Andean Inspired

When I first started spinning, I didn't want to spin two different singles and ply them together to make a two ply. I was afraid they would be different lengths and I would have waste. So I learned how to make a plying bracelet and Andean ply. Similar to chain plying (one single into three) it takes one single and lets you ply it against itself to make a two ply.

I wanted to do something similar with the last (and oldest) of my cotton singles. But with the plying bracelet, your project is stuck on your wrist and you are generally committed to spinning the entire thing in one go. I didn't want to do that. So I took my nostepinne and wound a center pull ball on it with my singles.

It was fantastic! The cotton didn't collapse onto itself when I was spinning and I was getting a nice two ply out of the tiny singles. Everything was going just fine for a while until I put it down and came back to it two nights later. The center of the ball had collapsed the next time I sat down to work on it and I didn't notice it until I was getting massive tangles.

Well, after the third tangle I was annoyed and decided to jam the center pull ball on my finger. I found the middle (where one end was feeding out) and popped my finger in there. I started out on my pinky, but eventually decided that my pointer finger gave me the best control of the yarn.

It worked.

Having a temper tantrum and deciding that it wasn't worth struggling anymore actually worked. I was able to control the inner and outer yarns better and got the rest of the yarn plied up onto my spindle. And best of all, I had no more breaking problems with either of the singles (they came before my cotton practice).

The tangle of singles beside my spindle was the only bit of cotton I lost from that batch. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that much yardage. I would have been more annoyed if I had just given up and thrown the rest of the ball away.

Now I have three skeins of cotton all spun up and waiting for me to finish spinning my cotton/denim blend. Then they will be going to the boiling pot so I can try my hand at actually finishing cotton properly. Since all of the cotton I have spun is naturally white, it won't be changing colors like colored cotton, but it will get all the wax off so it will be absorbent. And I will see if my artist ink is colorfast or not. Then I will have four little skeins of cotton ready to be knit with.

Fifteen Minutes

Fifteen minutes is not a large portion of time to take out of your day, but it is really important in learning how to do a new skill. Especially if that skill involves nothing more than gaining muscle memory. Adults have the hardest time learning new skills simply because they can't remember having a difficult time learning how to do many things that we take for granted today. Such as learning how to walk or learning how to eat solid food. We simply can't remember what it took to learn how to do those things because of how our brains work, but because we have been doing them for so long we expect that everything should come as easily to us.

I have found that in the spinning community, beginners are discouraged from learning how to spin on "more challenging" fibers such as cotton and bamboo. When I first read about this as a beginner, it made me have the opposite knee-jerk reaction that many teenagers have. The "I can do anything that you tell me not to do" syndrome. I won't lie. I had a really hard time learning how to spin cotton and even gave it up for a while in favor of spinning wool. After all, I had just gotten a spinning wheel and I wanted to play with that instead of struggling with a little spindle and a bunch of raw cotton.

I came back to spinning cotton for the simple reason that I have eight ounces of the stuff plus some expensive hand carders that I haven't been using and four ounces of recycled sari silk and recycled denim waste. I have a lot of stuff for spinning cotton and I want to be able to use it.

So I decided to take to heart some advice that I read a long time ago: spin for fifteen minutes a day.

That fifteen minutes has become one of the most important parts of my day. Since I try to make my spinning time first thing in the morning right after I get out of bed, it has helped to focus me and relax me at the same time. I found that it helps me get into the same place that meditation or yoga would so I feel mentally stimulated and mentally relaxed at the same time.

And since I am getting lots of practice in, that fifteen minutes a day is also helping me even out my spinning. I find it so much easier to spin now that I have been working on my fiber preparation and my long draw for cotton. I even spun my first ever cotton single that didn't break when I wound it into a ball to get it off of my spindle. The only bad thing about spinning more cotton is that now it is the only thing I want to be spinning!

Traveling Through my WIP Pile!

I am slowly getting things out of my WIP pile. In the past two weeks the pile has shrunk from four projects to only two projects and that is only because I almost immediately cast on another scarf after casting off my Noro Striped Scarf.

I decided to take a leaf out of the Yarn Harlot's book and wet block my scarf. It is a shorter scarf that (as my fiance has pointed out) is going to be perfect for spring and fall when I don't want to be wearing my longer scarf just yet. It is also the perfect length to use to tie around my head and wear it as a headband/earmuffs.

I am trying to decide if I want the stripes to be all the way up my next scarf or if I just want the two color striping bits at the ends of the scarf and keep the rest in the main color that I started with. But other than that, I am on a 1x1 ribbed scarf kick for some reason. It is easy and fun and always looks good no matter what you do with it, so I think that is part of the reason why I can't stop knitting 1x1 ribbed scarves at the moment.

I am also back at making my scrappy crumb blocks again. My mom's old sewing machine is acting up again, so I am back to hand sewing the blocks. The top two on the right were completely done by hand while most of the others were done either by machine or half by hand and half by machine.

