I thought I should get around to sharing some pics of things that people have made with my yarn. I first got in to spinning because I wanted to make yarn for myself to knit with. But selling the occasional skein on Etsy means that I get to see my yarn in other people’s creations, which is a true pleasure. Anyone who has tried spinning will know the effort and care that goes into a single skein of yarn. I always feel attached to every thing that I make, and it’s exciting to see what people make with my little yarn babies once they have flown the proverbial nest! Looking through some of the things that others have made has turned into a nice little retrospective of some of my favourite spins over the last year and a half.
To start, let’s go back to ages ago with this skein, and this awesome hat:
Undyed Falkland wool with sections of merino fleece
This skein was my first time spinning Falkland wool. I stumbled across it by accident while trying to be restrained in the pick and mix section of the World of Wool warehouse in Huddersfield. It’s an incredibly soft and silky wool with an almost pearly sheen. It’s also a good alternative to other imported merino, as it’s always non-mulesed and on the Falklands the sheep are farmed sustainably in terms of land usage and pesticide levels.
And above is the skein, come to life and on the head of the beautiful Sylvie from Phileas Yarns . It’s a lovely use of handspun texture and the yarn knitted up exactly the way I’d hoped it would.
Jumping ahead in time, this past summer, I vended at the Indie Burgh Yarn Crawl pop-up market in Edinburgh, where I sold tons of handspun and met lots of lovely yarn people, including Helen who was a tourist from Arizona. She bought this:
A month after the IBYC, Helen found me on Facebook and sent me this picture:
It’s combined with Ginger’s Hand-Dyed from the Ginger Twist Studio. I couldn’t find Helen on Ravelry or Instagram, and don’t want to credit her using her personal Facebook, so Helen, if you’re out there and see this, feel free to claim credit for your lovely work!
And speaking of Helens, there is this hat:
This Helen from my old knitting group in Yorkshire is prolific in churning out beautiful knitting projects. This hat was made from this skein:
This yarn was an all-time favourite of mine. It was a spun-from-the-fold single from Clive’s merino fleece. I think it’s important to know where our fibre comes from, and skeins like this remind me of this. Spinning from the fold incorporates all the little slubs and felty bits that are natural to an outdoor animal’s life. Looking back through my photos, I found some pictures of this skein being spun.
Such lovely slubby-ness
I spun a similar skein for myself and knit it into a shawl, which I’ve talked about it in a previous post.
I like to think that Clive, the happy, chubby sheep that I first met in a paddock in Australia is not contributing to hand-made hats and scarves in the UK and USA. It makes the specialness of a hand-made item seem just a bit more personal.
Having waxed poetic about this sheep, I realise that I have absolutely no photos of him. So I’ll close this post with this photo:
This is a really big kangaroo who sometimes hangs out in the same paddock. I have a million photos of him
It’s about time I continued my posts about knitting with handspun yarn, especially now that my lovely Etsy shop (check it out here) is up and running and people are actually buying my yarn to knit with. In my first post about knitting with handspun (Knitting with Handspun Part 1: Beginnings and Pullovers) I covered some of my earlier handspun knitting adventures. This time I’m going to focus specifically on some shawls that I’ve made with my yarn and what I’ve learned along the way.
First of all, I have to confess that I am predominantly a sweater knitter. It would seem that knitters fall into categories of what they like to knit the best: sock knitter, mitten knitter, shawl knitter, sweater knitter. I’m definitely the latter. I love knitting sweaters and do that the most. Accessories are usually in-between projects to me, to break up the time that goes into knitting a complete sweater.
I may be a bit mad, but in 2015 I knit 12 sweaters. Numbers 6 and 12 are handspun ones that I posted about previously.
Having said that, I have loved pretty much every sock, mitten, slipper, hat and shawl project that I’ve done. Also, shawls are a lovely way to show off beautiful yarns without using large quantities. A lovely handspun skein combined with other nice yarns makes a beautiful shawl. You don’t need to worry about fit, and there are so many patterns out there for lovely striped and geometric patterns that highlight a beautiful yarn and great colour combinations.
Above is the beginning shot of my most recently completed shawl; a cozy beast that I wear on almost a daily basis. I knit it using some lovely handdyed yarn that I purchased as a treat from my friend’s shop Phileas Yarns. The grey yarn is handspun that I made specifically for this project. It’s un-dyed grey Massam, spun as a single to match the gauge of the green yarn. Here it is below in its in-progress state, showing off its lovely halo and long-wool texture.
This project was great because the exact gauge of the handspun sections didn’t really matter. They were worked as short row ‘clouds’ and so the slight variation in handspun texture didn’t affect the shape of the shawl.
