Cashmere and silk yarn

Some more of the spinning fiber that I got for my birthday.  Again this was one that I was uncertain how much I was going to like it as a yarn, but was blown away when I finished! 

I guess I'm a little used to clay.  Sometimes in ceramics, a piece will never look any better than it does when it's still wet clay.  As soon as you see it fired it's turned into something else entirely, and it's not always good.

This yarn is by far the most soft that I've made so far, cashmere is so good x)

Bobbin Lace

I found this thing on the internet called bobbin lace and looked it up, and found it just fascinating!  It's a way of creating lace, which is why I learned to tat, and is a pretty antiquated technique these days.  So much so that I had trouble finding much instruction on the internet.

I got a book called 'Beginners Guide to Bobbin Lace' to get me started, and a set of 24 bobbins.  The bobbins were about $15 for the pack off of amazon and I thought 'Oh that'll be more than I ever need!'.  The funny thing about bobbin lace is the sheer number of bobbins needed.  It looks fun and interesting in pictures, but when you have it in front of you all you can think is what a terrible mistake you've made with your life.

I made the pillow out of some leftover packaging foam, a bucket lid, and some fabric.  But any kind of solid foam pillow will work.  It doesn't even have to be round.


The first few patterns in the book I found to be quite easy, and simple to understand.  A few patterns in I got very confused though, and had to seek help through youtube.  I still don't consider myself very good, but if you're interested in trying it I do have some comforting news!  First, there are only two movements: cross or twist.  Every single stitch is a different variant of crossing and twisting.  The second bit of good news is that you only work with two pairs at a time, usually moving one pair across the line.

 Keep in mind that in my photos the bobbins are NOT in any kind of order.  If I were still working on the piece they would all be spread out flat and kept in order.  As they are I tied off the ends and just let the bobbins hang while I took photos.

Alpaca Yarn 'Northern Lights'

I've spun a few yarns with the fiber that I got for my birthday (back in August...)!  This fiber was so pretty, I couldn't wait to work with it.  It's a black with bits of jewel tone blue and pink throughout it, it really just sparkled as a fiber.

Having a lazy kate built into my spinning wheel makes it SO easy to make two ply yarn!  I love plying, it's like magic :)

Hair embroidery

Well, turns out hair is hard to embroider with, who would have figured?  I'm trying anyways haha ^^;

It's so springy that I doesn't like to lie flat on the fabric, I haven't figure out any real 'tricks' yet except to work in short sections of hair at a time, only 5-8 stitches per length of thread.

Just some yarn!

So I bought some random yarn from Joanns.com since I wanted free shipping, and two of this type of yarn brought it up to the minimum price (they always get me with that... I love free shipping).

I'm thinking it might go nicely with the white warp that I have ready to be put on the loom, I'm not 100% sure though yet.  It's just so fuzzy and nice!  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to try making a warp out of it.

Things made out of hair!

These photos aren't new or anything, but they're of the items that I made of my own hair!  I showed some spun hair in my last post, but this is from some different spun hair.  I have red hair, and have been saving it for a while from off of my hair brushes.  I had some left from when I had my hair dyed blonde (it was more of a strawberry blonde) and right now my hair is its natural red.

Regular red!

Strawberry blonde!

And some of the things I made out of it!  I didn't used it all, but I did use most of it.

A ring that I tatted, it's really scratchy to wear unfortunately :(  I need to look into a way that I could seal it with clear resin maybe?  Then it would be stiff and smoother, right now there's so many hairs sticking out that poke into my skin.

Two earrings, they're not perfect though.  Since the thread that comes out of spun hair is so uneven, it's not too easy to tat.  The problem comes when you need to pull the thread through a row of completed knots, the hairs that stick out get caught and won't pull through the knots smoothly.  To fix this I used half cotton thread, half hairthread, and used the cotton thread to pull through the knots instead of hair.  It's a little difficult to explain, so I'll try next time to make a little tutorial about it!

Human hair

I've been trying to post more again, but it's been pretty stressful around here, with a lot of doctors visits x(  Excuses, excuses, but I'm trying!

Since I started spinning there was one material that I was pretty interested in trying to use, since I find it to be a terribly interesting thing: human hair.  It's durable, long lasting, shiny and everywhere!  The connotations it brings up can give anything made of it an interesting commentary, since it's been used historically.

