Fiber Monday - Not doing things

While I did a lot of things this past week, well, one thing... Canning. It's hard to can and do fiber type things. Pretty much for most of the week all I was able to get in was a bit of dyeing. Clearly the theme of the week was put things in very large pots and cook them. Things such as cucumbers and choke berries and more cucumbers and some goldenrod.

Here are the results:

The bottom skein was the first in the dye pot, then the next day I put in the top one because there was still so much dye left. I could have probably gotten a couple more skeins dyed with this batch, which would become increasingly paler, but I didn't have the skeins, and if I did, they wouldn't have been mordanted. Maybe I can do this next fall, and be prepared with the right amount of yarn, because it would be really pretty. 

Then came the weekend. Saturday was filled, so no fiber things that day, which brings us to Sunday. I had plenty on my list... Winding the warp into the loom, tracing my new muslin for my pattern drafting class, finally making the button holes in my jacket that only needs them to be finished. Did I do any of those things? No, no I didn't. Instead I spent the entire afternoon on a complete whim. 

A couple of days before, a friend had stopped by who knows far more about fiber related things than I do. I'm the round about way that conversations go, we started to talk about drum carders, so I got mine out to show her. She took one look at it and pointed out that the two drums were set too close together and told me how to fix it. This did explain why I found the carder a little tricky to use. 

On Sunday, J. moved the two drums to where they were supposed to be. And there I was with my drum carder out and in a more functional state, so what else could I do but give it a try?

I have always wanted to use it to card fleece, but I have never been able to manage it, and now I know why. Putting some fleece through it to see if it would work seemed like a good idea. So I did. I decided to have a go with some of this Clun Forest that I had dyed.

It was extremely pleased to see how well it worked. This kind of changes how quickly I will be able to process fleece now. But now I had some carded fleece on the drum carder. I could either take it off and store it for later, or I could keep going and make a batt. I'm sure you know which one I picked.

To make it more interesting, I grabbed a bag of purple-ish Mill ends. These are odds and ends of combed too and roving that are leftover and sold in bulk. There are lots of different colors and types of fiber, but you don't know what most of them are.

It all made a pretty decent batt.

(The color is a little off, it's actually more purple.)

There was still a good chuck of the afternoon left, so I decided to see how it spun. It wasn't a huge amount of fiber, so by dinner I had made a skein of yarn.

Now about that loom. Remember I said how I hoped to be weaving by the end of last week? Right, that didn't happen. I discovered when I went to tie on the rest of the warp, that I was ten ends short. This was annoying, but it's easy enough to measure ten more ends and tie them on. Except that when I went to measure out those ten ends, my yarn ran out halfway through. I could have called at least three different people to get a little more yarn, but I went ahead and ordered it because I would need it for the weft as well. Which does explain a bit why I had three full days to spend in the kitchen. 

The yarn came on Friday and I got the ends tied on. Today Y. and I spent nearly two hours winding the fifteen yards warp into the back beam. While winding on is probably my least favorite part of weaving, there is also some satisfaction that goes along with it. I do find it satisfying to go from this...

where it looks as though it will never be orderly enough to weave. To this...

You can see how thick that group of threads are in that picture. It is a lot of warp. I figure I'm probably good for about a month of weaving now.