It's not a regular update. There won't be any progress reports on my WIPs, or proud displays of finished objects, no yarn porn in the form of my latest acquisitions, and sadly, no penguins either. Instead this update will be all about some new fibre craft skills I've been learning, and a little bit about saying goodbye to a much loved hobby too.
Goodbye Running Shoes
Let's start with the sad part: this year I've been forced to finally admit that I can't keep running. I've spent the better part of the last 2 years recovering from a variety of minor injuries, and most especially from a particularly nasty bout of flu last February. Every time I recovered enough to get back out there training, I'd find myself in too much pain, or too exhausted to do anything much at all, within a fortnight. It's not a fitness thing either, even after some of the longer breaks in my training it was never my muscles, or my breathing, or my heart-rate that were a problem, it was always a joint that went out, or a build up of pain in my hips, or pure fatigue. After the stress and grief of this last winter, I found that I was struggling sometimes more than my dad when we went for our little Sunday afternoon stroll with Yaz and her little pug. If I can't keep up with a 69 year old man who has chronic spondylosis, terminal pancreatic cancer, and is going through triple chemotherapy, then I pretty much have to admit that I'm not well enough to be running.
In April this year I finally got to see a physiotherapist with experience of working with EDS. He gave me crutches and wrist-braces, with the instructions to use them when I need them, but not when I don't. I can cause myself to weaken prematurely if I rely on them too much, but on the other hand why struggle on in pain, or stop going for walks, when I can regain some of my speed and endurance just by using a couple of basic disability aids?
Having something to help me at least walk the longer distances again means that in a way I haven't had to completely give up. 3 days before my 40th birthday I completed the Newcastle Race For Life, with the help of my crutches. It took me an hour and 20 minutes to hobble around the course. I met another lovely lady also using crutches, she'd recently had surgery on her foot, and would need surgery on the other at some point too. She is a cancer survivor, but sadly not all of her family have been so lucky, it seems likely that there is a genetic predisposition in her family, so as far as she was concerned it really didn't matter that she would struggle with her crutches and her foot in a cast, it was more important to her that she do something to raise money to help her children, and potential grandchildren, avoid what she'd been through.
Together we showed that anyone can do their bit, and at the same time we showed ourselves that we can be capable of great things if we are willing to pay the price.
For me the price was you all getting to see this photo of me looking truly shocking, as well as several days of increased pain and fatigue, and me finally admitting to myself that I couldn't have walked it without the crutches, never mind run it, but it was worth it for the money I raised, and the sense of achievement. I'll keep on hobbling and limping my way around one Race For Life each year for as long as I can, because what's a few days of suffering for me when balanced against the lives that could be saved, or improved?
Incidentally, if you wish to be a part of saving and improving the lives of people with cancer, then do feel free to donate on my Just Giving page ;)
Natural Dyeing
Everybody in the knitting world is dyeing their own yarn these days. I must follow at least dozen different independent yarn dyers on Instagram. The kind of dyeing that they all do doesn't really interest me though. I know what modern technology and dyes can achieve, and I can't imagine for a moment that I'd have the skill or artistic talent to create anything more exciting than what is already available without me having to make a mess of my kitchen.
What interests me is how it all started. When people first decided that the sheep they were making their clothing from didn't come in enough different colours, how did they go about making more interesting colours for themselves? What did they do to make the colour last? Can I do the same just with what I have in the garden?
I started by reading up on the subject, in particular I've found The Craft of Natural Dyeing, by Jenny Dean to be very useful. I learned about mordents, preparing the dyestuff, and some popular plants that have been used as dyestuff for millennia. I learned that if you follow a book then at some point it's going to recommend that you buy some ingredient for the process ready-made. In this case it's the most popular mordent - alum. I don't want to do that. I want to be able to do the whole process without weights and measures, without using anything processed, entirely as it might have been done thousands of years ago. Well, with the exception of using modern pans and a stove top. I know that I can build and light a fire if I need to, so I'll accept the aid of modernity on that one!
So here's what I did:
Soaking - The wool needs to be wet before you start. Usual rules on no sudden temperature changes, or excessive agitation of the yarn in order to avoid felting apply.
Mordanting - Wanting an effective mordant that would have been easily available throughout history I chose to use iron water. I didn't go hunting down rivers with rusty red deposits in them, but the mordant was made by leaving flakes of iron (from dad's grindstone) in a bucket of water until it all went a rusty sort of colour. This means it was basically impossible to determine how much mordant I was using, and in hindsight I suspect it was WAY too much!
Preparing a dye bath - Having read that nettles produce a nice yellowy-greeny sort of colour, and because nettles are abundantly available in dad's wildflower patch, I chose them as my dyestuff. This stage smelled a lot like I was making spinach soup.
Maintaining the correct temperature is a difficult thing to judge when you're deliberately not using a thermometer. I went for not quite simmering, then left the whole lot in the pan until it was cool afterwards.
