Category: Spinning

TdF23, D+3 – Well, my FB is blowing up…

I posted to the Tour de Fleece 2023 Facebook group about my Shapwick Blaise wheel and I think it’s had the most engagement of anything I’ve ever posted on social media outside my Quora content!

She is an absolute beauty, but there’s so little information about this wheel that I’m slightly despairing of ever putting her in working order. I found someone via Google who had recently (May ’23) reconditioned a Herring Gordon, but their website no longer exists apart from a few scrapes on the Wayback Machine. Frank Herring is still in business, but the website doesn’t even mention their history of producing these beautiful and unusual wheels… I will email them, but I’m almost as fond of email as I am of cold-callers so it will take some time for me to work up the courage to engage.

I’m on #TeamWoW, World of Wool‘s TdF team, and today being Stage 4 (I think?) the challenge is to spin some Shetland. I got another delivery this morning from WoW with Shetland wool – the Woodland Collection, and the Breed Discovery pack – but I’ve decided to spin from a colour pack of Shetland top that I picked up at Woolfest instead. I picked the dark-ish fawn colour for a change of pace – I have lots of black, grey, and white fibre to work on, but not much in the brown spectrum. I think the Shetland word for this colour is Moorit. I also have dark brown, fawn, and Musket, a greyish mid-brown. The plan was to spin the whole 25g, then ply it. Here’s the whole thing, wrapped around my homemade wrist distaff:

Shetland top in the natural colour Moorit, a pale brown. It's wrapped around a homemade wrist distaff, which comprises a short length of twine, doubled and attached to a heavy metal spiral. There are two knots in the doubled twine about 2 inches apart, through which one end of the fibre is placed while the rest is wrapped loosely around the twine. It helps to keep the bulk of the unspun fibre from getting tangled in the drafting, but still free enough to pass through the hands when needed.
Shetland top (probably moorit) on a wrist distaff.

And the Fates must have been smiling on me, because it went to plan! I cannot stress how rarely this happens for me. I am a disaster magnet. The house could have burned down, I could have been struck by lightening, the wool might have had hatching tarantula eggs in it – none of these happened. The phone didn’t even ring! Okay, I cheated a bit – instead of plying on my wheel, I used my ancient Daruma Home Twister, a ball-winder which has a plying attachment. It’s not ideal, so the yarn is not perhaps as tightly plied as it should be – I don’t care. Today, I have done what I set out to do, even if the end result is kinda half-arsed. Gotta say, too, this Shetland top has survived brilliantly for being shoved in a paper bag in my junk room for years. It fed beautifully through my hands, and there’s only the tiniest dot of waste – you can see it at the bottom of the balling attachment:

A small centre-pull ball of light brown yarn wound onto a vintage Daruma Home Twister.
Shetland 2-ply on a Daruma Home Twister, with remaining fluff at the bottom right.

Allons-y!

TdF23 D+1: some progress.

This is the peripatetic sample card I couldn’t find yesterday:

An A4 black card titled "World of Wool Sample Card", with 4 rows of 3 clear plastic pockets attached, each labelled with the type of fibre contained within (described in the text). 11 of the pockets contain fibre. The first sample is spun up into a very fine un-plied yarn, wound onto a small grey card. The second sample is a light mustard yellow. The remaining samples are white or off-white.
World of Wool sample card. From top right: light brown de-haired yak; soybean; white angora; milk protein; pineapple fibre; banana; mint fibre; Whiteface Woodland; lotus fibre; adult mohair; kid mohair.

World of Wool gives you the option to purchase small samples of their fibres – 5-10g, depending on the fibre – to try before you buy. While too small to do anything much with, given the dizzying array of fibres, it’s worth it. Sometimes you know by the feel that something is not what you want to spin – I can’t say I’m terribly interested in vegan fibres that are basically nylon, acrylic, etc, so I’m never going to order them. But I am intrigued enough with, say, pineapple fibre to want to see what it’s like without committing to spinning up 50g, especially if it turns out to be horrible (I’ll let you know on, umm, Wednesday). I spun the yak when the card arrived a while back. It’s fiddly – very fluffy and wispy, and you have to be quite stern with it to make it adhere together long enough to get a thread. But it is oh so soft and lovely that it is well worth the effort. think if I was to get yak again, I’d blend it with something more cooperative, like merino (or get WoW to do me a custom blend). I haven’t bothered plying it – I don’t plan to do so with any of these samples as there really isn’t enough yardage to bother. Instead I just wound the single onto a bit of card, and will keep it in its pocket for future reference and stroking.

