Monthly Archives: October 2013

Spinzilla – Day One

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Today is the first day of Spinzilla – a monster of a spinning contest that spans miles and time zones. I am a member of Team Sweet Georgia. (#teamsweetgeorgia) I am working all week so I have to plan my spinning around the work. So, I got up early today and was down at my wheel by 6am. This tray awaited me — 36 carefully prepared rolags that I would spin in order to get an ombre effect. 

I spun until 9am and then started my (paid) work. I took three 10 minute breaks throughout the day and spun a rolag. At lunchtime I spun for half and hour. I had a couple of tele-meetings so was able to spin through those. The fibre is Waterfall – merino, bamboo and tencel from Sweet Georgia Yarns. In fact, all the fibre I’m spinning this week is from Sweet Georgia Yarns. They are of exceptional quality and have such amazing colourways, they are a delight to spin.

At 5:30 I spun for another 15 minutes and then finished up. Here’s the finished braid all spun up. It weighs 128 grams.
That finished I started on the next one – this is a contest after all. There’s no time to rest. Well really, I had a hot bath because my leg was sore. After the bath I spun for another 45 minutes on this – Indian Summer. BFL and 15% nylon SGY.

I’ll see how far I get with this while I watch M*A*S*H Season 3.

More tomorrow.

Skein from the spinning cotton workshop

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Yesterday I participated in an all-day spinning cotton workshop. I’ve spun cotton before and hated it. Wondered why anyone would want to do it, and was increasingly in awe of those who did it well.

At this workshop, a dozen other veteran spinners and I learned some wonder techniques and experimented with an amazing variety of fibres all thanks to an excellent instructor named Heidi from Vegan Yarn.

Here’s the skein I produced. The first shot is with the flash off, and you can better see the texture. That’s a regular sized marble there so you can judge the size of it. It’s 40g and 100m. A decent sized skein.

And here’s a shot of it with the flash on so you can better see the colours. All the colours of the cotton we spun with yesterday were natural colours. Not natural dyes. The cotton grew that way. There are a variety of shades of browns, several greens and of course white. All were a wee different to work with, but I managed to spin all the samples.

By the end of the day I really had the knack for spinning it sorted out. I think I may even spin some cotton during #spinzilla week cause the long-draw technique really creates good yardage.
Thanks Heidi.

Drying the Glen Valley flax

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I’ve had a difficult time this year drying my flax. I got the first batch dried, rippled and retted. Then the rains started coming, so the next drying stage was delayed. Meanwhile, the rains caused the other flax beds to fall over so one of them was quickly harvested.

That flax was put up against the fence in the hope that it would eventually dry and I could ripple it. The rains kept coming and coming. Nothing was drying. So I decided to use the rains to my advantage and instead of leaning them up against the split rail fence, I put them on the grass. At least the downpours could continue to rinse the smelly swamp water from the first flax. And the hope was that the steady stream of water could start to dew rett the other flax, despite the fact it hadn’t been rippled and was still full of leaves and seed pods.

The sun finally came out yesterday and it’s still here today. So I decided to take advantage of the sun and heat and do some active things to encourage drying. I got the drying rack and stacked the retted flax onto it.

Then I had a look at the non-rippled flax that I threw on the ground. I flipped it to get the really wet side in the sun. Lo and behold! It’s starting to rett. You can see the fine wisps of linen fibres on the edges. It doesn’t go all the way up the stem, it’s mostly happening down near the root end, where there are no leaves.

About an hour later, encouraged by the heat and sunshine, I moved the drying rack over to the driveway. The gravel in the driveway heats up and we can really push this drying number today. I took the flax from the shade of the second and third level of the rack and put it on the ground.

Inspired by the retting results of the non-rippled flax, I moved it from the lawn over the driveway next to the retted flax. Using the jet stream on the hose, I power-washed as much of the rotten leaves from it as I could manage. And now the whole lot is drying. I’ll flip it every hour or so, until the sun comes down. And then everything is going under cover. Enough of this.

And last but not least is the harvest of the final bed. I have this off the ground, all stacked up on the garden bench. It can’t stay there. I have to fashion something that will help it dry – but we have some more rain coming in this week. I need an Indian Summer to get this stuff finished off.

Time to head back out and flip the flax.