Fiber in the Hands of an Angry Spinner

I showed up in the Spokesman Review weaving on the quad at the Gonzaga Tartan Legacy Day.  It was a blast, and the cloth came out beautifully.

For curious weavers, I used a sett of 12 epi using sport weight Brown Sheep Naturespun yarn in Natural, Irish Shamrock, Nordic Blue, and Scarlet, sourced locally at Paradise Fibers.

I will have it at the 13 May meeting of the Spokane Handweavers’ Guild in Spokane Valley, if you’d like to see the finished product.  I fulled it further than I intended, which makes me a wee bit sad, but it would make a GORGEOUS blanket at that weight.

As we learned at the last guild meeting, blue DOES in fact felt at a different rate than the other colours, so I also had puckering of the white squares, which I worked out with a makeshift mangle (large rolling pin) and lots of elbow grease.

My spinning client send me musk ox (so very soft!) and silk (for strength) to spin.

Some of it had been spun before, and she wondered if I could take it back apart.

It was loosely spun, and the musk ox is short, so I started by teasing the yarn into short strips.

I held the strips and charged the carders with it.

Looking good.  So I started carding back and forth.

The fibers opened up nicely and the blending went really well: here’s the resulting rolag:

After just an hour, I got the yarn back to fibers, and the rest of it processed.  On to the spinning!

Unfortunately, the spinning and un-spinning resulted in some of the musk ox felting on itself.  This happens with really fine fibers — too much handling results in felting.  It’s basically the same thing that happens when a fabric pills.  Here’s one of the rolags that shows that:

And a close up:

Fortunately, I noticed this early, and I separated out the rolags with the damage from the ones that weren’t.  Here’s what happens in the spinning when you encounter the wee nubbies:

(Click to enlarge and get a good view of the nub).  Yarn with these nubbies intentionally placed can be gorgeous and interesting — they add a tweedy texture to the yarn and make beautiful cloth.  However, since so much of the musk ox was NOT damaged in this way, I wanted to preserve the smooth nature of the bulk of the yarn, so I spun two separate skeins: one smooth and a smaller nubby one.