Ali-Cat Fiberarts

Doubleweave Mug Rugs

Posted on December 17, 2017 by Alison

Last year I finally got a copy of Jennifer Moore’s *Doubleweave*, and have been working my way through parts of it. One of the things I made was a set of mug rugs (always convenient for trying out new techniques at small scale) in a windows draft. I had some blue yarn from an early batt blending experiment that I needed to find a use for, so I designed my project around that.

I’m a big fan of complementary color schemes. I planned five columns of windows, narrower at the sides and increasing towards the center. These columns would use a progression of yellow-orange and orange at the sides, with red-orange as the center column. This color order would be repeated in the weft.

I was very happy with how they turned out.

I ended up with quite a bit more of the oranges than I needed, but I ran out blue weft early. Rather than scrap additional foot of weaveable warp, I cut off the mug rugs and re-threaded for a straight 2/2 twill, planning to weave it off with the leftover oranges in plaid-like stripes.

I was pleasantly surprised by the resulting fabric. I had expected the color-and-weave effect of two complementaries to be muddier, the way they are in the plain weave stripes on the back of the mug rugs, but the twill lines reduced that effect considerably.

I ended up with just enough yardage to make a small tote bag.

Bag Yardage

Posted on July 11, 2017 by Alison

Now that I’ve got a handle on what to do with all this drum-carded wool that I’ve got, I’m working on handwoven yardage made from it. I’m thinking small project bags, tote bags, journal covers, etc.

I have started with an undulating twill that I’ve always wanted to try, and am very pleased with the results. I’m using a 10/2 commercial cotton warp in a very dark forest green with a handspun 2-ply weft using the drum carding technique I described earlier.I really like the way the variegated yarn that results works with this draft.

The pattern is a little less distinct after wet finishing, but it’s still beautiful, and an appropriate weight for the projects I have in mind.

Now that I have the yardage, I need to start working on patterns. I know there are a lot of patterns for bags and journal covers out there, but none of them are really what I’m looking for. Fortunately I have a good stash of fabric remnants in a variety of weights, so I have plenty of supplies for design and experimentation!

Handwoven Overshot Runner for Alice

Posted on January 21, 2017January 21, 2017 by Alison

A few months ago my friend Alice of Groundworks posted on Instagram about a cotton plant she had successfully grown in Brooklyn.

I offered to spin it, she accepted, and asked if I would be able to incorporate her cotton into a handwoven piece as a gift for her business partner. We agreed on a design for an overshot table runner (the draft is “Ferns and Flowers” from Bertha Gray Hayes,) and I got started.

I picked out the seeds and carded it on cotton cards…

and spun the cotton on my charka.

Here is the small skein of cotton that resulted

I used commercial cotton for the bulk of the project, and was able to buy navy in the weight I wanted, but was unable to find the particular green and red-violet that I wanted, so I dyed those two colors. The small skein of white handspun was used as inlay in a couple of the overshot motifs, and as a stripe at one end of the runner.

Loom warped, and a few inches of sampling before the main project…

Finished!

Second Iteration, Part Two

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Alison

This is the second part of my second round of batt color management experiments. Last post I made better fiber choices, and got results closer to what I was expecting when making a striped batt, then dizzing the fiber from the drum carder. This is the result from using the same fiber and technique with a layered batt. I used the same wool in the same proportions as my striped batts, and dizzed a roving off of the drum carder, working back and forth and using the largest hole on my diz.

This time the fiber distribution was much more consistent, and I got all three colors going the whole length of the roving.

I found, though, that when I spun the singles I was still ending up with long segments of first one side color, then another, with the center color mostly blended. I realized that this was due to a combination of staple length (about 4″) and the tendency of fiber to draft first down one side of the roving/top, then across, then down the other side, especially when dealing with a fairly thick roving or top. I wanted to see if a thinner prep would decrease this effect, so I made another identical batt, but this time I dizzed off through the smallest hole on the diz, resulting in a longer, thinner roving.

This actually made the single-color segments longer

Lesson learned – making a thinner prep does not result in more even color distribution!

Color management in batts, second iteration

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Alison

In recent years a technique that is starting to be seen more frequently is removing fiber from a drum carder as a roving, rather than as a batt, by pulling the fiber off through a diz. This can be done going back and forth across the width of the carder, or around the circumference. I wanted to see what kind of yarn you got from two of the more common color configurations in smooth batts – layers and stripes.

