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 […]

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 […]

original: http://huaman.livejournal.com/49931.html#cutid1

From ages and ages ago, I had this yarn that I strongly felt should be a sweater, a sweater I even wanted, but which I had no desire at all to knit. A friend of mine kindly offered to knit it for me. We sat down together, talked it through, took measurements, and she designed […]

In this day and age and in this western Europeanized culture, when spinning isn’t exactly something that is done out of necessity; when we have developed machines to do our spinning for us, is the effort to spin nice plain “traditional” yarns really just a sort of backwards timewasting (not taking into account the funness […]

All yarn pr0n all the time! The past week or so of yarn. Exciting yarn pr0n! Hot mohair action! Thrilling blends! Commercial alpaca! Click any picture to go to the photo gallery (and you can leave comments and questions on the photos there if you like, too). One ply kid mohair, one ply tussah silk, […]

Originally posted on livejournal in February 2005.

I had packed 500 yards and over 5 oz on the Woolee Winder and… http://ucan.foad.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=oil-slick I just could not get the last little bit on there. So I wound all 3 plies into a pull-from-either-end butterfly type thing (hey, it works!) and then took the *other* end of the 3, and plied it with a […]

A few highlights from my photo gallery for the study I did in 2004 of handspun boucle yarns, found here: http://ucan.foad.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=boucles The first, a blend of New Zealand Brush Tail Possum (whatever that is, it’s neat stuff though) and coopworth, with rayon binder. I tried to do this all 3 strands at once and it’s […]

First you take this: (coopworth/alpaca blend from Jehovah Jireh Farm) and then you make it into this handspun single-ply yarn: Which then in turn gets plied with this iridescent commercial flossy stuff for a binder: And then it looks like this: Then, ply it one more time with the binder, in the opposite direction from […]