Black and white yarn scarf

Remember this post when I started with wool from two different sheep, one white and the other black and then made some black, white, and grey yarn?  Well, look what I finally made with it!

Here are the two different piles of raw wool:

I separated the dark wool into black, dark grey and medium grey, then mixed white and medium grey to make light grey, and used some plain white.  I made a bunch of rolags and spun them into a big bulky yarn.
Here are some rolags:

This was a long time ago!  It was probably in August of 2011.  I just couldn't decide what to do with the yarn.  I tried knitting with it, but it was too bulky and not lofty enough so it made a stiff, bulky fabric that was not working out no matter how big of needles I used.  So, it sat and sat until I saw someone at work with a yarn scarf just joined by zip ties!  I decided that would be a perfect way to use this yarn.  But, I used yarn to tie it in 3 spots instead of zip ties.

The black wool is a little coarser than the rest and makes it a little scratchier than I would prefer, but I am pretty sensitive to wool and I can wear it all day close to my skin with minimal annoyance.  I had just enough yarn for two, so one is going up for sale in my etsy shop.

Art yarn scarf sewn with dissolvable interfacing

Several years ago I saw someone with a scarf that was made just of yarn sewn together.  They told me their friend had made it using dissolvable interfacing.  I had that in the back of my mind for a long time and recently saw the technique again in a recent issue of Spin-off magazine.  I decided to finally try it out on my yarn that I made while trying out my drum carder.  You can read all about making the yarn here.

After the yarn was done, I arranged it and sandwiched it between two pieces of dissolvable interfacing and pinned it to keep it all in place.  Then I sewed back and forth on my sewing machine.

Finally, I just ran cold water over it to dissolve away the interfacing and hung it to dry!

Drum carding and yarn inspiration

Well, it has been a while I know.  Over the summer we moved from Iowa to the Kansas City area.  It has been nearly a year of transition from the time we found out that my husband got a promotion to now.  I commuted back to Iowa for work for a while, we lived in a hotel for 2 months, we bought a new house, moved, started new jobs, etc, etc.  So, I fell behind in blogging.  My crafting has been slower too until just recently.  But, I do have a backlog of projects to share and plan to get them up here in the near future.  I will kick off my return to the blog with a BIG post tonight.

For Chirstmas, I got a Brother motorized drum carder with 120 TPI carding cloth.  This is a machine used for preparing wool for spinning into yarn.  So, I was anxious to try it out and experiment with different techniques of blending color to see what the final yarn would end up like.  I started with color inspiration from design-seeds.com:

Then, I found natural wool colors and dyed some wool with food coloring to try to imitate each of the colors in inspiration picture.  Here is the natural wool I started with - white and black/grey.

I weighed out 3 1-ounce piles of white wool and dyed them light teal, dark teal and yellow.

1 ounce piles of wool before dyeing.

For the yellow I used 4 cups of water, 1/2 cup white vinegar, 30 drops yellow food coloring, 2 drops of green, and 2 drops of blue and simmered in my little crockpot dedicated to dyeing for about an hour.

For the light teal, I did the same thing but used 26 drops of blue food coloring and 10 drops of green.

For the dark teal I upped the vinegar to 3/4 cup and used 46 blue, 18 green, and 3 red drops of food coloring.  I might have let this one go longer too, but I don't remember for sure.

After they came out of the dye bath, they dried overnight - here is how they looked after dyeing and before carding.  The yellow looks way more yellow than it did in the crockpot.

Next, I used my new drum carder to make one white batt, one black batt, one grey batt, one light grey batt that was a mix of grey and white wool, and one batt from each of the dyed colors.

Here is the comparison of the inspiration picture colors to the carded batts:

I divided these into four pieces and tried 4 different techniques of carding/spinning to see how the yarn would differ.

For the first batt, I used a sandwich technique that I saw on this video from NeauveauFiberArts, but she learned it from PluckyFluff, who is the one who helped design my spinning wheel, the Aura from Majacraft.

The batt was fairly mixed in color, and you can see that in the final yarn.

For the second and third batts, I tried just putting the separate colors in stripes across the drum carder to keep them more separated.

In process of drum carding.

The batt before spinning.

The singles before plying.  I basically went up and down the batt, spinning most/all of one color before switching to the next.

The final double plied yarn.  Since I plied one skein onto itself, you an see that the dark teal is mostly always with black, the yellow with grey, white with light teal...etc, so not a ton of variation.

