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Spinning mostly

Spinning mostly

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I haven’t been felting much lately, other than teaching, but I have been doing some spinning. I borrowed a friends blending board to try making some fancy rolags to spin from. I used 2 shades of orange, a purple wool, some silk and a tiny amount of  trylobal nylon on the board. It was my first time using the blending board so I was getting instructions and pointers from Judy.

I spun it on my new top whorl spindle. I don’t usually use a top whole spindle but I couldn’t resist this one from The Clay Sheep

Here I am spinning on it.

The yarn came out quite nice. I could have added more sparkle but I am always cautious of adding to much sparkle.  I wound it into a center pull ball the other night so now it is ready to be plied.

The other cool thing I got with my spindle was a hair stick. I asked her to make it as a special order.

Thanks To Jan Scott for the great pictures of me with the blending board and spinning. I think you took the hair stick pictures too even if it was on my phone.

 

 

Threads and Yarns

Threads and Yarns

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Around this time last year I was still doing the Take A Stitch Tuesday challenge. I struggled with it, and didn’t always enjoy it, but I did like what I produced when I used some felt offcuts from a piece I’d made with natural wools for placemats and coasters. I used my own handspun thread to sew the stitches. This is one I made using chain stitch, and this is one using cretan stitch. I hadn’t used my threads in a while, but recently I’ve been inspired by my flickr-friend, Marchi Wierson, a sculptural fibre artist who uses a variety of techniques in her work, such as wet felting and crochet, and loves working with natural wools and fibres. Her recent vessel commission and some gorgeous natural fibre yarns had me rummaging through my wools and fibres and getting my spindles out to spin more thread and yarn. I decided to use three shades of Shetland Wool.

shetlandI pulled off some of the tops from each shade.

tops

Then I looked through my embellishment fibres for some I thought would make a nice match. I chose Soybean top, viscose top and flax.

fibresI added some of each fibre to the Shetland tops.

fibreThen I blended them by hand.

blend
I got a couple of my spindles out, this is one I made and painted a few years ago.

spindleI made a small amount of thread, though even a small amount of wool and fibres goes a long way when spinning thread. This is it wound around the spindle.

threadThen I blended up some more Shetland and fibres and spun a thicker yarn. I will probably use the yarn in a wet felting project, though I have used them for needlefelting before.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERADo have a look at Marchi’s photostream if you have time, her work is amazing and inspiring 🙂

You might have noticed a few changes to the site recently. We’ve been updating it and adding more photos to the galleries. We’ve also added a new page for Fabrics, and Ann’s ever popular Cat Cave ‘how to’ is now listed on the Wet Felting Tutorials page.

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