The finished result:
Knit from the pattern Northern Sky by Christelle Nihoul
This felt like a real success, particularly in comparison with my first handspun shawl:
Behold the Transcontinental Alpaca and Three Sheep Shawl: A product of wool geekery, in which I got a thrill out of knitting with three breeds of sheep and alpaca from two continents. This was a completely handspun project and I was very excited about it. The end result was a bit crazy looking, but I was totally in love with it. I knit it from the following yarns:
Clockwise from top left: Australian alpaca blended with Canadian alpaca, dyed and undyed; thread plied, undyed merino cross; handpainted ryeland; handpainted BFL
I’ve mentioned this shawl before in a very early post about ryeland fleece ( A Weekend With The Oldest Sheep in England) Basically, the ryeland has a springy cobwebby texture, which evidently stretched during knitting and gradually retracted over the course of a few weeks, meaning that the shawl started to shrink and warp. I eventually pulled it out and learned this very important lesson, which is now my second knitting with handspun tip:
You can’t always mix fibres and yarns as if they are identical
Different yarns behave differently. Different fibres certainly behave differently. And there are a lot of different factors involved in why. In this case I took a super squishy alpaca, combined it with the springy retractable ryeland, and then added in a soft, but hardwearing BFL which had been tightly plied. The result was that while the alpaca bloomed and fluffed during blocking, the ryeland shrank, and the BFL just hung there draping beautifully, but not moving at all. The result: a warped shawl.
The solution is to gauge swatch, take little samples and block them, and be careful with how you combine very different handspun yarns in a project. The green shawl above was successful because the handspun sections could behave however they liked and it didn’t throw off the rest of the shawl. My multi-fibre handspun shawl was a triangle shawl with centre increases so that every row depended on each other and each half of the shawl was integral to the other.
I had to think about this just yesterday when I finished up with the above skein of yarn and listed it in my shop. This is a self-striping yarn that changes back and forth between hand-dyed merino and undyed, natural cream Massam. It has a lovely combination of textures. However, knitting with it will require a good gauge swatch because of the striping between the two fibres. The merino is soft and squishy and is far more compact-able than the massam. This means that the gauge that it’s knit in will have to work for both fibres and both of them need to be swatched for. While the merino can squash down to a fluffy and tight gauge, the same tight gauge on the Massam will not drape as nicely because it won’t squish down the same way. A looser gauge that works for both and allows them to both move and drape nicely will be required.
Now on to my last handspun knitting tip:
Above is an almost-complete shawl, which I’ve since decided to modify and have pulled back. I knit it from an all-time favourite handspun single which I spun from the fold with the fleece from Clive the pet sheep. This yarn was one of my first times hand-painting. I loved it so much and purchased as special skein of naturally hand-dyed camel/alpaca/merino blend to combine with it.
Handspun single from Clive, hand-painted after spinning.
I used the pattern Byatt by Karie Westermann which calls for a specific brand of yarn, 100g of each colour. I had 100g of the handspun skein and 50 g of the other one, so I thought at some point I’d spin or dye up another 50 g of contrast colour and finish it off that way. However, what I didn’t take in to account is that, unlike with most commercial yarns, you can’t really estimate how much you have by weight. I usually think to myself that 100g of fingering weight is enough for a pair of socks, 450-550g for an aran weight sweater, 300-400g for a fingering weight sweater, 200 g of anything for a shawl, etc. However with this shawl, I ran out of the handspun really really quickly, which is too bad, because it knit up really nicely.
Lovely “from the fold” texture, great colour variegation, and all in all a nice way of showcasing a raw fleece yarn. However, because I ran out so quickly, I had to completely readjust the pattern and then ended up running out of my contract colour too quickly as well, which threw everything off. My solution was to dye up another contract colour and swap it in to the pattern with my other contrast colour as soon as I ran out of handspun. The result is nice, but it’s pretty disheartening to pull back so much work. I could have avoided this if I’d actually paid attention to the yardages I had and the yardages that I needed, and had planned from the beginning.
So the last tip is:
Judge the amount you need by yardage and not by weight
This especially applies to yarn that’s been spun from the fold from raw fleece. The natural kinks and slubs that make yarn handspun from fleece so lovely can also make it heavier, meaning that you have less yardage for every 100 grams. Yarn like this has little pops of felt that give a beautiful organic texture and speak to the origin of the yarn. Fleece felts on the sheep as it rubs against things, stands in the rain, sleeps in the field, and basically lives its life outdoors. Including these felted fleece bits in the yarn feel, to me, like including a bit of the sheep’s story into the work. But you can’t underestimate how dense and heavy they can be. Commerically combed and spun yarns and some hand-carded handspun yarns can have a lot of yardage for less weight because they have a lot more air in them. Spun-from the fold yarns may have a lot more story in them, but they are much denser.
