I can do it!

It's been a while since my last blog post, for many reasons. On of them is that I have been busy learning new skills, and now I have come out the other end of the tunnel and I can call myself a spinner! Today I made my first three ply yarn. It is also the first time I have worked with raw fleece that I have washed and hand carded. It is also my first effect yarn with added goodies. Finally it is the first yarn I make on a spinning wheel, if I don't count the three samples that I will never be able to use.

Let's go back a few steps... In November last year I got my first spinning wheel. It was very old, green and didn't work very well. I then took care of two more old wheels in need of care, but none of them are in order yet. I think that will be a summer project so I can take them apart, clean, grease and straighten them up outdoors. Meanwhile I stumbled across a local girl who had bought a Kromski Prelude last year and decided to sell it again. I got it at a good price and finally had something that worked. I soon realized that my preferences lie towards thin yarns and I fond a dealer, Den Gamla Skolan, who had a faster flyer and extra bobbins. She also had the clever idea to use inexpensive raw fleece to fill the parcel up, and that is how I ended up with 600g of very smelly Gotland wool. This is what it looked like after washing:















After a couple of days of hand carding and spinning I finally had my three bobbins of thread, but before I could ply it I had to figure out where to place the third bobbin since the Prelude only holds two. I asked MrP for suggestions and he said flower support sticks. I actually found one that was just right and then put it between my knees, and it worked perfectly!















When I got my first, green spinning wheel the owner tried to make me take a lot of other stuff, and I came home with a skein winder that I didn't know anything about. I later learned that it is a 'knäpphärvel' and it is just brilliant. It is supposed to make a snapping sound after a certain number of turns, but mine only has a clock-like hand that turns slowly and I still have to count the number of threads in the skein and them multiply that with the circumference of 1.5 m.















Did you see the lamb that just happened to be in the in the background? My son got it at his christening and it is actually a Gotland sheep!

Finally the yarn! I still have some wool left, but so far it is 280g and actually about 280m. I think I have almost 200g for next session. To the wool I have added hand dyed Tencel from Ullaffären (The Wool Business) that I visited last Wednesday. All about that visit can be found in the group Långbacken on Ravelry, so I won't write that here (but the lambs are gorgeous...).

My own spin camp

Last week Mr P went back to work and I will be at home with the children until school starts. They are quite low in maintenance by now, so I started on a project of my own. After a feeble attempt two years ago it was time do do something about my desire to spin. There was a bag of beginners material in the wardrobe since last time waiting to be spun. Working a couple of hours every day for a week it has now become yarn:















The skeins were spun in the order that they lie in the box, from left to right. No1 is 50g of grey Gotland wool, also known as pälsull. This was easy to work with, but the yarn is a bit stiff. No2 is 100g of brown BFL (Blue faced Leicester). The BFL was soft and bouncy, but harder to control. No3 is 25g of black merino, which was soft and nice to spin but practising chain plying (Navajo) I overplied it. I am thinking of removing some of the twist. No4 finally is 25g of pencil roving in various shades of blue. This was fun to work with and the chain plying worked better this time.

However, this was just the warm up. For the second week of my spin camp there is 1.400g of alpaca waiting for me! Last time I caught the spinning bug I was at a fair showing my knitting and sharing the room with an alpaca breeder. On June 4th this year I gave her a call and asked if she had any wool for me. It turned out that she had sheared her little herd of ten animals before summer and she had three bags of wool left; brown, white and mixed. I bought the mixed bag and it came from the lovely Minita Miniy who was grazing in the paddock waiting for her new foal that was born the following week.















I hope I can do this wool justice, but this time I have to practice some carding as well. My goal is to make myself a cardigan and get some speed and productivity in my spinning. Wish me luck!

Nordiskt Sticksymposium 2010 - Wednesday

Last week was so amazing that I had to rest for a couple of days to be able to process it and start writing. It was spent with 140 knitters in Härnösand at the 11th Nordic Knitting Symposium and I'm sure we are all bursting with impressions, inspiration, patterns , yarns and new skills. I will divide my recollections in themes and start with the hot and busy excursion to northern Hälsingland last Wednesday. That was also the first day when I remembered to bring the camera, because I slept at home and not at the school.

The first stop was at the Holma-Helsingland linen mill in Forsa. Since there were so many of us we were divided into groups and I started out in the workroom of a conservationist working with wall paintings and old wallpaper. The painted walls are very special in this region and we saw some on location later in the day.















Next I joined a tour of the mill guided by the owner herself. She took us through the steps of processing the yarn. Almost all the yarn is spun on the continent, but here it is dyed on cones as showed on the first picture. Then it is plied into the required thicknesses. The only yarn that is spun here at the moment is their only woolen yarn Lovikka, a heavy 1-ply used for traditional mittens from northern Sweden, which is skeined in the third picture. After the tour it was time to squeeze into the shop and grab some yarn...











































After this stop the group was divided in two and sent to look at local museums with traditional houses in Forsa and Delsbo. These pictures show the 300-400-year-old wooden farmhouses in Delsbo and a group of tired travellers stealing a few minutes to knit in the shade.





