I got some hair from a friend, just what was collected in her hairbrush, and went to town!  Since she has long slightly course hair I had to condition it first, and comb it so that all of the hairs were facing the same direction.  I was able to spin my own hair first, and spin it directly from the round sort of 'pads' that came off of my hair brush, but my hair only goes down to my shoulder, so when I pulled on a hair it would slip out of the tangle.  Since this brown hair from my friend is rather longer, when I tried to spin it from the round from the brush it just pulled into knots.

Human hair is not ideal for spinning though.  Unless you are skilled enough (which I am not) the ends of the hairs will stick out.  This isn't usually a problem for spinning materials like wool, since each hair is so thin that it just gives it a fuzzy look, instead of a spiny one like human hair.  But it's certainly manageable!  I don't think it would be possible to spin it much thinner than this without considerable skill, certainly the thicker you spin it the easier it will be.  Unfortunately it's not always easy to get a lot of it to spin with!

This is how much thread I got from 2-3 sizable pads of hair from a hairbrush, so not much!  It's still enough to make something small though.  I'd love to try weaving it once I get enough, but weaving is notoriously yarn heavy.

I'd like to say that once you go through the trouble of cleaning, brushing and spinning that it's easy to work with, but I can't.  It's incredibly springy!  It does not like being pulled into tight curves AT ALL.  Of course you can always make it do what you want, but it takes some patience.  I'll try to dig up some photos of the tatting that I did with my own spun hair!

Right know I'm trying to make an embroidery out of it, I'll post progress photos of that too!

From roving to yarn!

So I spent some time spinning yesterday and made the roving that I dyed and posted about yesterday into some yarn!

It's not really quite what I wanted, but it's certainly not bad?  It's just darker than I had planned is all.

It only made about 100 yards unfortunately!  I still have about half the roving, so it can probably get about 200 yards out of the 4oz of fiber, but ideally I would like more!

Painted Roving

I got a book from the library about colors and spinning, and in it was a tutorial for painting rovings!  I had some lying around and I saw a beautiful yarn on etsy, but it was a bit too expensive, and there wasn't enough of it (I need 400 yards to make much of anything really on the loom).  I save a photo of it and decided to try and make my own kind of like it!

I ordered RIT powder dye from joanns.com, they have a good price at $2.29 a box, and there was a coupon for free shipping, so I got a bunch of them for like $15.

There are a ton of tutorials for painting rovings online, it's super easy!  It takes a little time, but you don't even really need any special equipment.

I used three colors.  Fuschia, rose and tan.  Rose and tan were both 'tints' instead of dyes, so they were less concentrated anyways.  It made less work for me, but if you want to get your money's worth out of the dyes you could just buy the actual dyes and water them down.  But when they're only $2.29 a box it's hardly worth it anyways.

This is four ounces of fiber, and I used a little bit less than half of each packet of powdered dye to dye this much.


You can kind of see that mine ended up a liiiiitle bit felted.  It happened when I was washing the dye out.  I really need to invest in a bag that I can wash fibers in, since it was a little bit too much agitation when having to change the water a lot to get the dye out.  In the end I left it with a liiiitle bit of dye still, and I'll just wash it more once it's been made into yarn.  I'll just have to deal with it dyeing my fingers a little bit when I spin it!

Alpaca

So I didn't post yesterday, and I have no excuse besides the fact that I forgot, doh!

I have this huge bag of alpaca fur that I bought off of Etsy from a rescue farm, and it was significantly larger than I was anticipating!  The listing didn't have a full photo, and all it said was that it would be more than two pounds of fiber.  In my mind I said oh, two pounds of fiber, that's reasonable, yes?

I've never bought more than half a pound of fiber before, so I guess I just wasn't prepared.  I haven't weighed it, but it might be more than two pounds.  I was just shocked when I opened it up and bam!  A whole garbage bag full of fiber!

It's super soft, and it'll make some awesome yarn I think!  It's light enough that I think it'll take some dye too.  I'll have to go through and sort it, but from what I've looked at of it, it's really quite clean.  It certainly doesn't have an overpowering smell like the leicester wool that I bought.

I keep putting off spinning it though, telling myself that I should wait until I have a spinning wheel, since spinning this much fiber by drop spindle is intimidating, to say the least.  I still have other spinning projects to finish fist anyways!