Still Weaving!

My solution for the moth eaten warp was to just take about an inch off the side, so I lost 10~ ends, but it was worth it to still be able to use the warp.  My mother joked that it had upset me so much, she was just going to go down there and cut the warp off, I did not find that funny x_x

I finished up the last weaving that had some broken ends in it and started a new one!  This one I'm just using a variegated yarn so the weaving goes super fast when I don't have to switch colors.  I really like how it looks! 

Hopefully I'll have it finished early next week, I want to try a rainbow warp next!

Oh no!

I went to weave some today and found this :(

It looks like a moth took a big bite out of my warp in the time it took me to get my basement work room back in order.  I'm guessing this only looks really bad to people that weave, but it's really bad.  It goes through several layers of the warp, so a few of my ends are essentially chopped into pieces which really sucks!

I can finish the scarf that I have on the loom now at around 60" without having to mess around adding new ends, but I don't know quite what to do with what will be left.

Augh, it's so frustrating to have broken ends, I just hate having to deal with it T_T

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)

Alpaca and Silk

This was my second spinning project, I picked the fiber that I deemed 'least pretty' since I still wasn't sure if I was going to improve on the wheel yet!  Shockingly, once it was all spun I LOVED it, it's so soft and shiny.  I would consider buying more of this fiber!

I just love how the silk adds that sine to it, and even though it's not perfect that's just fine with me, it's not like it's unusable, it just has lots of character!

More yarn!

This was the first thing that I spun on my wheel, it was a fairly small and cheap batt that I thought would be good for a first go.

It doesn't look it but it's actually two ply, I hadn't gotten the hang of the amount of twist yet (I'm still not sure that I have it...)!

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 :)

Spinning Wheel

My parents, in an incredible show of generosity, bought me a spinning wheel for my birthday!  I had been looking for months for a deal on one off of craigslist, but every time I was too late and was getting really bummed every time I missed one.

I picked one out and they got me a Kromski Minstrel unfinished.  So I stained and sealed it, then assembled and here it is!  I absolutely love it, I don't think I could ever go back to a drop spindle.

I'm going to try to get back into this!

Oh no, I've been gone forever :(  I don't know what happened to me, I keep saying 'I've been really busy' but can't come up with any one thing to point to for why I've been so busy.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, I have no excuse!

What have I been doing then?  Most a lot of Monster High customs!

A Lagoona Blue.

Abbey Bominable.

I have a bunch more, but they're all on my flickr if you want to see all of my customs in one place.

Another thing I've been doing is that I won a HUGE lot of yarn off of ebay!

It was 150lbs of yarn.  It's all organized by color now, but I need another bookcase for all of it!  I'll never have to worry about not having a matching color for something again.

Anyways, I'll really try to keep up with this again, just taking pictures of whatever I work on day to day.

Lots of White

So I've finally gotten around to working on the white warp that I put on my loom!  I decided to go with the white angora that I spun myself to go with it, and a little black that I had for some accents.

I like things better when they're woven loosely like this.  I think it might have been better for me to treadle (1,3) (2,4), but I wasn't paying much attention and ended up doing (1,2) (3,4), so two ends sit together, but it's hard to notice I guess.

This is the white angora that I hand spun and am using for the weft.

This much progress didn't take too long, maybe an hour!  Hopefully I'll finish it this week sometime :)

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!

White warp

I bought this nice looking yarn off of yarn.com since it was a good price, and had good reviews!  It's hard to shop for yarn online though, since you can't see the scale very well, and the colors are usually pretty different.  The trouble is that it's hard to beat the deals you can get online!

When I need to get 1000 yards of yarn at a time it's just no economical for me to go to a store and pay $10 a skein when I can find what I need online for half that.

So, this was one of the yarns that I bought, unfortunately I didn't stop to consider quite how thin it was!  It's pretty strong for how thin it is.  We'll see how much patience I have for weaving it, but I'm never one to throw away yarn!

It's only 160 ends, so it won't be too impossible to string onto the loom.  Sure will be tedious though.

Time spent weaving

So I've started weaving on this warp, it's going okay so far!  I mentioned before that the yarn I chose will cause me difficulty since it is a single (as opposed to 2-ply, 3-ply etc), and that makes it more likely to come apart.  This is problematic since to weave, since the threads need to be kept under tension for weaving, but you have to be careful to keep the correct amount.  Too little tension and the threads will get rubbed on too much, too much and they will snap.

My first instinct was to go with really high tension, thinking that they will be a little thinner that way, and it will keep them together?  It was a poor argument, and did not go well, I had three snap during weaving.  So this time I went with a medium/low tension, just enough to let me beat the threads down without them stretching every time I pulled.

I don't know how well this shows the tension, but it's not terribly taut.

I have the harnesses set up to do a basket weave!  I have a four harness loom, and I strung it on a straight draw (1, 2, 3, 4), so I set up my pedals to do 1 2, and 3 4.

Before I can weave I have to even out all of the threads!  Since they're in sort of V patterns from where I tied them onto the rod in groups.  To get them even you open the sheds (the spaces between the threads when you lift up a harness) and put yarn through a few times before beating.  You will have to pull harder on the beater to get all three shots down to the bottom, but it works really well to get things even!

Better, but not great!  Most people recommend weaving anywhere from one to four inches before getting to the real weaving, but I'm lazy so I usually end up just shy of an inch.

Not perfectly even, but since these threads are really thick, it's not much of an issue.  The more you weave the more even they get though.

Getting started weaving!  I bury the ends while I'm working, though there are other ways to do it.

A few inches in!  I have to decide what pattern I'm going to go with, since I have orange and green yarns!

Patten decided!  I made the error of cutting the ends of my yarn when I was burying them.  If at all possible it is so much better to tear the yarn, so that it will taper off and not stick out.  I tried that first but couldn't get it to tear, so I started cutting the yarn, but as you can see it's sticking out!

I thought about it and figured out that if I just untwist the yarn a little and hold it that way while I pull it comes apart easy.  I'll have to go back and fix the first few, but once I switched to tearing the yarn the ends are not a problem!

 More progress!  It'll take a while to finish it though!

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!