A very happy winter solstice, and a walk with Juno to the top of the mountain on this very clear bright morning, with wintery sentiment from the red toyon berries. All the new growth is overtaking the dead trees from the wildfire (now six years since), the old trees still standing appear silver and artfully dignified in their rightful place, here, there, everywhere, in the crisp winter light.
((click 1st image to go to slide show))
Never before have I used one, but I found a nice palette generator to help me begin my first weaving project, and I must say, these tools are awesome! I have needed to go to the source of my inspiration, which is the landscape around me, and to simply draw from the pool of photos in the archives in my blog will give me the colors I need, for knitting, weaving, anything. This photo Golden Fields which inspired a knitted lace design, again it will with weaving. For my first attempt with this palette, I am sampling the wool on the inkle loom . . .
The colors are all there, and what an interesting plain weave from the four colors in my yarn drawer, even though they may not be exactly as the color generator produced. It was just a matter of reconstructing the yarns from fluffy worsted knitting yarn into very tightly plied laceweight weaving yarn, like the Andean weavers do with wool, leave it to me to be a yarn nerd about it. My first try at making fine dense weaving wool (about 24 wpi) is nowhere near as fine as the authentic Peruvian pieces I have, but I think perhaps a very good starter weaving weight.
Okay spinners, here is how I do it . . .
- In z twist direction, I wind worsted weight on to bobbin without giving much twist, just tighten the tension on the bobbin, and let the yarn fly on to the bobbin, and it will become unplied somewhat, needing touch-up in next step, but I do NOT want to over twist (unply) or I’ll be having to reverse direction in the next step at intervals.
- Then with untwisted plied yarn on a bobbin, I loosen the bobbin tension so that I can pull the yarn back off, dividing the 4 plies and wind into two balls of 2ply, while at the same time spinning slowly as needed in z twist direction, when the twist builds up again.
- Once two balls of 2ply yarn needing to be respun with s twist, I wet spin in s twist direction to ply, while keeping tension on the yarn winding on to the bobbin so it is tightly plied and firmly wound on to bobbin. I find that wetting my finger tips helps manage fluff and also more densely plies the yarn.
- After finished, still damp, I wind finished plied yarn on to a felted wool ball somewhat firmly, as to keep a bit of tension on the yarn while drying. This is what the Peruvians do for their weaving handspun yarns, I learned from instructional video Andean Spinning by Nilda Callañaupa Álvarez, winding around often a little pebble to start their balls. I am using her technique as my guidance, and although I can’t imagine why they would want their yarn tightly wound, (so against the principles of knitting yarn) I am guessing it is so the wool’s elasticity on the warp is lessoned.
The final plied woolen spun skein, washed & dried, and my nep cloud experiment is finished !
The neps were so subtle and very difficult to get to show on the camera, so I had to intensify the color saturation of the photo just so that you could see them, the blue and green neps. The whole skein looks rather seafoam color when hanging out on the line.
This time of year the Black Oak leaves are budding out a soft fuzzy beautiful crimson velvet!
The landscape by the way, is healing slowly from the wildfire. We’ve had to cut down so many dead & dying old Black Oaks around the house, and since I was outside photographing yarn drying on the clothes line, I want to show you how the young shoots are vigorously growing from their parent trees, from root systems perhaps a hundred years old. I have been shaping the new growth, and now the tallest of these young oak trees is almost 10 feet tall. I’m so proud of these young darlings!
I was thinking of trying another variation of the technique I posted in my first Nep Clouds Recipe on my new hand-carders, but I don’t think I can really improve it, for it seems to do best I think , to achieve the affect of the traditional woollen spun rustic tweed, so drawing off the rolags from the blending board work very nicely ( I have made some more notes in the original Nep Clouds Recipe for those who don’t own hand-carders ). Alternatively one could spin from the batt, worsted technique. Anyway, this method suits me just fine, and I will look forward to blending up some more neppy colorways just as I did this skein, and that about wraps up this nep clouds experiment!
See all posts Nep Clouds.
See all posts Tweed Chronicles.
I went for a walk up the ridge in the foggy drizzle, and turned around only a short way up, where the bad burn begins. But at that turning point something I saw took my breath away! It was this bright yellow green carpet emerging from the wet black soot that has covered the dormant forest floor for seventeen months now. Beads of water hang on the tips of the moss fronds, precious and glistening, growing up from some magical deep rooted system, and truly a miracle of time and season! Just as this new moss is sprouting ever so blithely and succulent from a colorless landscape, so I want to be. I am so happy today to release incessant worries about what is not right, for thinking it only constantly reaffirms and makes it persist in being. I am prepared for weightlessness, living for now, happy, all focus on productivity of the present, and hyper sensitivity of natures regrowth, because the greatest inspiration and design element from nature is right before me.
It snowed last night! Here at 2000 ft elevation, it is sticking, and temperature is cold enough to keep it a while. Oh, but there seems to be something nestled into the snow…
It is two cakes of finished UnSpun!
of which I mentioned in the last post .
A gorgeous blackish tealish blue, 1100 yards & 100 grams, this super fine lace weight is ready to make a journey to Hamburg Germany! You can see all four of this series in Unspun For Friends
And all is well in our snowy charcoal forest.
And Emma in her car, snuggled under a blanket with her squirrel …
She hasn’t a care in the world about the snowy cold!