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Debating my next blending project.

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Reminds me of high school chemistry. All labs were done with droplets worth of various solutions. I thought it was because they didn't trust us with any larger amounts of chemicals. Nope, they didn't trust our chemistry teacher with any more chemicals than necessary. Considering the damage he did a vacuum chamber with a broken glass cover and leftover prom cups...

This scientist crafts stunning visual art through chemistry.

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35 ounces into 32 batts. 70% Merino, 30% Bamboo.

Tour de Fleece project?

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And there are still single gender bathrooms at the Kansas City airport. Twice as many as gender neutral ones.

Now if the soap dispensers hadn't broken within months of the renovation...

Sharing space is nothing new. Sharing bathrooms is nothing new. The reactionary outrage is so manufactured.

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I'm hosting a dye day on my place for the local guild next weekend, so I'm playing with the dye stocks from previous events. Considering some of them were mixed up 7+ years ago, a bit of testing was in order. First to make sure they still work, then to make sure I know what strength they are. See, I mixed up the oldest overly strong, and then stored them in jars with badly fitting lids and they lost some water and were partially sludge.

OK, mostly the Twilight Gray (teal). So a second test was in order (plus I already have plans to dye some fiber with it for my own project). I used 1/4 the dye stock I estimated to need for a dark color (in case my estimate was wrong). Good news is my estimate was right; better news is that I like the pastel version.

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We have all made yarn soup, but what about wool salad?

I really like my salad spinner for getting water out of my fiber for quicker drying.

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THE ENTIRE WEST IS BEING PUT UP FOR SALE AND I AM BEGGING YOU TO CALL YOUR SENATORS

Trump’s budget bill has many, many things in it, but buried amongst it is the MILLIONS OF ACRES OF PUBLIC LAND FOR SALE.

This is the entirety of the Arizona state forests, the entire Cascades mountain range. Swathes of pristine desert around the national parks in Utah. On the doorstep of Jackson Hole.

THIS BILL IS BIG, BUT IT CAN BE AMENDED AND ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT PASS AS IS please.

If you have ever enjoyed the wilderness, we stand to lose it all forever.

CALLING your senators - NOT JUST IN THE WEST. ALL SENATORS, is CRUCIAL.

Outdoor alliance has a great resource for reaching out.

I don’t have a huge following but please, everywhere I have ever loved, the forests I grew up playing in, the land I got married on, is all at risk and I am begging.

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So my fiber guild has started a book club. New book every month, changing genres each time as long as a fiber craft is involved. This month we read a knitting cozy mystery. While it was my first time reading a knitting cozy mystery, it was not my first time reading cozy mysteries. Several of the member did not know "cozy" mystery was a genre, and mostly knew mysteries from watch Scan Noir shows. Thus distrust of the knitting store regulars who so quickly started helping the protagonist. To friendly to even Midwesterners. Genre expectations matter!

Related, does anyone know of a book with a knitting mafia. Most of us were sad that the missing $20,000 wasn't for the murdered woman's yarn tab.

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Good news is that the guild drum carder was as easy to disassemble and reassemble as I thought. I think it will work smoother now.

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Question for the yarnblr - if you do this method, what do you do with the other end? I mean the one that was the working yarn. Do you cut and weave in as traditional?

I like to weave in as many ends as possible as I go.

This is how I do it when I join a new colour.

‼️ For a better result: Fray or break the yarn to taper the end.

Works both for knitting* and crochet.

*Does not work so well if you are knitting in the round or in intarsia or colourwork, as it will distort that first stitch. Saves you loads of time though, if you are knitting a striped scarf or shawl.

🧶🎥

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Do you like to read? If yes, put your current/most recent book in the tags!

Yes

No

I used to but dont anymore

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In trying to decide what large spinning project to start next, I found a pile of merino and bamboo tops that I want to blend. And then I found some more merino tops that would go nicely. Then I did math and realized it was going to be slightly more than two pounds, and the thought of blending 70 batts was overwhelming.