For the third batt, I prepared it the same way on the drum carder, but then pulled off horizontal strips so that it went back and forth across all of the colors several times for the singles.

This one was more mixed than the second skein, but not as muted as the first.

For the last batt, I did each color in a layer.

Front.

Back.

Side view of batt. 

The singles were much more mixed than the last two, but not as muted as the first.

Here is the double-ply.

Here are the 4 skeins from left to right: skein #1, skein #4, skein #3, skein #2.

I think they all capture the idea of the inspiration picture but it was interesting to see how the different methods produced different yarns.  I don't think the picture really captures the real differences as much as you can see them in real life.

A post with a final product from this yarn will follow.

Koozies and coffee sleeves

Here are a bunch more koozies and coffee sleeves I made a while ago and never posted.  The coffee sleeves are all hand-spun wool.  The blue one is dyed with food coloring, the other two are natural wool color.

Master Charles Hat for Cole

A year ago I tried making this hat for Cole and ended up with a much too large version that ended up going to my sister (I blogged about it here).  Well, I finally got around to making one in the correct size! I tried to get a picture of it on the recipient, but it turns out toddlers aren't the best at holding still for photographs when they want to run and play (who'd have guessed?).  So, below is the best action shot we got!

Harry Potter style scarf and hat

My 4 year old nephew has been really interested in my knitting and spinning recently and asked me to make him a scarf when he saw all my yarn.  So, I made him this scarf in the style of Harry Potter.  I wanted to have something to give to his brother so I whipped up this hat in a few hours one evening and the following morning.

I've been reflecting on my knitting progress recently.  Back in February of 2010 (almost 2 years ago!) I posted in this post about how I just didn't like knitting that much but that I really wanted to get over the learning curve so I could get into it.  Well, I think it worked!  I'm totally addicted now.  I've even been teaching others to knit and have been able to help them trouble-shoot.  That was a real eye-opener to me that I had transitioned from a novice to someone who actually knows how to knit!  I made both this hat and scarf without any pattern. Now, the scarf is not that tricky, but the hat required me to make ear-flaps and attach them to the hat, decrease, and pick up stitches around the bottom to do the ribbing.  Not to mention figuring out my gauge and how many stitches to cast on.  All that which was foreign to me less than two years ago now seems easy!

It really just took some practice and making a few things from patterns to learn some techniques.  Some other things that have helped me in the process have been the book Knit Fix, which has some really good explanations of both how to fix mistakes and also how to avoid making those same mistakes again (or in the first place).  The other thing that has really helped and inspired me is the Knit Picks podcast. Kelley talks about a lot of techniques and makes them sound easy or explains why you would use them.  I don't necessarily learn how to do the techniques while I'm listening, but at least I know they exist so I could look them up if I wanted to use that technique.  Sometimes it  helps me to better understand techniques I already knew about.  She also reviews a lot of books and my library has expanded because of that.  In fact, I think that is where I heard about Knit Fix!

Baa Baa Black Sheep

I found out that one of the summer students working in our lab grew up on a sheep farm.  She was going home one weekend, so I asked her if they had any black, grey or other colored wool that I could buy.  She brought me back an entire garbage bag full of black and grey wool (for free!)!

Here it is before any washing.

Here are some clean, carded rolags ready for spinning.  The white is from my other fleece that my dad got me, and the lightest grey is a blend of the white and the lightest grey.  The other 3 shades of grey and black are all from this fleece.  

I spun the different colored rolags in the order they were in the picture and then plied it back on itself to make this skein that goes from black all the way to white.

 This one was actually my first skein of spun yarn from the black and grey fleece.

And, here is a coffee cozy knit from the first skein.  This might have to go to the summer student as a thank you for the wool.  I can't wait to make something from the other skein. I've carded a lot more of this wool in preparation for my new spinning wheel, so there might be enough for a scarf or something when I am done!

Hand spun, hand dyed, and hand knit coffee cozy

Back in November I took a small amount of yarn I had spun (double ply on the top and a singles on the bottom of the picture below) and dyed it with food coloring.  It has been sitting on my shelf since then and I had no specific plans for it.  I had just done it to try out dying.

The color was so bright that I couldn't imagine wanting to make anything out of it. In fact, it is even hard to get a good picture!

Well, this weekend I finally got around to knitting up a coffee cozy with the singles yarn.  It seems like the only thing that you might not mind being that crazy color.  It looks better than I expected.  I actually kind of like it now.  I'm considering putting it up on etsy.