Knit Sisters

I had a lovely time at the Missouri Fiber Retreat this weekend, and came home having learned lots of new things, energized to start spinning like a fiend and inspired to work on my own knitting designs.

I took four classes over the weekend, three of them spinning classes, and one a design class with the keynote speaker, Melissa Leapman.

My first class on Friday afternoon was a class in spinning “designer” yarn (or as spinners refer to it, lumpy bumpy yarn) out of Lincoln wool.  Our teacher gave us a bag of naturally-colored Lincoln locks,

which we teased apart by hand, spun into a highly textured single, and then plied back onto itself.

                                        My neighbor and new-found friend Andrea’s lumpy yarn.

                                                      My own lumpy Lincoln yarn, not quite as highly textural as Andrea’s, but still pretty, I think.

Next stop:  Saturday morning and a class in spinning with angora bunny wool. 

I ended up not taking too many photos during this class, just because I was so busy trying to spin at least a little bit of each of the sample fibers our instructor passed out.  She gave us German, French, and English angora to spin, which we spun straight and unblended with anything else, and I also experimented a little bit with blending some German angora with Columbia wool on my handheld combs.

                                                      My mini-skein of German angora.

Saturday afternoon:  spinning three designer yarns with the lovely and talented Chris Hunsburger,

                                                               who happens to live up toward my neck of the woods, I’m proud to say.

Our first yarn was a lumpy bumpy mohair in much the same vein as the lumpy bumpy Lincoln of the day before.

Then we used the dyed mohair locks to make a corespun yarn, a technique in which you use a core yarn or thread and let the teased locks grab onto and wrap around the core.  There are endless possibilities with this technique, including using a commercial yarn as the core and letting some of the base yarn show through the wrapping fiber.

 

Our third yarn of the afternoon was a mohair boucle, a very, very cool technique which I had never experimented with before.   

Very cool, but also very labor-intensive.  First you have to spin the mohair singles.  Then you ply that single with a commercial thread (or yarn), letting the mohair spiral around the thread–putting tension only on the thread as you ply.  Every time you ply a little bit, you stop and scootch the mohair down on the thread, creating those little loops.  So you ply, stop, scootch, ply, stop, scootch.  Then, you ply the whole shebang with the commercial thread again, locking those little loopies into place. 

I think you can see that I won’t be making this particular yarn every day.

Coming Wednesday:  my class with knitwear designer Melissa Leapman.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Plays well with others, Spinning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.