Today, I began spinning after lunch, starting with the soybean sample on Enola, my 10g black bog-oak Turkish spindle from Ian at The Wood Emporium: teeny, dark and rather fast, but with hidden metal, like the Enola Sherlock character. The soybean sample was quite voluminous for its weight, and this wonderful mustard yellow. I was able to pre-draft it into 5 ‘locks’, whereupon it took on the colour and appearance of baby hair in my family, a kind of lustrous primrose:

A black bog oak Turkish spindle with a leader thread, and 5 pale yellow locks of soybean fibre.
Enola and the locks.
A toddler with pale blonde curls, and his face smeared with his mum's favourite lipstick!
See what I mean?

Also very fluffy and very, very sheddy. There’s will o’ the wisps of the stuff floating around my craft room now. It was an odd one, full of contrasts. Very short fibres, but I had to draw it out longer than I’m comfortable with – I’m not an experienced spinner and have just graduated from death-grip park and draft, I have only the vaguest idea of the other spinning techniques, so don’t be coming at me with your forward and backward short draw, double drafting, Texas long draw, 52 pick-up – I’m just happy that the fibre is moving onto the spindle without my hands being frozen into rictus claws after the first five minutes. And the fibre was a little like silk – super-soft but strong – while also having the squeaky feeling of a plant fibre like ramie. It’s another one that might be better blended due to the shortness of the individual fibres, but I can’t think with what. Maybe another, coarser plant fibre, trading softness for strength? Or one of he scratchier wools, for a bit of sproinginess?

I got distracted midway by deliveries (another book, and a box of gluten-free flours to try in the sourdough starter I’ve adopted) and sunshine, and decided to continue the spin outside, but no sooner had I got my hammock seat set up than it started bucketing down. Then the damn dog escaped again, which is bad as I live in sheep-and-shotgun country and said dog is a sheepdog school flunk-out I took on when he proved too independent* of the shepherd. He still wants to round up sheep, but local farmers don’t distinguish between unwanted “help” and sheep-worrying. As a result I was late getting back to the second half of my daily spin: the dreaded wheel.

With quick run-through some wheel-spinning tutorials on Youtube, I made a start. I used some roving that might have been nice once upon a time when I bought it, but which is now compacted and a wee bit felted. I figured it wouldn’t upset me too much if I wasted it, and I did waste a whole chunk! But look!

Image of a spinning wheel flier and bobbin, with fine white yarn wound onto it.
Actual string!

It’s not very much, but it’s nearly consistent with no lumps. It’s similar to the thickness I spin on my drop spindles, which makes a reasonable 2-ply fingering yarn. I’m so pleased with myself, I’ll be unbearable for a few days.

*: It’s a problem with Border Collies. They’re very smart so some decide they know better than the shepherd, and pretend deafness to command.

TdF23 D-Day – wheels and wails and waking up on the floor…

My very scruffy, half-painted craft room, featuring a hideous polka-dot blue carpet, a 50s or 60s G-Plan cocktail cabinet with shelves, drawers and a drop-leaf suitable for use as a desk on which sit my elderly Apple Mac (for watching spinning videos), an angle-poise lamp, a tub of various drop spindles, and random detritus. In the foreground, one of my dining chairs with a curvy, oakleaf-like back, a repurposed milk can filled with fibre, and my Ashford Traditional spinning wheel.
My spinning setup in my very scruffy, half-painted craft room – excuse the mess: it’s much tidier than when the transformation from junk-room to craft room started, but it’s still evolving!

Oh my giblets, what a start!

