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 […]

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 […]

Originally posted: http://huaman.livejournal.com/43101.html

This morning, before I had had more than about a sip of coffee, my 7-year-old son walked up to me all super-perky and said, “Mom, is there any yarn you have and you are not going to use it so you want to sell it?” “Why?” I asked him. “I want some yarn for a […]

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 […]