I will continue to knit with my own handspun, so more handspun knitting posts will follow in the future!
I haven’t really mentioned knitting here before, but those who know me well will know that I knit constantly. One of the great pleasures of spinning is being able to knit the things that I spin, although I don’t do it as often as I should. Below are a few of my knitting-with-handspun experiences and some good tips that I’ve learned along the way!
Above are my first knit-able handspun attempts. I did them from raw fleece from Clive the pet merino-cross that I washed, dyed, and hand carded. They’re very unevenly spun, and have some big felted chunks in them, from where I struggled to card with any kind of proficiency. Very beginner attempts, really, but they were very special because they marked the beginning of my love of spinning. I knit them into a string of bunting for my niece and crocheted her name onto them. Because of the unevenness of the yarn, it was a bit of a challenge, but I also found that this kind of project is a lovely way to enjoy the crazy texture of a yarn like this. The felted slubs that I had spun into the skeins because of my lack of skill ended up being lovely texture.
Next attempt was more ambitious. I had spun up the following two skeins: Red handdyed merino cross plied with Australian Alpaca, and yellow and red handdyed 2-ply merino cross. All merino cross was process from the raw fleece of Clive the pet sheep.
Both these skeins were carding and plying accomplishments for me, and so I decided to knit them into the yoke of a jumper. Which turned out like this:
I should mention that my original bind-off method for the neckline rib was too tight and pulled the jumper up at the front. Since this photo was taken, I’ve gone back and changed this and it’s much better!
I love this jumper to pieces. But I had a bit of a problem…
When I started out I figured out an average wraps per inch for the handspun, and deemed it to be a worsted weight. So I chose some nice worsted weight commercial yarn and knit the whole thing as if the different yarns were the same. But of course the handspun wasn’t. And as a result I have bagging along the raglan line above the armpits, and over the tops of the sleeves. It’s pretty clear in the above photo. Every so often, when I wear this and look in the mirror, the bagging of the handspun drives me nuts and I wish I’d been more sensible and swatched it first.
This brings me to my first tip…..
Gauge swatch and do the math! Do it!
Nobody likes doing it, but swatching is so important!! I learned this the hard, time-wasting way.
Especially do this if your handspun is textured. You may need to adjust needle sizes, or adjust your stitch count when switching back and forth between yarns. Remember that going down a needle size might make the knit handspun too dense and it won’t drape the same way as the rest of the garment. Or maybe you need to go up needle sizes and decrease stitches so that the knitting is looser for a proper drape.
I employed this with success in my most recently finished project.
Self-designed pullover, knit top-down and seamlessly, using handspun for stripes
This pullover incorporated a beautiful skein of my friend Sylvie’s handdyed yarn (check out her Etsy shop: Phileas Yarns ) with this handspun and handpainted BFL:
Grey BFL 2-ply,with slubs of merino felt, and handpainted
While the handspun was approximately an aran weight, like the other yarns, it knit up to be 4 stitches/inch while the other yarns were 5 stitches/inch. Actually a pretty big gauge difference when multiplied over the circumference of a jumper. On first go I went down a needle size for the handspun, but it wasn’t precise enough and I had funny baggy bits and the knitting was too dense compared to the nice drape of the rest of the yarn. So I pulled back the yoke and did it again. This time I decreased one every five stitches when switching to the handspun, and increased one every four when switching back. The result is perfect! And the changes in stitch count are not too noticeable.
How I love this sweater!
Wearing something that you’ve spun yourself is one of the greatest joys of knittting!
Next post, I’ll continue and talk about shawl knitting and mixing sheep breeds when knitting with handspun. Stay tuned!!!!
I’ve recently completed a couple of yarns inspired by familiar and favourite landscapes and am thinking of making a whole series specifically dedicated to the landscapes in my life. I used to be really fascinated with landscapes when I was in art school (a very long time ago!) and I’ve been remembering this a lot lately, as I’ve also been doing a great deal of driving along the edges of the stunning Scottish Borders and Northern Pennine regions in the UK. Both are open and vast with beautiful variations in natural colours.
The northern Scottish Border region, near the town of Biggar, taken by me on a very windy hike.