I’ll preface by saying that my vague plan for TdF23 was to spin every day – that’s all. Firming up slightly, I thought each day I’d spin a 10g sample from a World of Wool sample pack on one of my drop spindles, and then hit up the spinning wheel with something more weighty, like the 400g Herdwick ‘n’ bionylon WoW custom blend destined for sock knitting, or the Dye Candy art batt, etc. I don’t do detailed schedules and timings. I used to, but the universe has all kinds of ways of tearing up my plans and throwing them in my face, whether or not there are any plans in the first place, so nowadays I save the time and energy for the inevitable disaster management instead.

Well, first I couldn’t find the @&%$ing sample pack, but that wasn’t much of a problem. While looking for the samples, I found a remnant of some tweedy floof I picked up on a visit to Donegal Yarns. It wasn’t meant for hand-spinning – it was some intermediate stage in their processing of fleece into yarn, and by now it’s only fit for stuffing cushions. When I got my drop spindles out earlier this year, I’d spun up the rest and a brutal job it was too, basically just ripped clumps out of it and hoped for the best. And yes, it’s a lumpy bumpy yarn – but here’s the thing: I bought a cone of that same colour on my visit, and it’s not wildly different to my handspun.

So I spun up this remnant in lieu of one of the samples on my big yew Turkish spindle, whom I have named Bow Diddly:

A corner of the drop-leaf desk of the cocktail cqbinet, with a tub full of drop spindles in the background. In the foreground is a small ball of green tweed yarn, a large Turkish spindle in golden yew with more of the green tweed wrapped around it, and a small Turkish spindle in black bog-oak.
Bow Diddly with his little bog-oak friend Enola, and the green tweed.

Enola stood ready for the 10g samples, which I promptly found after finishing plying the tweed. Of course. Oh well, at least they’re there for tomorrow.

So then I hied me the 50cm or so to my spinning wheel, and this is where the trouble really began. And begat more problems. And then some. The wheel is one I got on Freecycle at least 10 years ago. I never actually used it. Although I’d taken it along to a spinning workshop a few years ago, it misbehaved, even flummoxing the instructor, so I’d ended up using a borrowed wheel. I did look into finding someone who could repair it, but it would have meant shipping it over to England and then there was the whole pandemic thing so that didn’t happen. And today, sitting before it, I realised I didn’t even know what make it was anymore… And the orifice hook was gone, and the drive band kept popping off, and why is there fishing line on it…???

Onto Youtube to look for some Setting Up A Spinning Wheel For Dummies videos. No worries, I’ve done some spinning, so I’d fulfilled my obligations for the day, and isn’t this spinning-related too?

Eight hours later I picked myself off the floor where I’d fainted from hunger. But I had learned SO MUCH. Like I apparently have a Ashcroft Traditional, probably 1982, and it’s a double drive – but is set up as a single drive. And you guys, the whole maiden (?) thingy can be moved sideways! which lines up the groove on the flier with the groove on the wheel – which was the reason the drive band kept flying off – they weren’t aligned properly! It finally spun properly, but the yarn wouldn’t wind onto the bobbin, so I went down another rabbit hole where I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to find a replacement whorl for my flyer (learning in the interim that I had a jumbo flier) before realising that Traditionals don’t have one (or at least they don’t have one that screws on after the bobbin…). Then I found a video showing how to put together a Traditional from bits of lumber without reducing it to kindling in the process as I was by then tempted to do… and this is where I learned about the fishing line thingy! Scotch tensioning! Which has nothing to do with Scotland, even though there’s an Irish tensioning which I still have to figure out.

Hmm… Irish tension… Nope. Get thee behind me, Spinning. (Laterz).

Apparently the fishing line (which is attached to a wooden knob at the front of the wheel and goes through a hook at the back) is placed over the groove in the bobbin, and secured via the spring on the end to a wee hook on the other side of the maiden assembly. The line can then be tightened by turning the wooden knob, which has the effect of of slowing the rotation of the bobbin with respect to the flier, which in turn allows the yarn to wind onto the bobbin!!