Now I know that using iron as a mordant does cause the colours to be darker and more muted, but this is significantly more brown than I was hoping for. In the right light you can see hints of green and yellow, but I think excessive iron might have been the problem here. Still, it can't be denied that I changed the colour of this yarn! More experimentation is needed!
Preparing raw fleece
At the start of June it was my sister's birthday. To celebrate she and her family went camping with our friend Gemma and her family. Perfect trip for 4 young kids, they all get to have adventures and get dirty, perfect trip for 4 adults, they all get time away from computers and wine around the campfire. The place they stayed is called Brockwell Woods, and they invited us to visit them for an afternoon. When we did we discovered that the land owners also keep Jacob sheep, but that they can't sell the fleece because there's no profit in it. Instead they store it and use most of it for insulation in the barn! I asked if I could buy some, and I was told that if I made a small donation to their tree planting fund then I could take as much as I wanted.
Now I've spun from raw fleece before, back when I very first learned to spin I did a workshop at Brough Lee Farm, and they provided me with a bag of washed fleece. We were taught how to flick card, just to get the worst of the vegetable matter and guard hairs out, then spin woolen style from that. I much prefer to spin worsted though, now that I'm more experienced, so using dad's new-found YouTube skills we spent a good length of time watching videos on fleece preparation on his TV. I learned that carding isn't what I need to be doing in order to prepare fleece for worsted spinning. I need to comb the fleece instead. So I invested in a simple set of combs, and set about preparing the fleece I'd bought.
First you need to "skirt" the fleece, that is pick out all the bits that are matted, felted, or made of poo. Sheep don't wash, they don't wipe their arses, and they scratch their butts by rubbing up against drystone walls, there WILL be bits that are not salvageable! Then you wash it. There are several schools of thought on this. Some people say use hot water, some say use lukewarm water. I've always been lead to believe that sudden changes of temperature are bad for wool, so I went for the lukewarm option. GENTLE agitation with a little woolite. Several times. The water will gross you out when you see how filthy it gets! Then rinse several times. Then let it dry.
Washing is removing dirt and grease, because sheeps wool is full of the natural grease lanolin. Washing won't remove all the bits of grass and seeds and stuff!
That's partly what these are for. These are very basic wool combs. Normal people might clamp them to the edge of a table, but I can neither stand for long enough to use that method, nor sit on a dining chair for long enough, or at least not without passing out or incredible pain, or both. So mine are clamped to the edge of one of the large wooden stools that usually live in dad's summer house, hence the few spiderwebs still clinging to the underside, despite my efforts to brush them off!
This is the fleece once it's been washed, dried, and 'picked'. Picked just means sort of lightly fluffing it out. You can get fancy devices to make the picking process less laborious, but in my case dad just pulled it apart with his hands. I didn't make him do this part by the way! I think he was impatient to see the combing process, so when I arrived here last time he'd already done this in preparation.
Now you load your comb, or 'lash on'. Depending on the type of fleece you have, and how much the natural structure has been disrupted by the washing and picking process, you might be able to see which direction the majority of the fibres are aligned in. On most of the YouTube videos we watched the fibres seemed to start off far better aligned than these, but I don't know if that's because the people making the videos deliberately chose types of fleece that would make the concept easier to describe. I worried that perhaps this wouldn't work for me because my fleece seemed so much messier to start with, but actually it didn't turn out to be a problem at all.
You start combing at the tips, and gradually work closer and closer to the loaded comb, working with the combs at right angles to each other. As you work, the fibre will slowly transfer from one comb to the other, and the little bits of vegetable matter mixed in with it will fall out onto the floor, or get stuck behind the tines of the first comb. Once most of the fibre has transferred to the second comb, you swap them over, remove any raggedy neps and knots still attached to the first comb, and repeat the process several times.
As you can see, even though I started off with a big unruly mess, this created lovely neat, straight, aligned fibres. You can also see here what the waste material full of neps and grass and stuff looks like.
Now you carefully pull the fibre off the comb, in much the same way that you would draft to spin. Pull an inch or so, then move your grip forward and pull another inch, etc.
You'll end up with a rough sliver like this, and a tiny bit of wastage on the comb.
Wind the sliver into a loose 'nest', and put it aside while you load up the combs with more fleece and repeat the whole process another 3 or 4 times.
Unwind the 3 or 4 slivers that you've made to make a sort of loose batt...
Then load up your combs again from the batt. Several of the videos I watched recommended combing your fibre twice in this way. If you're using a particularly fine fibre, then you might even switch to a finer comb at this point. The phrase that sticks in my head from one video in particular is "Combing it twice, makes everything nice!" so that's what I did, and it did remove a small number of little stubborn neps and tiny particles of vegetable matter that the first combing had missed. I did the same transferring back and forth between combs procedure as I did the first time, although it didn't take nearly as long the second time around before I was happy with how it looked.
This time instead of hand-drafting a sliver, I used a diz (carved by dad, of course!). A diz is basically a smooth, slightly curved, flattish object with a small hole (very small hole!) in it. I even saw a video where a woman used a standard yale key as a diz. You hook a little bit of fibre through the diz, then push the diz towards the comb until it starts to stick. Then you pull more fibre through, and push the diz forward again, etc. It allows you to create a thicker ribbon of fibre than the hand drafting method, which is more robust for storage until use. Although it does take a bit of practice to get the technique right!