After a few years of not doing much with them, I've started going back to guild meetings. And in those years, the guild bought a loaner drum carder. Two emails later and I'm the proud borrower of a standard Brother carder for the next month.

But of course, I don't want mess up my large project. So, a braid of unknown wool from a destash and some mulberry silk top. I could get about 1 ounce onto the drum before fiber was staying on the licker drum. I could get the silk to load easily when there wasn't much on the drum, but it worked easier to load it from the top. As long as I spread the fiber out, I don't think I need to recard the batts to blend.

I'm halfway through spinning the singles. Sadly, two days of kayaking 5+ miles means that my drafting hand is a bit sore, so I probably won't finish today.

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I wish I could say it was skill and even spinning, but I didn't weigh my fiber when I split it. But at the end of plying one pound of yarn, my two plies ended within two feet of each other.

I'm currently very impulsive with my crafting. I just want to spend my time doing what feels right, holding myself to a plan just isn't doable right now.

I'm at least poking at knitting and weaving right now, which is nice. I've worked on three of my current wips in the last week. And I brought my table top loom down to the screened porch. There's quite a bit of warp on it from when K. borrowed it, so I'm just doing twill, practicing getting the tension right.

It's spring and I want to spin green. I'm feeling to precious to spin various greens in my stash. But when trying to face the mess that is the library, I found a bag of four braids of hand dyed blue and green tops. At first I thought they were all Falkland, but based on the variability of crimp and softness, maybe they were all planned sock yarns? Well, they are all blended into 32 batts, so I don't know. I need to be better about keeping labels on braids, because I'm pretty sure I dyed or overdyed all of these but didn't take pictures in Rav after dying, and I have no clue what they are/where they came from.

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Since I finished the carding part of my blending color wheel project, I stalled out. I know I want to take photos of the batts, but what then? Do I spin the entire batt or do I keep them for reference. If I split it in half, is the remaining fiber or the spun skein large enough?

So I made a sample batt with some of the remaining fiber, split it lengthwise, crocheted the remaining fiber, spun the other half and made the shortest skein (1/2 yard, so 9 inches long).

I think the skein is big enough, and I'd like be able to reference how each color looks in both fiber and yarn form. I'm going to sleep on it.. but I'll start spinning the samples. Then I can show them off to my guildmates at some future meeting, and possibly be talked into writing it up. The nice thing about saving half is that I can put off trying to take good photos for longer.

Also, I think I'll do similar for my dye samples. I had started spinning the 1/2 ounce dyed rovings, but only did about five so far. I really like having the samples as fiber.. so maybe only spinning half.

Weird color because of twilight.

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Two months later, and I finished my singles at the local social spin. So it's plying time. Before I started spinning the first bobbin, I ran four of the batts through the drum carder again to blend the colors better. But after spinning that bobbin, I felt that the color was now too homogenous. So I decided to recard half the batts, so that one ply would be double carded (more solid color) and the other one would be carded only once (more variegated), as you can see in the left picture. I like how it's turned out in the plied yarn (right picture). I may remember that for future yarns.

I'm currently very impulsive with my crafting. I just want to spend my time doing what feels right, holding myself to a plan just isn't doable right now.

I'm at least poking at knitting and weaving right now, which is nice. I've worked on three of my current wips in the last week. And I brought my table top loom down to the screened porch. There's quite a bit of warp on it from when K. borrowed it, so I'm just doing twill, practicing getting the tension right.

It's spring and I want to spin green. I'm feeling to precious to spin various greens in my stash. But when trying to face the mess that is the library, I found a bag of four braids of hand dyed blue and green tops. At first I thought they were all Falkland, but based on the variability of crimp and softness, maybe they were all planned sock yarns? Well, they are all blended into 32 batts, so I don't know. I need to be better about keeping labels on braids, because I'm pretty sure I dyed or overdyed all of these but didn't take pictures in Rav after dying, and I have no clue what they are/where they came from.