Somewhere in amongst all this the flaming drive band snapped, and if the postie hadn’t been right outside delivering a book I’ve been waiting for, I’d have hoofed the bloody thing out the window where it would have landed on top of him. But as I want him to keep bringing me books, I refrained. Luckily there is no shortage of long, fibre-y stuff about the place. Who’d have thought a knitter would have the like?!

So that was my Day 1. I think the wheel is operating correctly and and is ready to tackle the blizzard of floss awaiting…

Boxes of fibre awaiting spinning. L-R: a bag of raw Grey-Faced Dartmoor fleece which I probably won't get round to; box with grey Herdwick and black Hebridean fibre, each custom-blended with bio-nylon; a box with all the other fibres, only one of which can be seen (green rolags) and a spalted beech tub containing prepped Valais Blacknose fibre.

So much fluff… Not all. Not even close to all.

Allons-y!

f

Tour de Fleece 2023

I have decided to do this yarn-spinning event for the first time this year.

I’m not really a spinner, at all. I did a few workshops years ago – one was my, I think 40th birthday present to myself? 41st? Long time ago anyway. I wasn’t very good, so I never continued, though I did purchase a very pretty drop spindle at one workshop, along with some fluff. I also bought a spinning wheel that was going cheap at some point, thinking I might use it (I didn’t), and picked up a castle wheel for pennies ag an auction a while ago with some vague idea of turning it into a lamp (I didn’t).

So that was the state of play until a couple of months ago when I decided to turn the “junk room” into a crafting/painting/computer fixing room. While cleaning, painting, moving, collecting, building, shovelling it all into place, I came across the drop spindle and fluff, and, being a lady of a certain age and thus glowing like a pig, I sat down and had a wee fiddle at it.

And now I have about a dozen spindles of various types and sizes, a fudge-ton of fibre,

… and a crown.

Why a crown? This is deep TdF lore. It has something to do with a Rie Cramer illustration in the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, where the now-queen gets the better of the fairy; and something to do with encouraging a spinner who may be flagging during the 3-week TdF challenge. Mine is an old white-metal sugar-tongs that I turned into a choker, some 18ga silver-plated jewelry wire, and a bunch of stitch-markers.

I have no plan or goals for this, other than

  • seeing if I can stay the course, and
  • mastering at least one of the wheels.

I have some random fibre that I can practice spinning on the wheel, the Pandemic batt from Dye Candy, a rolag from I can’t remember but it looks like poppies, and a whole pile of interesting fibres from World of Wool, including 2 custom blends (20:80 bio-nylon with – 1. black Hebridean; and 2. dark-grey Herdwick) which are destined for winter socks.

Allons-y!

Is Angora wool cruel?

No.

Angora wool comes from the Angora rabbit, of which there are several breeds. All Angora rabbits are large, some startlingly so:

Woman holding a gigantic white rabbit, which pretty much covers her torso. The rabbit's head appears to be larger than the woman's, though this is because of the amount of fur on it.
FLOOFF!!

Their wool grows to about 3″ (7.5cm), though some can be up to 5″ (12.5cm).

An almost featureless squashed sphere of oyster coloured fur that occupies the entire top of a bedside locker, which on closer inspection, turns out to be an Angora rabbit just prior to moulting.
FLOOOOOOOOOFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This naturally falls out every 90 days, although some owners trim their bunnies regularly:

An Angora rabbit just after trimming. It looks more like a white scottish terrier than a bunny, but with rather longer legs, and sporting what looks like two huge, fluffy feather dusters on its head. I swear. I could just DIE of the cuteness.
Like a Scottish terrier with feather dusters on its head.

The main reason for keeping Angora rabbits is not for their wool – it’s for competitions. After competing for a year or two, they’re retired, often becoming pets as they are very used to being handled. They’re terrific fun, a mix of dog-like rascality and cat-like snuggles.

Their wool is harvested through regular brushing, moulting, or trimming. It’s actually possible to spin directly from a bun in moult:

As long as it’s moulting, it will happily sit there and let you. If it isn’t moulting, you can expect a surprisingly painful kick in the stomach. These are not coot widdle bunnikins, they can and will draw blood.

