A good day has…

…fresh chicken in the freezer
…shortbread cookies in the oven
…Buckingham Palace Garden Party tea
…and my daughter reading fairytales aloud

If I didn’t have cheap-ass rechargeable batteries….

…you’d be looking at my own picture of my new toy, instead of this one. As soon as I get my batteries recharged, I’ll plug in my own picture. This one is from the shop website.

I got my first bottom whorl spindle, in a spindle kit from Maine Woods Yarn and Fiber — I love Etsy! Tons of great hand crafted stuff, including plenty of fiber artists, and my blog buddy Sarah’s shop — her bags are divine.

I really wish I knew what kind of wool the white top is — it’s lovely, and sheepy scented, fairly long staple length, and smooth smooth smooth. Partially it’s the combed top preparation – but the wool is not like anything else I’ve spun — it seems almost like Lincoln, if Lincoln were really soft. I hope I can figure it out!

Today we kill chickens.

Yeah!

Done and done.

I finished spinning my Cormo – here’s the final tally.

1 lb. raw Cormo fleece yielded 10 ounces of 4ply cabled yarn, approx 400 yards total. It is a heavy worsted weight, about 8WPI, and will eventually be a hat and mitten set for me. The six ounces lost is partly due to washing – this was a a very lanolin rich fleece – and partly due to sampling and leftover bits. I probably have about 10 or 20 yards of singles, 2plies, and sample skein hanging about.

And here it is:

3 large skeins, and one little one, which is ten yards, and not included in my yardage above.

I also sat down and did a little organizing work on my spinning stuff. I took a fiber sampling class a while back, and came away with a box full of top and roving samples from about 20 different fibers. With my usual laissez faire attitude, I stuck it on a shelf and ignored it, until yesterday.

Yesterday I pulled the box down, laid out all the samples, pulled out the singles sampler I had spun during the class and my little note card, and labeled everything. Now I know what I have, and can refer back to it when ever I want to know what someone else is talking about.  Gods willing, I might even refer to my samples for oh, say, designing spinning projects.

I’ve got a nice range of fiber – bombyx and tussah silks, several rayons including milk fiber, and a wide range of wools from Optim stretch merino to Lincoln (which is startlingly like dolls hair). I’ve also got some yak in there, and a bit of possum/merino. Fun stuff.

Check it out!

I got a new toy from my father in law.    Now I can make myself some proper sawhorses,  and once I have proper sawhorses I can make a proper workbench.

And once I have a proper workbench I can make anything!   Mwaahhhaaahhaaa!

News of the day.

I have finished carding and spinning all the Cormo.  The last two bobbins of singles are waiting to be plied,  and once they are plied I can spin the final yarn, and then the Cormo will be done.

I have made a Navajo spindle for the Navajo spindle class I will be taking in October.  It cost about ten dollars to make,  including buying a seven dollar drill bit.

I am knitting a round pink and white dishcloth – it is the first new knitting I have done this year.  Everything else has been stuff that was on the needles in January.

I have decided to comb as much of the sweater fleece as I can, and card the rest.  That will give me two yarns, and between them I should have plenty to make my sweater.

I am trying to decide how to process the Jacob I have.   Probably I will card it, because it has a very short staple, and the black and white locks have different staple lengths.   I will blend some, and keep others black and white.

What I’ve been up too.

This little silence of the past few days has been due my being deeply occupied with making and playing with some new wool combs.  It’s the most involved woodworking project I’ve done in a while, and has been keeping me agreeably busy.

I decided I needed wool combs after processing the Cormo I’ve been working on –  my sweater fleece is a mixed breed longwool,  with a 4-5″ low crimp staple,  while my Cormo has a staple length of about 3″ and an extremely fine crimp.   The Cormo is pretty much ideal for carding, and having gotten a chance to work with it,  I realized how unsuitable for carding my longwool fleece is.

So,  I hunted around online and on Ravelry,  and found Loxoceles’ plan for making wool combs.    A trip to the hardware store later, I had everything I need to make a version of these basic wool combs.

An oak plank, some wood glue, some finishing nails and some epoxy.   I also indulged in a number of little wood working toys that I didn’t really need,  but wanted, like new sandpaper and some little clamps, etc.

Here is my plank clamped to the table and posing with my handsaw.  You can see the baseplate I just finished cutting next to the epoxy.

I had to figure out what size wood pieces I need, and the nail spacing for the tines. Once I had the wood cut, I matched the nail size with a drill bit, and went to work with the drill press, drilling out the comb heads so I could put the nails through them without splitting the wood. This took three attempts to make two comb heads, since I did split the first head.

Here are the nails ready to be put through after drilling, and the finished stationary comb clamped and drying. The nails are driven through the headpiece to make the tines of the comb, and secured with epoxy. I then chiseled a bed for it in the base plate, and woodglued it together.

I did the same thing for the moving comb, except that instead of a base plate, it got a handle. It’s really rough, since I just knocked it out with a chisel and rounded and sanded it a little to avoid splinters.
Here is the finished comb pair, stationary and moving.

Wool combs are pretty straightforward to use — I actually find them easier tp use then cards, because they seem to need less skill to make a good spinnable product. They do produce a lot more waste then the cards do, though. But the waste from combing is good for carding, so it’s not a complete loss.

