Felting and Fiber Studio

Recently I was at Value Village and I spotted this super bulky yarn.  I didn’t have a use for it as yarn, but thought it would be nice to spin.  I have a fondness for blues and purples.

Lion Brand Rapido is a Super Bulky yarn.  This colour is called Tangy and it is 74% acrylic, 22% wool and 4% other fibres.

The yarn has a thin black binder or ply thread.  That black thread needed to be removed before I could spin it.  So I sat down and slowly pulled and then cut the black thread away.  I was left with three balls of roving.  I then started spinning.  After a few days work I had two bobbins of singles.  As you can see, one bobbin is much fuller than the other.

Next I started plying.  Initially I did a simple 2 ply yarn, using both bobbins.  When the smaller bobbin of singles ran out I was finished with the  2 ply.  With the remaining singles I made a 3 ply yarn by chain plying the singles.

The completed yarns look nice and I love both the 2 ply and 3 ply yarns.

In other news…. I have been continuing to monitor the Bird Nesting Balls (see Bird Nesting Balls 2024 for more info).  We have many American Goldfinches in the yard.  The Goldfinches diet is 100% seeds.  As a result, they time their nesting to coincide with seed availability which means they nest later than most of the other birds.  Recently I have seen the Goldfinches collecting wool, alpaca, bear and dog fur from my nesting balls.  Yeah!  (Getting photos of them collecting the fibre is much harder.)

Our yard has also seen a number of other visitors.  In addition to the steady stream of birds and Raccoons, we have had a fox visiting us quite regularly and last week this bear popped in looking for food.  I was sitting at my desk about 3 m from the bird feeder and their appearance was quite the surprise.  Luckily we were able to convince it move along by making a bit of noise and the feeders were undamaged.  I am waiting a while before putting out more attractive smelling suet or peanuts though.

Last year I wrote about my experiences putting out various fibres for the birds in Bird Nesting Balls.  This spring I have put out some new fibres to continue my experiments.

Our guild has a destash area where donated yarn and fibre is placed in our studio.  Members can adopt items and are requested to make a reasonable donation to our guild in return.  Someone had left a number of bags of dog fur on the shelf.  It was very soft, but also very short.  Pretty much unspinnable to me.  But I thought it would be perfect for a fresh set of bird nesting balls.

While discussing this plan with my guild mates a bag of Bear fiber was also produced and I was urged to take it.  While bear fibre sounds amazing, in reality it was very wirey and unpleasant.

Because I had quite a bit of fibre, I bought 3 metal rings designed to hold peanuts in the shell.

Here are the various fibres: tan dog fur, black dog fur, and bear.

I loaded the circular bird food holders with a blocks of Bear, black dog fur and tan dog fur.

Here are the holders after I stuffed them.  I also loaded a small amount of black cat fur into the blue bird holder.  (Last year the Chickadees really like the black cat fur.)  The lighter coloured fiber in the blue bird holder is llama.

Once the holders were loaded it was time to hang them up.  I spread them around the bird feeders in my front yard on April 21.  I also hung up the 2 balls I used last year, one with cream wool, and another with tan alpaca.

After a few weeks I began to notice that the holders were looking shaggy, which I assumed meant that the birds had been pulling out fibres.  But I had not witnessed the birds gathering fibres.

We have many hungry Raccoons in the neighbourhood and despite the baffle on my pole they manage to get up on the feeder.  We also have squirrels that launch themselves onto the pole and claw at things.  I recently noticed the wool holder was on the ground and falling to pieces.  So I went to the store and bought a metal cage designed to serve suet cakes.  I filled it with the wool and hung it backup.

Shortly after making this upgrade to my fibre supply station, I finally noticed a Chickadee taking fibre from one of the rings.  It looks like the black dog fur is the Chickadee’s preferred fibre.

I also managed to capture a short video.  I apologize for my dirty windows.

I spin almost every day.  Partly because I love to spin.  And partly because I can easily combine spinning with TV watching time with my husband.  This results in piles of spun yarn that needs to be washed and set.  When you spin yarn, there is often excess twist in the yarn.  Washing helps that twist settle out.  Washing also helps remove any excess dye present in the fibre.  For some fibers, when you wash them they bloom quite a bit and the final yarn can be shorter and plumper than it was before washing.  The following photos show the same yarn I before and after washing.  These yarns are from my previous batch of spinning/washing.