My first experiment with color management in batts didn’t go well, mostly due to poor fiber choices. I had used equal amounts of fiber by weight, but the middle fiber was bamboo rayon, which was very slippery, and tended to clump together. This is my second attempt, using all the same fiber.

This time I chose turquoise, mustard yellow, and magenta. Because yellow is a high value color, you need more of it in a yarn for it to appear to be there in equal amounts. For my first attempt at a striped batt with these colors I used roughly double the amount of yellow as of turquoise and magenta, with the yellow being the center stripe. My goal was a yarn that had distinct segments of each color, with minimal blending.

My current drum carder is pretty small, so I try not to go much over 35g of fiber on it, usually sticking to 25g for mathematical convenience. I did the same here using 8g each of turquoise and magenta, and 14g of yellow. I split the batt in half, and fed each half back through on its side to make a striped batt. The process went much more smoothly this time, but I found that by only splitting the bat in half I was getting much more color blending at the center than I wanted.

As I dizzed the wool off the carder, I found that the narrowing of the center stripe caused by the aforementioned blending made it difficult to get sections of roving that were mostly yellow. By the time I had stopped picking up blue fibers from one side I had started picking up pink fibers from the other side. I also noticed something that I should have remembered from dyeing combed top – namely that when going back and forth across colors, the color repeats at either end will be twice as long as the color repeats in the center, from changing direction and repeating the same color twice. This needs to be taken into account if you want the colors to be roughly balanced.

I made a second batt, this time with a total of 40g of wool, 10 each of the turquoise and magenta, 20 of yellow. I also split the bat into fourths, rather than in half, when feeding through sideways to make the stripes. This time I had much less blending, and the center section was about twice as wide as the sides.

I still had a fair amount of blending as I dizzed off, but I suspect this effect is strongly related to staple length. With a shorter stapled fiber I would have probably been able to get much longer sections of “clean” yellow.

As you can see, comparing the two singles, the second of these two batts did have much longer segments of color with less blending than the first, and both of them are much better than the attempt with the bamboo!

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More Battiness

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Alison

Going on to part two of my Batt Experiments. In my last post I discussed the technique of making a layered batt, then tearing it into strips and putting the strips back through the drum carder on edge to make a striped batt. I then removed the batt as a roving by pulling it through a diz, going back and forth across the width of the carder. I showed the resulting roving, and the resulting singles on the bobbin, and talked about how they didn’t turn out the way I’d expected due to some unwise fiber choices.

This is part two, where I kept the batt in layers, tried to maintain a little more control over the bamboo by applying it directly to the drum rather than going through the feed tray, and again removing the batt as a roving by pulling it off through a diz, going back and forth across the width of the carder.

As with the striped batt, the roving came off looking more-or-less the way I’d expected it to. When you diz off a striped batt, you should get all the colors in all the layers distributed fairly evenly along the roving. Theoretically, this should give you a single that also has all the colors in all the layers distributed evenly along the length of the single.

Again, as with the striped batt, the bamboo bit me in the posterior. The slipperiness and tendency to clump together made the bamboo draft in long sections. This time I ended up with a single that had blue and magenta segments interspersed with mostly white bamboo segments.

The final results of this round: Even though the dizzed rovings from each batt looked the way I expected them to, the fiber choice impacted the way the rovings drafted to the extent that the appearance of the singles was almost opposite of what I had expected.

Lesson learned: When trying to apply anything like a scientific method, do a better job of controlling the variables!

Battiness

Posted on September 29, 2016September 30, 2016 by Alison

When I first learned to spin nearly 20 years ago, “painted roving” was the New and Exciting thing. The barrier to entry for indie dyers is pretty low – combed top and acid dyes are easy to get, it can be done in a small space, and there are numerous books, magazine articles, and tutorials about the various ways it can be done. These days braids of painted top are one the most prevalent forms of ready-to-spin fiber preps.