Most owners, however, will collect wool from brushings:

Now, a number of people have mentioned PETA. It may be true that some Chinese Angora farms have poor animal protections in place, and that abuse took place. I deal with that by never buying Angora from China, or from anywhere that is even slightly suspicious – but I do that for any fibre*. However, I would like to direct you to this website, and, when you have examined it in full, I would like you to think about whether PETA is the sort of organisation from which to get your information on animal abuse.

*: this means that I only work with substandard cashmere, for example, because the truly high-quality cashmere comes from half-starved wild goats. Starvation is the reason for the ultra-fine fibre these goats produce. NB: they’re not deliberately starved. It’s because their native environment (mountain grassland) doesn’t produce enough food. Cashmere goats living in, e.g., Australia or Scotland, are well-fed, and therefore produce thicker cashmere fibre.

Quora linky.

When making textiles, how would early people card them?

There is such a thing as craft historical re-enactment – it’s not all Vikings and Romans. Craft historical re-enactment can happen on its own, often in living history museums, but also in conjunction with the sword and sandals kind of re-enactment*. There are also many knitters who are interested in historically-accurate crafting – there’s large and active communities of Historic Knitters and Spinners on Ravelry, for example, and another dedicated group of crafters who are preserving old, out-of-copyright patterns and crafting books online.

So, how would people have carded fleece to make yarn in the pre-industrial era?

Image showing modern and historical carders.

I’m sorry this is such a poor-quality image – I took it with my phone at my first-ever wool festival, and, while camera quality is my main criterion for buying a phone, that phone was high quality for 2009. These are carders: the pair at the front are relatively modern, but at the back, on the cross-shaped handle, is a typical pre-industrial carder. Those fuzzy blobs you can see are the seed heads of one of the Teasel species of plant:

Dipsacus fullonum plant in sunlight, with a goldfinch perched on it pecking the seeds from the seed head.
Dipsacus fullonum, the Fuller’s Teasel. Fulling is the term for a type of felting.

Historically, Fuller’s Teasel seeds were used for both carding wool for spinning, and for finishing woven cloth by brushing and softening the surface.

* – In my LH characters of Jodis (formidable matron) and Finnbogi (beardless and somewhat inept young warrior), my craft skill was naalbinding, a kind of Viking knitting but with a sewing needle.

Quora linky.

Is there a huge markup on yarn? Why is yarn so expensive often?

Sometimes. But mostly, not.

I had a little adventure into yarn production some years ago. I purchased the fleece, had it spun as a worsted-spun 4-ply, and wound into undyed hanks.

As I recall, the fleece, a rare-breed Galway (my Unique Selling Point (USP)) was £11 a kilo. I bought 10kg – £110.

I drove it to a spinning mill – around £200 by ferry plus 500miles petrol. Total in the region of £600 – lucky it was a multipurpose trip…

The mill charged £56 per returned kilo. I got 60-ish 100g hanks back, so about £336.

The resulting yarn was shipped to me at a cost of about £60.

>> 110+(600/2)+336+60=806 (travel costs halved because it was a multipurpose trip)

>> 806/60= 13.43333333

So, just to break even, I’d have to sell each hank for £13.50. And that’s without a ballband, gauge testing, packaging and posting, Etsy listing and selling fees, etc. A 50% markup would bring it to just over £20. And you’ll find, as you look around, that £20 is an average price for a hank of good-quality 4-ply yarn with enough yardage to make a pair of socks.

But that’s a profit of only £405 – half as much as I’d need to repeat the process the following year.

Rare-breed Galway sheep with characteristic top-knot.

A non-profit business, just bringing attention to the lovely Galway, would need to charge £30 per undyed 100g skein – and that leaves nothing to plough back into a breeding programme, fodder, housing, veterinary bills, or my time and expenses! Salary? Don’t make me laugh…

I could, of course, have shipped the fleece instead of delivering it, at about £100 for the 10kg. I could have gone for a less expensive woollen treatment, costing a mere £52 per returned kilo – and if you think that’s still expensive, you should watch this:

Fleece processing is intensive both manually and mechanically. Neither the expertise nor the machinery (£1mn startup costs) comes cheap!

