, they’re for crochet items, which are significantly faster. But then, as it happened, I had a yarn that I wanted to swatch for photos, and so sometime in late October I decided I’d combine […]

The Basics of Spinning Wheel Drive Ratios Spinning wheels are pulley systems. Changing ratios is basically the same principle as changing gears on a bicycle, except instead of sprockets and chains, you’ve got pulleys and drive bands. Simply put, a ratio of 5:1 means that the drive wheel’s circumference is 5 times that of the […]

Leslie’s sweater yarn is now complete, and shipped off to her! I’m left with three partly-full bobbins of single-ply yarn, which I’ll finish up and keep for myself, and two batts that I expect I’ll spin very fine, again, for myself. By completion, about 45 hours total were spent on the yarn, from dyeing and […]

A few weeks back, I embarked on an exciting custom spinning project for a longtime friend, who wrote me to say she was ready to start knitting the sweater of her dreams, and did I have the right yarn for it by any chance? I wrote her back immediately telling her I insisted she let […]

One of the questions I hear often these days is “I have a spindle with no hook or notch to hold the yarn — how do I work this half-hitch thing I’ve heard about?” I grew up spinning this way, on Peruvian low whorl spindles which are as simple a spindle as you can get: […]

Today I’m working on sock blends, in large part to work my way through the pile of bombyx silk seconds that I wound up with from recent silk dyeing sessions. Basically, any time that a silk fails my quality control for being saleable as top, I put it on the blending pile — it’s still […]

Well, the Abby’s Yarns site is finally up and running, and what with the Franquemont Fibers eBay store stable and reasonably full of inventory, I’m shifting gears from production work to web work for a little bit. Little by little, I’m gathering up, editing, and putting online many things I’ve written on the subject of […]

Original Post: http://community.livejournal.com/spinningfiber/862460.html Are people spinning yarn today for the same reasons they were a few decades ago? Maybe, maybe not — maybe some of both. When a more traditional spinner encountered a newer art yarn spinner and expressed surprise, a little bit of a culture clash occured. Here’s what I said: Welcome to the […]

Some recent finished objects with handspun yarn, and one in progress. 1. Triangle, bottom up, improvised variant on “Falling Leaves” lace, bounded by criscrossed diamonds. The yarn: I blended mohair, tussah silk, and a dash of the horrible-looking orange and black firestar nylon, and that is this 2-ply yarn. http://ucan.foad.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=mohair-silk-triangle 2. Sampler scarf, including lots […]

What is blocking? It’s when you stretch your completed object out or finish it in one of various ways in order to make it stay a given size and shape. The shawl I’ve been knitting on, here: will not be that size or shape exactly when it’s done, and the pattern will really pop out […]