The next stop was at Forsa folkhögskola, where Håkan Liby lectured on the traditional costumes of the region. Last but not least we went to Mellanfjärden by the coast where we had a selection of local fish dishes for dinner overlooking an old fishing village turned turist paradise.

The main knitting themes during the day were linen yarns and traditional sweaters, but they deserve their own posts because they were also an important part of the classes and lecures throughout the symposium.

Icelandic wool

I went to Iceland last week, and although I was there on other business I managed to squeeze in some wool. My cousin owns some 170 sheep and the week before they had been brought down from the mountains were they graze freely during the summer. The farmers still go out on horseback for several days to collect them, but they use airplanes to locate the sheep. Then the sheep are brought to a place where they are held in a circular enclosement and then separated into smaller pens, one for each farm, as seen in the picture. These days they don't have to herd them the last kilometres to the farm, but load them on trailers. After the sheep have been brought home the lambs are slaughtered before the remaining sheep are put in a barn for the winter.















Later that day we went to a local shop where people with an interest in crafts in the western parts of Iceland sell a selection of high quality products. It is called Ullarselid and was started in 1992 on the grounds of the university of agriculture at Hvanneyri. The products are mostly made from wool, but there are also buttons made from bone and horn, stones and other souvenirs. The following three pictures show some of their hand spun or herb dyed yarn, sweaters designed for the hand spun yarn and their special take on the traditional Icelandic sweaters with a patterned yoke.











































I made my not so interested brothers come along, and here is what they bought: socks, mittens, a hat and some felted soles. Not as expensive as the larger items but still great quality and perfect gifts to bring home. What I bought? You will see in the next post...

Family summer

This year we have stayed close to home and had our relatives come here to visit us. This has meant more work around the house, many short excursions in the area and nights spent over long dinners rather than knitting in the sofa. This has given me more time to reflect on what I really want to knit, rather than just starting new things all the time. I really want to get back to knitting more traditional patterns, with my own modifications and modernisations. I also want to look more at what the family wants and needs and not just fall for new yarns and patterns. All the craft shops I've seen this summer have inspired me to think about what I could knit and sell. It would have to be of high quality but affordable and quick to make, and not something that is already out there. I have an idea, but I'm not sure I have the time to do it...

Another thought that I have had for some time is to start spinning. As I wrote last time I have made my first serious attempt, and here is the result.















After spinning, plying and washing my 50 g of corriedale wool left me with 27 m of bulky yarn. I need to work on making it more even and with less twist, but I think I got the general idea of it. I also ended up with a z-twist since I used the "wrong hand" compared to the directions, so I'll try it the other way next time and see how that works. My favourite part was the plying, when those unruly strands suddenly became yarn. I used a center pull ball and my hand spindle and it was so much easier than the spinning, but I should have used the larger spindle because it got so much more volume compared to the first thread.

I've also finished my "late night easy knitting" again. Even though I have other things I should work on that easy piece by the sofa gets all my attention these days. This is the lovely Cheshire Cat Stole made in Färgkraft 1-ply in the colour Sommarnatt (Summer Night). The yarn started out in a more complicated pattern, but the colours dominated and it needed something with cleaner lines. One skein was enough for a 170 x 50 cm stole. Since the yarn is heavier than the original I made it narrower by making one repeat less, and then just knitted until I ran out of yarn.















Finally a picture taken outdoors which does the colours more justice. The shawl is modelled by my mother-in-law. She got a pair of socks for her trouble, those red Seduction Socks that where too small for me.

Knitting among friends

Lately I've had many reminders of the how great it is to be able to say that we are part of a "knitting community". Saturday the 12th I got a lot of knitting energy when Cina opened her house for a night of knitting, thanks! Then last Wednesday I went to our weekly knitting café and the group had gotten a few new interesting members during the weeks I had been away. I think it is good that we can keep the group open and diverse.

On the web I have also had a few interesting experiences. I've been corresponding with Jody at Knotions magazine about her design Unwrapped that I finished last week, and now she has posted my picture on the site blog. I can ad that I wore it all day yesterday, and it was very comfortable on a hot and humid day. Also the blanket I made for my new niece last month has gotten a life of it's own on Ravelry with an amazing response. If you weren't around to see it, here is another picture of it.















Yesterday I showed about 57 pieces of knitting at a summer feast at the local museum in my home village. I tried to find as many different techniques as possible, like two-end knitting, Moebius shawls, double knitting, lace shawls and also traditional sweaters from Scandinavia and the British Isles. My father was one of the organizers and asked if I could help out with an exhibition, and it was fun to go back home and show old friends what I'm doing these days.















I shared the room with a family that has just bought ten alpacas and they had some wool and textile samples and a lot of pictures. They hope to get proper production going next summer. There was also a woman who demonstrated spinning on a handspindle, and she taught the 8-y-o-daughter of the alpaca family how to do it. Only days before I had bought a beginners kit at Spinspiration and the girl borrowed my little spindle, and her father will be making one for her a.s.a.p . When I got back home I was really inspired and I spun most of the white Corriedale wool in the picture on the little spindle last night. The bigger handspindle is my mother's and she has used that model for plying the yarn that her father spun when she was a child in Iceland. Now it is my turn to try out plying my yarn, and it is fun to be an eager beginner every now and then.