I could even have used any old fleece at half the price, instead of rare-breed Galway – but that would have eliminated my USP. I’d have to find some other way of adding value, such as hand-dyeing. Sadly, while I can do and enjoy dyeing… I’m not really ‘valuable’ as a dyer. I have no unique vision that allows me to create exquisite colourways that are Art in the skein, like my neighbour EweMomma does:

Skein of hand-painted yarn in shades of pink. green, purple and yellow.
Ewemomma hand-painted yarn.

I’d produce plain solid colours like wot i dun ere:

7 hanks of yarn dyed in solid maroon, red, salmon, burgundy, lime, turquoise and orange.
Sooooo boring. But at least I got a good R-O-Y range.

The way you need to look at fibrecrafts is as a hobby, like golf, wine-tasting, or astronomy. A decent golf club can set you back £100 – and you’ll need more than one, plus balls, tees, club fees and funny trousers. Wine tastings can be as little as £30 – for a couple of hours, and you don’t even get to drink the wine! Astronomy costs – are astronomical. But a decent yarn is lovely and squishy in the hank, provides hours of knitting pleasure, and an end product that – with a little care – will last 1,000 years…

Egyptian sock fragments, c. 1000–1400CE, with colourwork geometric designs in black, white and blue cotton.
Egyptian sock fragments, c. 1000–1400CE. From L to R: Textile Museum, ca. 1000 – 1200 AD; Victorian & Albert Museum, ca. 1100 – 1300 AD; Textile Museum, ca. 1300 AD

Quora linky.

Can I make a living from selling wool and from knitting?

From knitting? Almost certainly not.

I was a maths teacher, and collected some data for a Functional Maths project I ran with low-ability students. One heavily-cabled Aran sweater I made took me 60 hours (I’m a fast knitter. It was complicated) of knitting time, and about 10 hours of swatching, planning and finishing.

  • At the current minimum wage in the UK (£8.21 an hour), I would need to sell that sweater for £574.70 to compensate me for my working time, plus the cost of the yarn (just over £50, so pretty cheap).
  • However, I am NOT a ‘minimum-wage knitter’, I am an expert AND an artist/artisan. In my professional career, I routinely charged £25–50 per hour for private work. Applying that to my knitting, that raises the minimum sale price of the sweater to £1,750-3,500, plus yarn costs.
  • I knit that particular sweater for my husband: people regularly complimented him on it, and, on learning his wife had knitted it, asked if I’d knit one for them – – – – for £20. INCLUDING the yarn…

From selling wool? If you mean running a yarn shop, people do, and can be quite successful. However,

  • my local non-artisanal yarn shop also sells cheap crappy acrylic yarn, fabric, supplies for sewing, embroidery, quilting, paper crafts, art (painting, sculpture, etc), and just about anything else you can imagine. The owner makes a modest living.
  • a posher yarn shop stocks only locally-sourced wool and mohair. The owner is independently wealthy, only opens part-time, and uses her profits to promote local charities. She does do a mean hot chocolate and gluten-free cookies, so I spend far too much time there.
  • A friend and neighbour who’s a yarn-dyer does make a living by selling online and through trade fairs all over Europe, and teaching, and giving talks, and Patreon, and ‘moonlighting’ as an accountant.

From producing wool? Eh. The suppliers of the posh yarn shop that I’ve met produce yarn as a way of offsetting the cost of keeping their animals. One also keeps milk goats and sells the milk, another keeps Jacob sheep for meat, skins and wool. They also teach, dye, design, etc.,etc. They’re not getting rich, and might not be making very much money at all once the accounts are balanced. I once had a go at buying fleece and getting it spun for sale: I did make a profit, but I had to sell the undyed yarn for nearly £20 a 100g hank – and the profit wasn’t enough for me to buy more fleece to spin the following year 😦

Almost everyone I know of who is making a living off fibre crafts is not just a dyer, or a designer, or a spinner, or… They’re a sample knitter and a dyer and a designer and a spinner and a teacher and a vlogger/blogger/podcaster and a magazine contributor and a book author and a photographer and and and. I knit, design, and teach, and it just about covers the cost of my yarn.

