Knit Sisters

The drawback to using the beloved five-pitch English combs is that you are left with quite a bit of waste fiber.  Now, being the frugal soul that I am, I had to purchase a smaller set of combs so as not to completely waste said waste fiber.

So, when I combed that handpainted roving, I ended up with little bundles of fluff.  I combed that fluff with my double-row handheld Louet combs, along with some short pieces of mohair, and spun up the resulting sliver into a fine singles.  The colors became even more muted with the additional combing and with the addition of the white mohair.  It was a very pretty little bobbin of yarn, but it was indeed quite little.

 

I let this little beauty sit for a little bit, while I thought about what to do with it.  I knew I wanted to ply it with something, but what? 

A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of weakness, I purchased this largish bag of raw kid mohair from a woman in the local spinning guild.

 

What can I say?  The price was right, and she’s a local breeder of angora goats.  This is fiber from a bona fide Missouri goat.  That makes such a purchase almost noble, no?  (Supporting the local economy and all.)  But this stuff takes some serious fiber preparation.  First off, there’s the washing–we won’t go there in this post.  Suffice it to say that it is no joke.  After that, there’s the combing.

 

 

Then you have to pull the sliver from the combs.

 

You end up with something quite, quite lovely in and of itself, but it still isn’t even spun into anything yet.

 

Then you spin.

Then you have to ply the mohair strand with the mohair/wool strand.  (Because, as you probably guessed, that is what I decided to do with that little bobbin of singles.)  Wind it off on your trusty kniddy-knoddy, and you end up with one (!) skein of mohair/wool 2-ply yarn.  (Pictured on Monday, remember?)

And, because I do this for fun,  I’m going to do it all again with the leftovers I get when I put this roving through the five-pitch combs.

Then I’ll have two different, yet coordinating, skeins of yarns.  Yup, that’s the plan.

While walking Hugo this Saturday morning, I saw what I at first took to be a horse trailer parked downtown.  Of course, Hugo, with his super-sensitive nose, knew better at once–these were no horses, these were alpacas!  I immediately scouted out these alpaca people, (who were sitting on some benches around the courthouse) and asked somewhat lamely, “Are some of you the alpaca people?”  Of course, they were very nice about it and didn’t even poke fun at me for my dumb question.  Turns out, there were not one but three groups of alpaca people:  two groups who own alpaca farms in Kansas, and one group who owns a fiber shop and fiber mill in Kansas.  They were all there for the county fair shindig going on around the square on Saturday.  They had live animals, fiber, yarn, and other fiber-related goodies.

Well!  What could I do but invite myself to come sit and spin with them that afternoon?  So, at about 1:00 p.m. I trundled myself up to the square and horned in on Kay and Sally, two sisters (!!) who run a fiber shop in Phillipsburg, KS.  I took the Joy with me:

 

Kay was spinning up some alpaca on her Kromski Mazurka wheel, so I happily sat down beside her and set up shop, so to speak.  Her sister, Sally, was warping a small Kromski table loom in preparation for weaving a scarf.  They graciously let me join them and even more graciously treated me as though I were an old friend.  We all sat and chatted for about an hour, and then, off to the west, some very threatening storm clouds started to blow in.  Kay and I moved in under their tent.  It started to rain.  It started to blow.  Then it started to thunder, lightning, and pour.

Soon, Kay, Sally, and I were involved in Operation “Save the Alpaca Fiber.”  We frantically threw books in their truck, tossed skeins of yarn into bins, and bundled up beautiful woven and knitted alpaca goods, all the while trying to hold onto the tent, which was threatening to blow away in the wind.  Eventually, the tent did blow away, right into the nearest store front.

Well, we did get everything packed up into their truck, more or less safely, although not before we were all absolutely soaking wet.  Actually, I think we all gave up on the idea of staying dry pretty early on.  (At least I know I did.)  The phrase “soaking wet,” doesn’t really convey how wet we were.  Sopping, sloshy, drenched, down-to-the-underwear wet comes closer.

I invited Kay and Sally to come back to my house to dry off a bit before heading home.  (It was the least I could do after having invited myself to their party…)  They towelled off as best they could and I gave them a couple of old t-shirts.  Here they are, standing in my kitchen, still smiling after everything.

 

(That’s Kay on the left and Sally on the right.)

You know what the worst part of the whole day was?  I didn’t even get a chance to purchase any of their lovely alpaca roving before the storm blew in.  Sorry, ladies!  But, at the risk of sounding sappy, I now have two new fiber friends.  Thanks for the adventure, Kay and Sally!

In other weekend news, I finished this skein of mohair/wool:

More mohair news on Wednesday.

Well, I’m so glad you asked, Ellen!  English five-pitch combs look like this:

(Pay no attention to the messy floor/table.)

Combing is actually a very, very old form of fiber preparation.  There used to be guilds devoted to the combing arts.  (No joke.)  Basically, combing takes your messy, dirty fiber and aligns the fibers while getting rid of all the short fibers, second cuts, and what spinners somewhat euphemistically refer to as “vm.”  (VM is “vegetable matter,” in other words all those little bits of hay, burrs, twigs and things of that nature that remind you that sheep are animals and mostly live outdoors.)  Nowadays, handspinners also use combs to do all sorts of fun and fancy color-blending of fiber, as well.

I myself have grown addicted to combing after taking a class from Susan last year.  (I also bought this set of combs from her, in case you’re wondering.)  I now own not only the aforementioned five-pitch combs, but also a set of double row Louet handheld mini-combs.

If you’re thinking that these combs look a bit like weapons, well…you’re right.  They are extremely, extremely sharp and not recommended for use by the clumsy or in households with small children.  Pay close attention while using them!  The consumption of alcoholic beverages is not recommended while combing!  Make sure your tetanus shot is up to date!  (Although that sounds like a joke, it is not.)

But, they produce little bundles of fiber that spin like buttah.  It is a beautiful thing.

I bought this:

here last June and put it through my English five-pitch combs to turn it into this:

They’re pretty little balls of fluff, aren’t they?

Then I spun it up into this:

I spun it as singles to preserve the long color gradations because I had this idea that I wanted to knit this yarn into an entrelac scarf.  Sort of a la the Eleanor stole in Scarf Style.  I was hoping that the long yet random color gradations would give me little blocks of solid or almost-solid color in the way that the lovely Noro yarns do.  Also, then if the singles biased a bit, the multi-directionality of the entrelac would offset that.  Good plan, right?

The only fly in this oh-so-charming ointment is that I have never tried entrelac before.  So this yarn is still sitting at the top of the stash awaiting judgment.  I take it out now and again to show it off to people, but I haven’t even wound it into balls yet. 

One of the problems with one-of-a-kind handspun yarns is that they often end up being so beautiful (if I do say so myself) in the skein that it’s very hard to actually use them.  What if what I knit doesn’t turn out as pretty as those skeins are right now?  It’s a dilemma, and the only way I see out of it is to lose the “preciousness” of those handspun skeins.  How to do that, you may ask?  Well (I knew I would get to this point sooner or later), the best way I can see is to have lots of stash and devote more time to spinning and knitting.  Then each skein isn’t quite as precious.  Isn’t that a good rationalization for stash-building and ignoring housework and cooking?