Here are my landscape yarns so far, based on two other favourite landscapes:
This one was inspired by early summer on the North York Moors in Yorkshire, when the heather is starting to bloom, but the moors are still very barren and red. It’s a beautiful expanse of empty and dramatic land with distant sea views. When I first moved to the UK, I remember driving through this region with a friend, and stopping by the road side to stand quietly together and look at the view.
Heather blooming on The North York Moors National Park, photo credit http://www.walkingenglishman.com (also a fab website for finding walks all over these beautiful places!)
This is a single that I spun from hand painted locks of merino cross fleece from Clive the pet sheep. It’s mostly sock weight, but was spun directly from the locks, so it’s textured and a bit thick and thin in places.
This was my first time painting locks, as I usually kettle dye them, or paint the yarn after its spun. It was very successful though, and there was much less blending of colours than I thought, so the yarn maintains the dyed variegation of the fleece, and some of the natural white comes through.
My other landscape yarn was spun from handpainted merino top. I like how dense merino top is, and how when you paint it gently, the colours maintain a brightness from the white fleece in the middle that the dye doesn’t reach. I dyed this to be turned into a self striping yarn. It was based on the landscape of my childhood: a basic combination of lake and trees and sky, translucent blues and variations of greens.
An old photo, taken many years ago at my favourite lake
I used three shades of green and one shade of blue on the top. I had hoped for a bit more variation in the blue, but I’m pleased with the translucency of the colour.
I spun it up as a thick single and then chain plied it to maintain the striping.
As a singleAs a 3-ply
The result is bulky and squishy. The idea was to make the yarn as comforting and cozy as my memories of the place.
Stay tuned for more landscape yarns. I’m sure I’ll be spinning up more soon 🙂
So now you’re ready to get the fleece into the tub. I like to use plastic baskets that you can get from the pound shop or dollar store. You don’t need the lids. If you want to spend more you could also use the sifting trays that insert into cat litter trays. I can wash 300-400g of fleece at a time in three baskets in my bathtub. As I mentioned before, how much I wash is determined by how much drying space I have. I set aside a couple of hours to soak the fleece. I do a minimum of three soaks at about 30minutes each.
Run the tub full of hot water (not scorching or boiling). Place the fleece in your baskets, and when the tub is full and the water is off, submerge the baskets in the water. The fleece will start to float, so gently, gently place your hands on the fleece and submerge the locks. Don’t agitate them, squash them down to hard, swoosh the baskets around, etc. If you aren’t using baskets, you can just put the fleece straight into the tub, but it will be harder later on to remove them without agitating them.
Don’t be alarmed by the amount of oil that comes off the fleece right away. The water will turn orange pretty quickly. This is just the lanolin separating from the locks.
To the left is a picture of yarn spun ‘in the grease’ from unwashed merino, soaking in the sink with a bit of soap. This photo is a bit unsavoury, but you can see how dark and orange-y the water is.
Leave the fleece to soak in the water for about 30 minutes. Don’t let the water get cold, or else the oil will congeal back onto the fleece. When the time is up, lift the baskets out and drain them well. Don’t squeeze the fleece! Drain the tub, give it a rinse, and fill it again with hot water and dish soap. Put the baskets of fleece back in and let them soak in the soapy water for another 30 minutes.
Ryeland fleece in the tub
After the soap soak is over, drain the baskets as before, drain and rinse the tub and fill it again with clean water for a final soak. If the soapy water is still yellow, or the fleece still looks dirty, then you can do another soak with soap.
After the final soak, drain the baskets and gently pick up the fleece to let all the water drip off. Lay the locks on a towel, lay another towel on top, and gently press out extra water. You can skip this towel step if you like, but your fleece will take a lot longer to dry.
And now you should have a lovely big batch of clean, fluffy fleece!
Air dry the fleece in whatever way is convenient. If it’s a sunny day I put it outside. I also like to lay a piece of muslin cloth or netting overtop of my drying rack before I put the fleece on it. When it’s dry, you can trim off any dirty bits that remain, although most of these will dust away when you start handling the fleece. Don’t card, comb, or spin your fleece until it’s dry!
Finally, don’t forget to give your tub a wash. Whomever you live with will thank you for it. It will be a bit gritty and sludgy after everything is finished and those who aren’t radically enthusiastic about fleece will find this a bit off-putting when they go to take a shower the next morning.
Happy washing and stay tuned for future posts about carding, combing and spinning from the fold.
This is what a bag full of raw merino cross looks like. Lovely creamy colour….
But quite dirty in places
The first thing I do is trim off all the caked and dirty ends. If your fleece supplier has already done this for you, then you’re a step ahead, although do have a look through the locks to take out anything they may have missed.