Ironing the blocks really makes a difference with how they lay. The last block I made was ironed before it was trimmed down to size to make the cutting easier (and it was).

 I also did a very loose Jelly Roll Race Block (the one on the upper right corner) where I took scraps of fabric that were about the same width and sewed them all end to end. Then I folded the ends in half and sewed along one side and cut the fold then repeated that until it was a square block. It sounds complicated, but it really wasn't. I understand why people would like to buy a precut jelly rolls of a fabric line to make a quilt with. It really doesn't take that much time and I imagine that if you were doing that on a sewing machine that it would fly by.

My cotton is growing quite nicely. They finally sprouted and the seedlings are growing nice and tall. I'm not sure a couple of them will make it, but my dad (who gardens a lot) thinks that they might all survive to be strong cotton plants. Hopefully in another week or two they will have their true leaves instead of the seedling leaves. When that happens then I will transfer them to other bigger pots to grow up the rest of the way.

This makes me hopeful that I can actually grow things and that my dream of having a small garden one day will come to life. I mostly would want a small herb garden with maybe a couple of veggies, but I haven't had anything grow like this before. I will report back with their progress in about a week.

Sick Day

I haven't been feeling too well for the past couple of days, so I finally went to the doctor and they basically put me on a lot of medicines. Then my mom (who works at the doctor's office that I go to) ended up calling in another medicine for me to take care of my cough and to hopefully get me feeling much better. Apparently, I am a strange person so that medicine makes me really tired so I have been sleeping a lot.

I have managed to get some spinning done and I have done my first chain-ply on my spinning wheel! Plying on a wheel goes by really quickly compared to the spindle. The yarn both twists and goes onto the bobbin simultaneously. It is really awesome. Of course, I have watched some videos on chain-plying on the wheel after I got the second bobbin halfway plied, so I think the second half of the second bobbin is more tightly plied than the first bobbin. I will find out after I wash and dry the second bobbin since I just finished that one tonight and I am giving it a night to rest of the bobbin before I wind it up on my niddy-noddy.

I talked about having cotton on my Golding in my last blog post, but I really like spinning it! I hate how people say that spinning cotton is so hard when it is so easy to spin. Cotton fibers are shorter than wool fibers, but they almost want to spin themselves. It does feel really different than wool, so that is probably what scares people off.

The last thing I have been doing is watching a few videos about spinning flax into linen. It is so fascinating to watch. The best videos I have found are done by the guys at the Hermitage. If you watch the videos, then you will understand where the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale came from because it really does like you are taking straw and turning it into gold. I think it would be fun to try growing my own flax to turn it into linen, but I think I need to go shopping at their store first and get some flax to see if I even like spinning it in the first place. Then if I do I will have to convince my dad to help me make my own processing tools. The only trouble would be the hackles, but I will cross that bridge when I get there. Right now I will probably be sticking to cotton.

King Cotton

Natural Brown Colored Cotton on Tahkli

Last year, I spent my Christmas money on a Learn to Spin Cotton kit from Cotton Clouds. I kept reading about how cotton wasn't easy for a beginner and how spinning cotton was hard because it was so short. I wanted to prove them wrong and show them that if I could spin cotton, then anybody could.

What I didn't want to admit was that I was having a hard time spinning cotton. My yarn was really, really thin. Instead of drifting apart, my singles would snap at the thin spots. When I put less twist in, the singles would drift apart. I was having a hard time with fiber management so I was having a difficult time plying the singles together to make thicker yarn. It was tough and eventually I gave up and went back to spinning the nice, shiny wool I had. I got to where I was spinning nice wool yarns and I was even getting down to a nice fingering weight yarn that I could make socks out of. I was satisfied with that, but I kept browsing my I SPIN COTTON! group on Ravelry. Everybody there was growing and spinning their own cotton and I wanted in on the fun.

Cotton Yarn Spun in 2011

I looked back at my cotton that I spun. Most of the cotton I spun from cotton sliver, green cotton sliver, brown cotton sliver, a pima cotton boll, and some pima cotton lint. I spun that all on my little tahkli. Only half of the cotton skeins I have are boiled, but they are all soft to the touch and I am proud that I have spun them.

But I think if I try again, I can do much better. I found the rest of my brown cotton sliver and I am spinning that on my tahkli. I now use a white ceramic bowl to spin on so I don't scratch the surface of any table and get a nice fast spin. I have found that I am getting a slightly more consistent yarn. My fingers are slowly learning how to spin cotton and they are picking it up quicker. I just have to ignore the feeling that I am going to lose control of the yarn at any time. And I keep dropping my spindle from time to time.

The cotton growing season is practically over up here in northeast PA, but I have some seeds that I am saving for next March. The seeds were still germinating this summer, but the squirrels and rabbits kept eating my seedlings. I have eight seeds left that I am hoping to grow. If I can just get one boll to grow on one plant, then I can get a new batch of cotton seeds to try again.