A Roving Review - Part 1

Nothing too exciting going on. I am working on a pattern that I am knitting with the yarn I spun last week. So I thought I would give a review of the fibers I used in these yarns.

All fibers for this project were purchased from the Woolery.

First up was the generic white wool. This is basically the same wool that came with my spinning wheel, and what I started practicing on. The Woolery sells it under the name Heinz 57. It is made from the wool of multiple types of sheep. Drafts nicely, fun to dye with Kool-aid both before and after spinning. Nothing super special, but a decent low price fiber.

Next up, a Herdwick top. Herdwick sheep are raised primarily for meat, but their wool is useful as well. This wool cost almost twice as much as the generic white. Very coarse, and quite scratchy to the touch. Not recommended for anything that will touch skin, but it is supposed to have good insulating properties. Does not take dye well. But quite fun to spin! It drafts like a dream (a scratchy dream, but a dream nonetheless!).

These two threads were plied together to make the yarn that I posted in a previous blog. I dyed this after spinning. You can see that the Herdwick did not change color much, but it has a nice effect when combined with the dyed Heinz 57.

Finally, I moved on to a black churro. Churro is the traditional Navajo sheep. At first, I was vastly disappointed. It was more expensive than the Herdwick. It drafts nicely, but it was full of little pills and vegetable matter. But, I had already purchased the wool, and I had some specific idea of what I wanted to do with it, so I continued to spin. As I worked with it, I began to appreciate it. It formed a nice sturdy thread. I actually liked the feel of it: A bit rough, but not really scratchy.

When I plied this yarn, I appreciated it even more. A surprisingly soft and lofty yarn. I look forward to working with it!

Back to dyeing

I really wanted to make something cool out of my Herdwick and white wool yarn. I was inspired by a few youtube videos that I found on ChemKnitsBlog channel. After winding my yarn into loosely wound balls, I let them soak in a vinegar-water bath for about half an hour.

Mixing up a batch of black cherry, lemon lime, and grape Kool-aid with several drops of black food coloring, I partially submerged my yarn into the liquid. Unfortunately, the liquid level came above the midpoint, so I was going to end up with more than half of my yarn being red. Time to cook in the microwave...

After the yarn had absorbed most of the color and cooled for an hour, I then mixed up a batch of mixed berry and lemon lime Kool-aid, with some black and green food color, and flipped the balls over and cooked them again.






I really like how the yarn turned out, with one exception:
Uh.... it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! :-O

I don't much get into holiday themed items, and I don't think my spinning is good enough to try to sell my yarn yet, so I had to perform further experiments with it. Yes, I know, it is still wet, but as the dye tends to BRIGHTEN as it dries, I was afraid the effect would be even worse!!!

I did not wind the skeins back into balls because I had already obtained the overall effect I was trying for, just not quite the color scheme I was after. I mixed up a batch of mixed berry, peach mango, black, and blue, and dunked all of the skeins in. After cooking and rinsing, I think I was successfully able to get rid of the Christmas-y feel.

Once the skeins are dry, I will wind them back into balls and see what I have.

And this week, nobody dyed!

At least, not in my household!

I loved how the Herdwick and white wool looked after dyeing it. I wanted to try to make a larger dye lot, so I could make something significant with it. So far, I have four skeins of  130 to 150 yards. I am trying to decide if I want to make more before dyeing it. It probably will not get cooked until next week or so.

In the meantime, my son has been collecting walnuts from the yard with the expectation that I will use them to turn wool brown. He was well on his way to saving for me EVERY walnut in the yard. I had to let him know that I would not be able to use ALL of them!!!!

Unfortunately, I don't think I want to dye the yarn I am currently working on brown, and the walnuts will go rancid if I leave them sit around. So I am trying to freeze them. We will see how that works.

And some of my early spinning attempts did not yield nice knitting yarn. So, I am making felted balls out of them! I have heard that they work great in the dryer. I used the mistakes to form cores and wrapped them with some craft roving. Now to send them to the washer... along with a bag that I knitted like 8 years ago with the intention of felting it!!!

Dyeing the spun?

Well, I tried my Navajo plying, and it was, shall we say, an unmitigated disaster! Oh, what a tangled web we spin...

Since it didn't look like this skein would be good for much of anything useful, I decided to use it in additional experiments... BWHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Two packets of Mixed Berry Kool-aid and a few drops of black food coloring later:

Looks like the hot bath and subsequent drying did some good for it. I might even be able to use this yarn! Some very nice colors. And the orange-orange-orange-lemon lime over-dyed with the mixed berry and black somehow gave me the EXACT olive color I had been looking for originally! Who knew?

Time to try some spinning first and then dying. I decided to try my hand at spinning the Herdwick Top that I got from The Woolery. A bit scratchy, but it spins like a dream.

I plied a strand of this with a strand of generic white wool. I was so excited to start my dying experiments that I forgot to snap a pic of the yarn as spun! After several rounds of inadequately documented dying (but if I recall correctly, it involved Peach Mango, Mixed Berry, Grape, and Black Cherry Kool-aid and some black, red, and blue McCormick food coloring), this is what I have:

It really is a nice, if a bit chunky, skein of yarn. Since it is on the scratchy side, I don't think it will work for a scarf, and there is not enough for a sweater (only 145 yards). I have a few other ideas of what I can possibly do with it. The yarn itself is very pretty (imho) and would make a really cool fringe on a shawl. I am also considering knitting and felting a purse out of it. But right now, I am enjoying just looking at it!

I also dyed some more roving: I liked the way the lemon lime X2 + grape X2 made up before, so I tried a few variations, each on a 4 ounce piece of roving. The first was lemon lime X2 +grape X3, and the second was lemon lime X2 + grape X2 + black cherry X1. Here is a braid made from the resulting rovings:

The one on the left is a picture taken inside, and the one on the right was taken out-of-doors in the shade. In both pictures, the redder color is the one made with the black cherry. I am not sure why the lemon lime/grape roving shows up so green in the indoor picture, as that is not at all how it looks to the naked eye. I haven't begun to spin this yet.

Also, I wanted a longer niddy noddy. The one that I have is a Babe, which means it is comprised of PVC pipe sections.

Some of my skeins have been too long to make nicely with this version. I had some PVC tube lying around, and thought I would try to extend the device. The outer diameter of my pipe was a little smaller than the OD of the Babe pipe, so I wrapped the ends a few times with painter's tape.

I re-skeined a previous attempt that was too fat for the shorter version of the niddy noddy. The width was better, but it is kind-of on the long side. I might look for an in-between length of pipe, as this one might be too long. My daughter has claimed this skein of yarn, although she does not yet know what she is going to make out of it.