Enter the blending board! Here was a tool that was much less expensive than a drum carder, and didn’t have the learning curve of hand cards. People realized that they could use this tool to plan placement of color and texture in a carded prep. Batts and rolags were no longer expected to be a mostly-homogeneous blend, nor were they limited to stripes. The intersection of these ideas with the rising popularity of Art Yarn has made artfully blended batts A Thing with spinners buying RTS preps.

In an effort to be at least somewhat on-trend, as well as to take advantage of recent fleece acquisitions, I’m trying to get out of my comfort zone and figure out the New Batt. Homogeneous blends I can do -have been doing for years. Ombrés? Not so much. I have little interest in themed Art Batts – they’re fascinating and beautiful, but I admit the idea of trying to spin them makes my skin crawl. For all that I admire a well-executed Art Yarn, I’m a smooth-or-minimally-textured-yarn gal. Different ways of blending colors and fibers, however, I can do. I am on a quest for different structures and fiber blends, spinning them up, and seeing what happens.

I’ve discovered that it’s harder than you’d think to find 201 or 301-level information on this subject. Everything I’ve found has been for beginners. I’m looking for recipes, not “how to cook.” In desperation I bought Esther Rodgers’ Craftsy class on Fiber Processing, hoping she would go into the details I was looking for, and I found some of what I wanted – I just wish I hadn’t had to pay for a class that was 95% stuff I already knew so that I could get to the 5% I didn’t. There were also subjects I wish she’d discussed that she didn’t, but I’ll get into that another time.

I’m currently exploring striped and layered batts, dizzing the batts back and forth off the drum into a roving, and seeing what the resulting yarn looks like. One of the ways to get a striped batt is to make a layered bat, split it, then run the sections back through the drum carder sideways. I first tried this with the Cheviot X fleeces I’ve been washing, but I didn’t think to take photos, and the colors were too dark to really show the results well online. I decided to repeat the experiment with more contrast.

Here is my layered batt, using equal amounts of magenta and blue Merino top, and white bamboo rayon. This fiber combination turned out to be a bad choice for this experiment, as you will see later. Among other things, I determined that yes, bamboo is one of those types of fiber that is best applied directly to the drum rather than via the licker-in and the feeder tray. It’s so slick that the main drum doesn’t want to pick it up, it all gets stuck around the licker-in, and you have to then persuade it to go where you want.

Here you can see the batt section turned on its side, the three colors forming stripes. You can also see how the slipperiness of the bamboo is causing a great deal of separation in that middle layer, and will end up being a bit of a PITA as I try to keep the stripes discernable.

The resulting striped batt on the carder, with significant blending between the colors, mostly due to the slipperiness of the bamboo.

When a striped batt is dizzed off the drum carder, you’re supposed to end up with a roving that transitions through the colors in the stripes one at a time, with some blending between. That’s mostly what I got – you can see large areas of mostly-magenta, mostly-blue, and mostly-white. Again, the slipperiness and density of the bamboo caused it to blend more with the other colors, so that there are nice puffy Merino stripes, but the bamboo sections still have a significant amount of the other two colors visible.

This is what the singles look like on the bobbin. The sections of blue and magenta are very distinct, but the white of the bamboo has almost thoroughly blended into them, leaving nothing that is mostly white.

Next time I’ll post my experiment with this same fiber combination making a layered batt, and show how that turned out.

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The Light at the End of the Tunnel!

Posted on September 24, 2016September 26, 2016 by Alison

I’m down to the last two raw fleeces! I may actually be done with this huge undertaking by the end of October!

Last year my lovely Sister in Law, who is a rural route letter carrier, started bringing me raw fleece from several of the small farms along her route. These are not fiber flocks, and are mostly used for pasture management and organic lamb. They are all crosses, with the largest number being Cheviot crosses. I can’t say for sure what they are crossed with, and the fleece characteristics vary widely, from next-to-skin soft to Pillow Stuffing. I ended up with maybe 20 fleeces that I have had to wash in very small batches because we only have one bathroom, and my husband strongly objects to the smell.

I’ve been making giant bags from unused flat sheets to store the washed fleece in, and I periodically stuff a giant vacuum bag full so I can store it away. I eagerly anticipate being able to navigate my studio without needing a string to find my way out!