If you have bigger combs, then you might be able to produce long enough ribbons of tops to braid, but my combs are pretty small, so I just wound them up into little bumps. This was the result of my first afternoon of preparing washed raw fleece for worsted spinning, and I'm pretty pleased with it!
This was the tea towel that I'd had laid on the floor underneath my combs. Bearing in mind that a lot of the knots and neps end up left on the back of the comb, then pulled off and thrown away, you can see just how much crap came out of the little bit of fibre I prepared that day!
Of course the next logical thing to do was to spin with some of this fibre! First I spun up some on one of the drop spindles that dad has made. I even chain-plied it and made finished, usable yarn!
I think this is one of the proudest things I've done in my fibre-craft career! There's not much of it, just about 13m, less than 4g, because I was only doing this to try it out. It's roughly sport-weight, and definitely quite 'rustic', but that's to be expected with Jacob. Even the commercially prepared Jacob that I've spun before turned out much the same.
So now I've started spinning a larger amount on my Haldane wheel. The farmer who I bought the fleece off made an off-hand comment about always needing warm hats for looking after the sheep in winter. I'm sure he didn't intend me to, but I think that my first full project with this fibre will be to knit a hat and give it to him as a thank you. I can't imagine that he had any idea how much enjoyment I would get out of those 2 bags of "useless" fleece!
Now it's bed time for me, and quite possibly more fibre combing tomorrow!
You start combing at the tips, and gradually work closer and closer to the loaded comb, working with the combs at right angles to each other. As you work, the fibre will slowly transfer from one comb to the other, and the little bits of vegetable matter mixed in with it will fall out onto the floor, or get stuck behind the tines of the first comb. Once most of the fibre has transferred to the second comb, you swap them over, remove any raggedy neps and knots still attached to the first comb, and repeat the process several times.
As you can see, even though I started off with a big unruly mess, this created lovely neat, straight, aligned fibres. You can also see here what the waste material full of neps and grass and stuff looks like.
Now you carefully pull the fibre off the comb, in much the same way that you would draft to spin. Pull an inch or so, then move your grip forward and pull another inch, etc.
You'll end up with a rough sliver like this, and a tiny bit of wastage on the comb.
Wind the sliver into a loose 'nest', and put it aside while you load up the combs with more fleece and repeat the whole process another 3 or 4 times.
Unwind the 3 or 4 slivers that you've made to make a sort of loose batt...
Then load up your combs again from the batt. Several of the videos I watched recommended combing your fibre twice in this way. If you're using a particularly fine fibre, then you might even switch to a finer comb at this point. The phrase that sticks in my head from one video in particular is "Combing it twice, makes everything nice!" so that's what I did, and it did remove a small number of little stubborn neps and tiny particles of vegetable matter that the first combing had missed. I did the same transferring back and forth between combs procedure as I did the first time, although it didn't take nearly as long the second time around before I was happy with how it looked.
This time instead of hand-drafting a sliver, I used a diz (carved by dad, of course!). A diz is basically a smooth, slightly curved, flattish object with a small hole (very small hole!) in it. I even saw a video where a woman used a standard yale key as a diz. You hook a little bit of fibre through the diz, then push the diz towards the comb until it starts to stick. Then you pull more fibre through, and push the diz forward again, etc. It allows you to create a thicker ribbon of fibre than the hand drafting method, which is more robust for storage until use. Although it does take a bit of practice to get the technique right!
If you have bigger combs, then you might be able to produce long enough ribbons of tops to braid, but my combs are pretty small, so I just wound them up into little bumps. This was the result of my first afternoon of preparing washed raw fleece for worsted spinning, and I'm pretty pleased with it!
This was the tea towel that I'd had laid on the floor underneath my combs. Bearing in mind that a lot of the knots and neps end up left on the back of the comb, then pulled off and thrown away, you can see just how much crap came out of the little bit of fibre I prepared that day!
Of course the next logical thing to do was to spin with some of this fibre! First I spun up some on one of the drop spindles that dad has made. I even chain-plied it and made finished, usable yarn!
I think this is one of the proudest things I've done in my fibre-craft career! There's not much of it, just about 13m, less than 4g, because I was only doing this to try it out. It's roughly sport-weight, and definitely quite 'rustic', but that's to be expected with Jacob. Even the commercially prepared Jacob that I've spun before turned out much the same.
So now I've started spinning a larger amount on my Haldane wheel. The farmer who I bought the fleece off made an off-hand comment about always needing warm hats for looking after the sheep in winter. I'm sure he didn't intend me to, but I think that my first full project with this fibre will be to knit a hat and give it to him as a thank you. I can't imagine that he had any idea how much enjoyment I would get out of those 2 bags of "useless" fleece!
Now it's bed time for me, and quite possibly more fibre combing tomorrow!
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