It had been about 3 weeks since I last washed any yarn and my bag of unwashed skeins was getting full.  I took them upstairs to our spare bathroom for washing.  This bathroom has 2 sinks which makes washing skeins faster.

I dug out my equipment.   Some leave in wool wash.  And my counter top spin dryer.  I bought this spin dryer in 2013 from The Laundry Alternative and it is one of my favourite tools.  I am going to be very sad when the motor dies and it bites the dust.  But so far it is still working fine.  The wool wash is from a local company and it is a great product.  Gentle on the wool and it has a light scent that is appealing.

After getting setup I started washing skeins.  I fill the sink with slightly warm water and add a glug of the wool wash.  Then I push the yarn into the water to ensure it gets fully wet.  I leave it to soak for 15-20 minutes.

After washing I drain out the water and put the skeins in the spin dryer.  I have a video from a few years ago showing the spin dryer in action.

Sometimes when I wash skeins you can see the dye coming off the yarn.  If the water is really stained with dye I will sometimes do another rinse.  It is best to remove any excess dye before putting the yarn into a project.  This avoids unpleasant surprises later.

After spinning out the water, I take each skein out of the spin  dryer and snap them a few times.  This involves opening up the skein and putting my wrists inside the loop.  Next I quickly move my hands outward to snap the yarn tightly.  I will then rotate the skein and repeat this a few times.  Finally I take the skein and drape it over the neck of a hanger to dry.  After a day or two I come back and rotate the skein on the hanger so that a dry area is against the neck of the hanger.  This helps the other area (previously on the neck of the hanger) to get more airflow and dry thoroughly.

Here are my 8 skeins of yarn washed and drying.  All these skeins were wound on the same skein winder.  The variation in length shows how some yarns shrink/bloom when washed.  The two shortest skeins are also the bulkiest yarns, spun as coreless corespun and then plied with thread.  Both of these bulky yarns were spun from Mystery Batts I received in my World of Wool Botany Lap Waste bag.  The coloured skeins are all Superwash Merino.  And the one cream skein is a Mohair (70%)/ Wool (20%) / Silk (10%) blend.

I was staring out my window watching a bird taking fiber from a nesting ball and thought this might be something worth writing about.  I have been running a multi-year experiment on the fiber preferences of my local birds.

Spring 2021

My experiment started in 2021 when I began spinning some llama I bought from a local farmer.  Though the fiber was dehaired, when I got into the bags I discovered quite a bit of VM (aka vegetable matter).

VM is something spinners hate because if it gets into the singles there will be prickly bits stuck in the yarn.  As a result, I ended up removing large sections of this fiber and putting it in the discard pile.  I started with 200g of fiber and at the end had 158g of plied yarn.  So quite a bit of fiber was passed over. 

However, I found this neat metal hanger and thought I’d try filling it with fiber and see what the birds thought of it.  It was spring and prime nest building season so it was worth a try.  The VM filled llama got stuffed into the blue hanger.  And as far as I could tell not much happened after that.  We did not notice the birds taking any of the fiber and it seemed to be a total bust.

Spring 2022

One day we had our cat Jupiter groomed by Purrdy Paws Mobile Pet Grooming.  And as they were giving our cat back to me, they also handed me a pile of Jupiter’s fur.  (Side note, Jupiter went over the Rainbow bridge in fall 2022 so looking through our photos or him to select one for this blog has been lovely.)

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The blue hanger with the llama fiber was still on the feeder, and I added the handful of black cat fur to the top of the blue hanger.  I wasn’t expecting much of anything but it seemed like a good way to use that handful of cat fur.  What happened was that the birds, especially the chickadees, took the black cat fur away and continued to ignore the llama.  Hmmm…

Spring 2023

In May I went to a small fiber festival and a couple of my friends were selling nesting balls.  Given my failure with the llama I was not sure how things would go with the nesting balls but I decided to expand my experiment.  I purchased two nesting balls… one with Alpaca and another with wool and added them to our feeders.

We haven’t noticed much activity with the alpaca fiber, but the wool nesting ball has been a hit. We have seen both chickadees and goldfinches taking wool.  It is really fun to watch them work.

I suspect I will have to refill the wool nesting ball next year to supply the birds with the material they prefer.  I have also started collecting cat fur from our pet brushing efforts (we have 3 cats so collecting cat fur should be easy enough) and adding it to the blue hanger.   It will be interesting to see which fibre gets the most attention next year.