My “Slow Fashion” Project – Part 2

Posted on September 21, 2016September 21, 2016 by Alison

I had the weft yarn for my Slow Cloth yardage project all sorted out, now I needed warp. I was not in the mood to dye and blend another pound of fleece, so I left it natural. My strategy was simple: I’d card and spin about 12 oz of singles, measure the yardage, and see how long a warp I could make with it. I was hoping for at least 6-7 yards, at about 20″ wide. I just wanted plain yardage, so no fancy patterns. I went with a basic broken twill and used this draft from Handweaving.net, only without the warp stripes.

It all started off well enough. I sized and blocked my singles, and wound them onto cardboard storage spools when they were dry in preparation for warping. I used the Ashenhurst Rule for determining sett, as I did not feel like measuring WPI on 4800 YPP singles. I had a starting sett of 27 EPI, and I would warp Back to Front for a change. For some reason I ended up with a five yard warp, where I had hoped for at least seven. I chalked it up to lack of experience, and start winding my warp. After I finished winding the whole warp I discovered 4 more skeins of spun warp yarn that had fallen behind the loom before I did my warp calculations. Now I understood why my warp ended up so short – I was missing about 1400 yards 😦

I had two choices. I could carefully unwind everything back onto spools, recalculate the length with the additional skeins, and start all over again, or I could keep the warp at its current length, and just make it a little wider than I’d planned. It had taken me four days to wind this warp. I went with option B.

I figured there was no need to actually count anything while I was winding the extra warp. After all, I was threading in a straight draw and didn’t have any complicated threading sequences to keep track of.

I’m sure you can see where this is heading.

I took the warp chains to the loom and started spreading them in the raddle. It did not take long to see that I had 38″ of warp on a 26″ loom. This was not going to work. I tried changing my sett to 32, but even that wasn’t enough. In the end I left it at 32 EPI and pulled out the extra ends, setting the unused warp chains aside. Oh, and somewhere in all the rearranging of warp in the raddle I lost my cross.

I finally got it all beamed and threaded, but it was not a nice, neat, orderly warp. It wasn’t really tangled, but there were a lot of places where sectionsof warp were crossing over each other. This, combined with the new closer sett, made the warp Very Sticky. A warp of close-sett, semi-woolen-spun wool singles is sticky. Who’d’a thunk it (please apply sarcasm font.) Every time I changed sheds I had to manually clear the warp and make sure none of the threads were sticking together. Every. Single. Shed. It’s impossible to develop any speed or rhythm when working like this

I did eventually finish. It took me three months. I’m reasonably happy with the fabric, even though it’s more warp faced than I’d pictured. The warp stripe draft gives it a very subtly ribbed texture at this sett, as seen in the photo at the top of this post.

So what happened to the rest of that warp yarn, you ask? When I was done with this piece of yardage I cut it off, and tied the remaining warp onto the center section. I re-sleyed at my originally intended 27 EPI, giving me the more balanced twill I’d been hoping for. I got another four yards of fabric, at just under 8″ wide. This one was much faster to weave off, as the warp was beamed more evenly, and the wider sett meant no more manual clearing of sheds.

It will make nice facings, and maybe a small bag or two.

My “Slow Fashion” Project – Part 1

Posted on September 7, 2016September 17, 2016 by Alison

A couple of years ago I set a personal challenge to make at least one complete outfit entirely from fabric that I had spun, woven, and sewn myself. This is where that project starts.

When I was a relatively new spinner I made a common newbie mistake, and treated a raw fleece I was washing a little too impatiently. It wasn’t a total disaster, but there was a little felting on the cut ends.

I did what I usually do when I want a “solid”color, which is to dye the fleece in a selection of my base colors, then blend them on the drum carder. Unfortunately I also chose this fiber-blending project to try using a swing picker for the first time. It was not, on the whole, what I had expected. The picker only exacerbated the problem, tearing the fiber where the ends had felted together. I had also not done a good enough job removing the second cuts from the fleece. The result was a fairly neppy batt. I was not about to let that stop me. I found I liked the tweedy pops of color that the neps made, so I decided to think of it as a “design element” and called it good.

I let those batts sit for a number of years as Life happened. When I decided to start this project I realized these neppy, tweedy batts would be perfect for plain twill yardage. I spun a bit over 11 oz of wool into a bit over 3000 yards of singles at roughly 4500 yards per pound – about the size of heavy-duty sewing thread.