Quora linky.

How easy is it to make “wool” out of pet hair?

Not hard at all. The only thing you need is the right kind of pet.

So goldfish and budgies are right out.

The best pets are the fluffy ones – the ones that grow a decent undercoat in winter. Huskies are good, and so are long-hair cats like Maine Coons. Also, Angora bunnies, and some lionheads, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some guinea pigs and ferrets didn’t produce small, usable amounts of undercoat.

The fluff can be collected through normal grooming. Keep it in a clean, sealable plastic bag until you have enough. When you have about 100g/4oz, you can try removing the hairs from the fluff, wash (if you don’t like spinning “in the grease”) and card, and spin.

This first spinning effort will tell you whether the fluff is worth spinning on its own – some of it may be too short – or whether you’d be better combining it with a longer fibre, like wool or cotton.

Here’s some people who made clothing from their dogs’ hair:

Two women in dog-hair cardigans, with their dogs - a Tibetan mastiff and a husky. I think - I'm not great on dog breeds.
Aman in a cabled dog-hair sweater, with a large hairy mongrel (probably).
A woman in a dark-brown dog-hair gilet, with rough collie who is too light-coloured to be the dog-hair donor.
A man in a bright white Aran-style cabled cardigan, with a beautiful white husky.
A woman wearing a black stole which looks like Persian or Astrakhan lambswool, but which clearly comes from her huge Royal poodle.

These People Are Wearing Sweaters Made From Their Dog’s Shed Hair

There’s even a company – Knit Your Dog – that will do the hard work for you, if you’re not crafty:

And a woman who works exclusive with dog har, and writes about it:

——————

The main problem with cat hair is there’s comparatively little of it. I’ve only really heard of people felting with cat hair:

Crafting with Cat Hair: Cute to Make with Your Cat

Angora bunnies produce Angora wool, that fluffy, soft stuff that makes gorgeous, expensive sweaters, so that’s pretty mainstream and commercial. However, here’s a video of a woman who keeps Angora rabbits (and poodles), showing the process of producing items from bunny to needle, which would be the same for any other animal fibre:

Quora linky.

Momma gotta brand new bag!

I do! I will!

I’ve been having a go at dyeing wool, using Kool-Aid (right, top) and food colouring and vinegar (right, bottom). I have loads of undyed 4ply which I am probably never going to use up otherwise. The plan is to double-ply it and knit and full (felt) myself a bag. I love Clarice Cliff so I just had to get a copy of Melinda Coss’s Art Deco Knits when it came up on eBay. I’ve had it for a while but the designs are so 80s that I’ll never knit anything from it. However, it would be a pity not to make something. So I thought bags. The first one with be a straightforward knit-up of a sleeve, but if/when I do more, I might try to mimic the shapes of Clarice Cliff’s pottery as well.

I wound off approximately 2oz (50g), skeined it on the back of a chair and tied it loosely with waste acrylic yarn. I washed it in cool water with a little liquid soap, making up the dye bath while it soaked briefly. The Kool-Aid dye bath consisted of 2 sachets dissolved with cool water, in a microwaveable pot (I used a soon-for-the-bin micro pressure cooker) – except for the purple (top, far right) for which I used 4 sachets. The food-colouring dye bath was approximately half a bottle (20ml) of Supercook food-colouring and a good glug of Sarson’s Distilled White Vinegar, in cool water. I didn’t bother rinsing the wool clear of the soap – I read somewhere that it actually might help the dyeing process – and lowered it into the dye bath, adding more water to make sure it was completely covered. A good shuggle of the pot to mix it up, then into the microwave for 2-minute bursts – mine has a default setting of 750W – with 2mins rest between, when I poked it a bit with a whisk to keep it under the bath. For most, the dye bath was clear after about 4 or 5 bursts like this. I then left the wool in the depleted dye bath overnight to cool, though it only needs to reach room temperature. I washed the wool gently in cool water to remove any excess dye, and left it to dry on a radiator. I’ve double plied two already into pullcakes with my Daruma Home Twister (left).

