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slightly off-color pictures but: process of my latest spin. Its superwash merino which i keep saying I would prefer to spin more of other wool breeds and non-superwash but I keep ending up with superwash merino

However: before this I had started to spin my icelandic/alpaca wool but i wasn't impressed with how it was blended. so took out my blending board last night & ended up with some mini batts/giant rolags which i wasn't really planning for BUT it's more blended which is good.

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A closer look at the ancient art of tablet weaving and how my novel research evolved into (yet another) fiber hobby

As usual I'm soooo good at videos and social media, so be sure to watch the full video on my free substack (because the hellsite does not like uploading my long videos lol)

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Newest finished piece!! Pretty happy with this! The leaves look a bit funky, I think I'm still using too much tension and maybe not enough bobbins for them. Super happy with the stems and the petals! And hey look! My square lead works are becoming more square! The new technique learned in this one was crossing over a braid. So for example the two bottom leaves use the same bobbins and are not sewn on separately.

Pattern 7 in the Technique of Honiton Lace by Elsie Luxton

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I also took this off the pillow today

My first piece of Ipswich lace!! This was a surprisingly big mental challenge to do. I haven't done a ton of work with gimp threads so it took a lot of concentration to figure it out. Also my first time using a full working diagram like this so that was also a learning curve. The biggest issue with this though was the thread. I just don't like silk. It's so slippery and unravels so easily. I've had this much done for a couple of months I think and finally today decided that one full repeat of the pattern was enough and we are calling it done 😂 I did enjoy the pattern and plan to make more Ipswich lace in the future! But it will definitely be with cotton thread and maybe with a bolster pillow. Also I need to wait until I have more bobbins lol. This was the pattern in the book that required the least number and I was using a mix of square and Midlands which was kind of terrible 😅

Pattern # 8 in Lace Samples from Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1789-1790 by Karen H Thompson

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I'm Sorry - Gator Days

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When I was little my mom’s meatloaf was my favorite food. But ONLY her meatloaf. I didn’t like anyone else’s, and she told me that she would teach me how to make it when I was older. And when I was like 19? She finally taught me, but she told me never to tell anyone else and I was like weird but okay

Anyway, she was super fucking homophobic and abusive to me when I told her I was gay, so here’s the recipe

4-6 lbs of Hamburger/turkey burger

1 pk onion soup mix OR ranch mix

1 TBs ketchup

1 Tbs spicy brown mustard,

1 Tbs bbq sauce

1 Tbs steak sauce

1 egg

mix, shape into a loaf in a big pan, and bake at 350 for 2 hrs (maybe 2 and a half if you’re feeling dangerous)

You can get almost all of these ingredients at the dollar store, and have leftovers if it’s just you. The leftovers make great tacos if (taco seasoning is also like a dollar). Enjoy your revenge loaf

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i really like seeing posts about how other people are processing their fibre, so i thought that i'd add ours. we bought a couple bags (about three kilos—this photo is only half) of raw fleece at sheep and wool, and now have it all washed out and cleaned up.

the most helpful boys in the world were very interested in what we were doing, and frankly far less suspicious of the large tub of water than i would've preferred for them to be.

anyhow, about a kilo of fleece got dumped into the tub and arranged to be as aligned as possible. in future washes, i didn't bother with this and didn't find that there was much a difference, and certainly not sufficient difference to justify the time and effort spent carefully laying it out.

i imagine that this is different if you're washing a whole fleece and things are already more or less aligned. if you're washing a bag of of fleece that's just been plopped into the bag, i would suggest not bothering.

the small bag at the end were some locks that we'd picked ahead of time to see if they washed up nicer. (spoiler: they did not.)

worth noting is that we have one of those bathtubs that's short but deep, so this isn't as much water or space as it looks like.

if you've ever wanted to see how water-resistant wool is, here's a great example. these photos were taken the next morning, and some of the fibre was still totally dry, despite having carefully pushed it all underwater before we headed to bed.