When I started washing fleece I was hesitant to trim off too much because I didn’t want anything to go to waste. However, it meant that I was just dealing with the dirty tips later down the line, and in some cases inadvertently felted the fleece by trying to pick off the dirt when it was soaking. Going through lock by lock also means that I can pick out any large pieces of vegetation which will inevitably be tangled in the fleece. Sometimes I come across beautiful little surprises like this dried up flower bud.
Through the whole process you’ll do yourself a favour if you keep your locks of fleece laying in the same direction as neatly as possible. Trimming is the most labour-intensive part of preparing your fleece,but take the time to keep your fleece organised and it will be easier to dry and spin later on.
It may feel like you’re trimming off a lot, but what is discarded is actually in fairly small ratio to what goes into the tub. Here is a picture of fleece ready to wash ( about 300 grams raw) with everything that was trimmed off, to show the proportion of waste.
Now the fleece is ready for the tub! A word of warning before closing this post….
Cats really like raw fleece. They like to lick it, roll in it, kneed it, smell it obsessively, etc. It must be the sheep-y smell (I don’t think I mentioned that raw fleece smells VERY sheep-y and lanolin-y. I love it, but check with whomever you share a house with before you start filling your spare rooms with bags of it like I’ve done). My cats go crazy for the fleece, almost like it’s catnip. Keep your stack of neatly trimmed locks away from the kitties, and make sure they can’t leap into your storage bags!
Processing raw fleece is time consuming, but not labour intensive. At the bare minimum all you need is a bathtub or sink, some dish soap, somewhere to dry the fleece, and a few hours at home to mind the fleece as it soaks. Other materials that will help: two or three plastic baskets (I bought mine from the pound shop); a towel that you don’t mind getting dirty and a bit wooly; mesh cloth, muslin, or netting to lay over your drying rack
I did a lot of online research about the best way to wash fleece when I got started. Some ways worked better than others, and in the end I found a method that worked best for me and the fleece that I was using. The only thing that you must not do is agitate the fleece, as it will felt, and probably quicker thank you think.
So this is a step by step of how I turned raw merino cross fleece in to fluffy, spin-able, super soft wool.
Before and after: raw, greasy locks straight from the sheep, and washed, hand-combed top from the same batch of fleece
This is my favourite way of working and is also how I learned to spin. Working from a raw fleece allows you to be involved in every step of the process and to see the transformation of wool from fleece locks, directly off the sheep, to yarn that’s ready to knit or weave. My first handspun knitting project was particularly special because I was able to knit, and now frequently wear, the wool from a sheep that I had actually met (and cuddled). I feel that it’s important to know where our products come from and to be able to appreciate their natural properties.
My first handspun knitting project: The yoke uses my first two successful skeins of hand-dyed handspun merino cross from a pet sheep named Clive.
The downside is that it’s time consuming and much more difficult to produce a yarn with a consistent gauge. Raw fleece will contain dirt, pills of felt and vegetation, and sometimes the fibres will be too tangled to spin smoothly. As a hand spinner using raw fleece, I sometimes like to spin textured yarns that incorporate the felted and tangled bundles that you find in the locks of a fleece. But sometimes it’s nice to spin smooth, knit-able, and more hard-wearing yarn. That’s why I do like to buy commercially combed tops to spin more consistent yarn, to try out different types of fleece, and to save some time and effort.
Three skeins spun from raw fleece. They’re fluffy and more textured than commercially combed fleece would yield. The skein on the far right has big granny stacks of partially felted fleece locks.A single of hand-painted yarn, spun from hand-combed merino cross fleece.
I usually get my fleeces from Ebay, where farmers will often sell partial fleeces, weighing around only 1 kg (better for storage). These are unwashed, but often the worst of the dung and mud will have been trimmed off. You can also find fleece sellers on Ravelry. I almost bought an entire Border Leicester fleece for only £30 from a Raveller this past spring. Sometimes sourcing fleece like this also allows you to experiment with breeds of sheep that you can’t get as combed top. I’ve been working my way through an interesting coloured ryeland fleece, which is primarily a meat breed but has a multi-tonal wool with an interesting cobwebby texture that resists felting.
Always store your fleece in something breathable, like old cotton pillowcases, or paper bags (I made extra big ones out of a role of brown newsprint paper). Raw fleece is very oily, and if left sealed in plastic, it will sweat and the oils will eventually go rancid and rot the wool.
Coloured ryeland on the spinning wheel. This is the oldest breed of sheep in the UK!
Next up… posts about the whole process of raw fleece to spinning wheel!
The Spun Plum 