The results of the dyeing were overall pretty fabulous, even if I do tootle me own flute. The colours on the whole are clear and vibrant, and I’m particularly pleased with the good, dense black, which I really didn’t think would come out well at all. Instead, it’s about the best of the bunch, much better than the pic shows. The food-colouring green is lovely too – a nice strong organic sagey colour. I’m very fond of the Kool-Aid turquoise (second from left), and the red (second from right) is lovely and pure too. The food-colouring blue is a huge disappointment though, all patchy. It was my first attempt at food-colouring dye: on some advice from tinterwebs, I soaked it overnight in the dye bath before zapping it. Damn you, tinterwebs! Once more you bring me wrongness! It was actually worse than it looks now: I cooled it, added more blue and, in a fit of poorly-remembered colour-theory madness, a splash of red and zapped it again. It’s better, but it suffers from the madd colorz yet, poor fluff. Saying this, I could probably whip up a bidding frenzy of Wollmeisian proportions on Etsy with the foul stuff. Many’s the fool would promise me their firstborn* for it…

Next time, I will make sure to loosen up the strands within the skein, and tie them VERY VERY LOOSELY indeed. So loosely indeed that they were virtually UN-tied. Even though I thought I’d got them loose enough, they still affected the dye penetration on the first batch. It doesn’t matter much, since I’ll be using them double-plied and then felting.

The Kool-Aid colours are, from left to right:
Orange and Lemonade (one sachet each) – light, bright orange
Berry Blue – turquoise
Lemon-Lime – bright sap green
Black Cherry – reddish-brown marroon
Watermelon Cherry – peachy pink
Tropical Punch – pure red
Grape – mid-purple. Not entirely successful.

Other craftiness: a forgotten pair of socks. Sue me. How many pairs have I done? These are claret, ribbed in the leg and down the top of the foot. And another pair, 5-row stripes in red and navy blue. And yet another: Tiny husband’s Regia Bamboo socks are finally finished. And as if that wasn’t enough, a dinky pair of ankle socks for Ickle Baby Cthulhu from the left-over Bamboo. The photos are crap. Don’t know what’s wrong with the camera.

I also made myself a fake Fair Isle tam. Not that I couldn’t make a real one, but I saw the patterns and thought “Oooh!” and “An excuse to use some of that variegated Teddy Picasso** in the camouflage colourway that I unaccountably like so much, without people necessarily catching me out being hypocritical”. So I went at it like a demented thing, so maddened by the promise of fiendish skultammery goodness that I didn’t check stitch counts or anything, finished it in 24hrs – and promptly lost it to the offspring. Seriously. I spend ages working out significant and meaningful Aran symbols for a tam for him, and he won’t touch it. I risk my mental health at the eight legs of monstrous yarn worshippers to make him a Spiderman hat that lies despised and cobwebbed in a corner until I give it to his friend Harryweb. Not to mention all the unbelievably cute little hats for which I don’t even have photos, because they got chucked out of the pram! But let me even day-dream about a hat for someone else – TH’s BS Johnson, my fake Isle tam, his Spiderman hat now that it’s Harryweb’s… – and he WANTS IT NOW. The bottom two pics are his response to mild suggestions that he give Mommy back her special hat.

“Ye can tak awa ma dignity, but ye’ll nivver tak ma tam!!!”.***

TTFN
K

P.S. I treated myself to a spinning workshop for my birthday!! Now, once I get a proper spindle…

* – What, precisely, is the attraction of the firstborn? Why does everyone want them? Why the elaborate schemes to get their mitts on them? I say this as a firstborn myself. Though perhaps the fact that no cannibalistic witches/wrathful gods/strange little spinning men wanted me makes me bitter. And envious.

** – This is the DK version of the chunky Teddy Colourama for IBC’s ‘special jacket‘.

*** – Sunday Post Translation Services, Inc.