after about twelve hours of soaking, this is what we had—the water doesn't look that dirty in the second photo, but you can just barely see a cloud of dirt at the edge of the mesh bag we were using to hold the wool in place in the tub. (it was just laid on the bottom of the tub, and meant that we could easily move the wool up or down the tub, or lift it out entirely, without having to move it much.)

anyhow, soaking water from this batch went into a bucket to feed my wife's plants. (and then the next batch i fucked up and drained it. 🤡 it's amazing they put up with me, tbh.)

wool got moved safely away from the water, and then it was time for the hottest tap water we could manage. our tap runs at well over 60c/145f, so we didn't bother to try to make it any warmer. as it was, i was very grateful that we'd bought the extra heavy duty kitchen gloves.

we added a couple splurts of dishsoap (palmolive) to the tub, then carefully let the fleece spread itself out again, which doesn't take much encouragement, thankfully. and then we fucked off for a while.

twenty minutes later, the water looked like this.

my hand's in the water to about my knuckles in that photo, and as you may notice, it very much appears that i have no fingers.

second wash. our friend the very large mesh laundry bag helped hold the fleece first away from the drain, and then from the tap, and we did it again just like the first wash.

another twenty minutes, and we had this.

you can almost believe that i've got fingers! progress!

this post offers a great look at what it looks like when lanolin is leaving a fleece. we have incredibly soft water, so most of their findings weren't especially relevant to our washing, but the visual guide is fantastic, especially since it took them so many changes to get things clean.

so again, drained, refilled, and resoaped, then left to sit for twenty minutes. and this time, i came back to this!

a whole entire hand! fingertips and everything! i was sort of surprised, honestly, since fine wools have a reputation for being really lanolin heavy, but after this batch of fleece i went down to two washes, and feel like it was more than sufficient for 90% of it. (there was a chunk of merino/bond cross in a later batch that was a little shorter and more lanolin heavy, and likely could've used a third wash, but i'm using that to make rolags and it's going fine, so whatever.)

anyhow, fleece clean! rinse time!

this looks like fleece in water, because that's what it is. we did two rinses, and that seemed plenty sufficient to get out all the suds.

next we spread it out as gently as possible onto a cheap sweater drying rack and hung it on a giant screw that's sort of inexplicably sticking sharp-end-out of the eaves of our porch. (and you'd be like 'that sounds normal, lots of people have screws or whatever to hang things,' to which i'd say 'it does! except that there are three of them and the placement is utterly bizarre, and this is the only one that you can hang anything from.' my best guess is christmas lights, but why a screw? why sharp side out? how sharp side out, at that?)

wool, drying! and the hated roses that have been blooming all fucking winter and are continuing to bloom and are getting bigger and now have spawned more roses somehow, and now we have a bunch of red roses, too. when we moved into this place a year and a half ago there were only white roses. we don't know where the red ones came from, nor do we know why the roses are suddenly VERY TALL—see how in this photo, they don't even clear the top of the wall? now they're like 50cm over it. eighteen inches over it. why. i hate them.

i will continue to hate them unless they become tall enough and self-support enough that they accidentally shade our office, in which case i will hate them slightly less but i'll be mad about it.

and now we're done! that's a lock of nice clean wool! all we did before this photo was fluff out the tips a bit.

i combed some out, and it's pretty good!

nice little nests of combed top. the wool's slightly different colours because, like i said, it wasn't a fleece, it was just fleece, if that makes sense, so there's a bit of a range of colouration in there. but there's much less loss than i'd expected, even combing it out, and all up this was a much easier and less miserable process than i'd feared it would be!

i've put off buying raw fleece for a long time, partly because i've mostly lived in apartments and haven't had a ton of space in which to wash it, and partly because i'm disabled and was afraid that doing it would be too much physically, but it turns out that i probably could have done this a lot sooner, and also that it's not really that hard on the body. the worst of it for me was bending over the tub to fill/refill and then get the wool onto the drying screen, which was a little rough, but definitely not so rough i wouldn't do it again.

(we then did this several more times to get all the fleece washed, and i can already tell you: we're gonna do it again.)

this is the first time i've done raw fleece that had lanolin in it, so please don't take this as an authoritative resource, but that's what we did, and it worked really well and was a lot easier than i'd feared, so i figured i'd share.

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work in progress wednesday - lace weight on 2mm needles

it's the forest laughters shawl pattern on ravelry for those interested: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/forest-laughters-shawl

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This week hasn't been super busy, just busy enough that I haven't been able to nap through the day for the past 3 days. That meant falling asleep on the couch last night at around 8pm and today I'm regretting not laying down an hour ago (did some homework instead) because I've got two meetings this afternoon.

It's fine, I'll manage, but I am learning new things every day about balancing work and my symptoms

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progress on the baby blanket :)

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Basic Doll Pattern Bases For Knitters, Three Sizes Available ... Plus, Bonus Hair Styles! 👉 https://buff.ly/QLLkmAZ - designed by Rowena Dawson

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saw a braid, had a vision. tore it apart into a gradient, spun and chain-plied to maintain the color change, going to knit a watermelon crescent with black beads over the pink flesh and probably dark emerald beads over the rind.

crescent shawl recipe:

find something fun in the stitch dictionary and cast on enough stitches for as many repeats as you want plus four selvedge stitches.

every row:

begin slip one, yo, k1,

knit lace pattern

end k1, drop yo, purl last stitch

once edging is a good depth (5 or 6"? I'll stop when the rind color is changing over), short row a crescent finish (I like german short rows, start 10 stitches past center, +2 stitches each side every row).

115g/~335m 3-ply cheviot wool.

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The ribbing of my sock is finished, and I'm moving on to the colorwork! This sock features two charts: the first is a few rows of alternating colors, and the second is a lace motif. I've made lace socks and I've made colorwork socks, but haven't yet combined the two, so I'm looking forward to this section.

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You think you will take up a nice artistic hobby. FOOL! It is maths!

Crochet? Maths.

Knitting? Maths.

Drawing? Maths.

Sewing? Maths AND Ironing!!!

Everything is maths!

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i never posted my finished Problem Child™ gradient. mostly because by the time i finished washing it, i was so annoyed that i tagged it and tossed it to the side so i didn't have to look at it. spinning and plying it was. well. look the yarn is done and it's 982 yards/100grams, okay?

final thoughts on this project? the blend is a good one. a 60/20/20 blend of Polwarth, yak and silk is one i would absolutely recommend if you're wanting to try a soft, warm luxury blend. as for the particular braid i spun, it was my first time trying Regenbogenwolle and it did not go great. i've heard good things about them so i don't know what happened but this braid was a little felted and the blue dye came off everywhere. just touching it left blue on my hands, no pressure or drafting needed. upon washing, you can imagine the amount of blue dye that came off, and to my surprise a substantial amount of green washed out too. my trust is kinda rattled right now. i have two more braids from Regenbogenwolle in my stash that were bought at the same time, one is the same blend in a different colorway and the other is a 50/50 Polwarth and Milk Protein blend, and i'm hoping the spinning will go better.

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A while back I got a very fun roving from @swords-n-spindles as a get well soon gift

I spun it up without much of a plan, and decided that the weaving is the proper project for it.

But what ??? Well, obviously something big fashion inspired (I may or may not have gotten the book around the time I looked for a fitting project)

BUT! I needed more yarn! I had some more hand spun that somewhat fitted the color theme (and some dying experiments I spun up for it too!)

Still not enough! Bought finished yarn and dyed it (I spun enough in my opinion) (laso black yarn not pictured)

Used a weekend on the countryside to warp the loom

AFTER some tension issues I noticed I took the wrong heddle. So weaving on hold until I'm back home and could fix that.

After fixing that, I had fought the tension (I have 4 different yarns with different tensions each, don't ask me why I thought that won't be a problem)

The cat helped with the warping (not)

BUT! I managed. And finally I started weaving a few days ago

A bit scarred to see how many meters I'll have left after all that bullshit ( had to cut quite a bit of length)

For now I weave, and worry later 😌

Welcome to the "cursed tension bog fashion project"