The stationary comb is clamped to the table (I need better clamps – these ones get in the way and slow down the combing process):

Then the stationary comb is loaded with fiber, a process called lashing on.

When the stationary comb is loaded, you take the moving comb and hold it crosswise in front of the wool, and rake it across the tips of your locks in a horizontal motion. With every pass you move the comb deeper into the locks, pulling wool onto the moving comb as you work. Eventually you are sweeping the moving comb across the stationary comb touching or almost touching it (this is where my clamps got in the way – I couldn’t get so close), almost all of the wool is on the moving comb, and what is left on the stationary comb is short knotty waste.

This it what it looks like in the middle of a combing:

You then return the fiber to the stationary comb in a similiar process, but this time moving the comb in vertical strokes down past the stationary comb. Still holding the comb crosswise, and still starting at the tips of the fiber and working deeper until almost all the fiber is back on the stationary comb.

This process removes the shorter fibers from the wool by leaving them as waste on the almost empty comb — how much waste you decide to leave is up to you, so you can comb for only the longest fibers or for a more mixed blend. Combing also aligns the fibers fairly neatly, so that they will pull close together when spun, and make a single with a smoother more rounded surface but less air in it then carded fiber.

When you are finished combing a load of fiber, you then draw it off the comb in a long piece, much as if you were drafting to spin. I don’t have a diz yet, so I didn’t use one.

The prepared fiber is called top, or combed top (which seems redundant to me), and since my combs are small and make small amounts, I coil them up into little nests. This one is all ready to be spun from, and will make a fine tight worsted single.

Freshly made handcombed top is the most pleasurable thing to spin that I have ever laid my hands on. It it light and airy and flows like water through my fingers.

9/11 – On Today.

Do not expect poetry here, cunningly crafted words catching images and feelings well. This is still awkward and raw for me to write – to think – about. I’ve tried. If the power of what is my mind could be said in words, it would be too awful to read.

I remember it was such a beautiful day – unusually beautiful for Toledo, Ohio, which normally even at its best is drab and smoggy. But it was clear and the sky was blue, and the sun was bright through the living room windows.

My daughter was just past a year old, playing and babbling about the house. She’d slept through the night. My husband was at work – the first day at his first nursing job. He’d just graduated in June and passed his boards earlier that summer. MCO – it was MCO then, not MUO. A level 1 trauma center.

I had house work to do, and was puttering around doing it, listening to NPR. I had to ring our insurance agent about disability insurance, since with the new job we’d be able to afford it. I remember thinking “What’s her problem?” when his secretary answered the phone and sounded so so strange. She put me on hold, and it wasn’t the hold music – it was a news broadcast. NPR was still playing their normal morning program, so it must have been very early.

It took me a few minutes to realize what the news broad cast was saying, and what it meant. Planes in New York crashing into buildings. I hung up on the insurance agent. NPR was still just the normal morning programming.

I remember picking up my daughter, my baby, and walking with her. Just walking back and forth across the tiny living room of our one bedroom apartment. Turning on the computer to try and find some news to read — I’d never looked at news online before that day. I’ve read CNN online every day since.

Not much later my husband called from work. He didn’t want me to listen to the radio, read the news — he wanted to protect my normalcy for a while longer, but it was already too late. He told me he might not be coming home. MCO was a level one trauma center, and they had gone on full alert and staffing, ready to receive a possible influx of patients from New York. People were still estimating that tens of thousands were involved, would die, would be rescued, would need medical care. People were being called in from days off, from vacations, non critical patients were being discharged to other hospitals.

By the end of the day though the towers had come down, and there were frighteningly few injured people drifting into NYC hospitals. MCO went off their full alert, and let people go home though everyone was warned to stay available. I remember thinking for a split second how good it was that there were so few injuries, before realizing that it didn’t mean people were safe. It meant people were dead.

I remember not knowing where my father was. He lives abroad, but he worked for Eastman Kodak then, and they had a group that he worked with in the South Tower. And I knew he was the US that day, though I wasn’t sure where. I wouldn’t know for about three days, until he finally got in touch with my sister in Rhode Island and let her know he was fine, and she let us know. He had been in California, and it hadn’t occured to him we wouldn’t know, that we would worry. He’d been in NYC a few days earlier.

I remember the taxi driver. It was about one that afternoon – I’d talked with my husband, checked the news, listened to the radio. The Bee had nursed, napped, fussed. She wanted to be down and playing, I wanted to hold her and never let her go. So I called a taxi to take me to my mothers house, where there was more space, different toys, a television for watching the news. Eventually there would be my mother and brother.

The taxi driver knew. I knew. And we didn’t talk about it. Not a word. He commented that normally he had the radio on, apologized for not having music. I mentioned the weather, what a pretty day it was, and how clear the sky. We both noticed that there were no other cars to be seen. He complimented the baby. I thanked him. I mentioned I was going to my mother’s house. He asked what she did. “A teacher. Grade school.” Then we were there.

I remember the sky, that day and in the days afterwards. Such a blue. So clear, so empty. A sky owned by the birds and the clouds and the sun. I remember that the only time I cried was thinking about that sky – about how I was seeing a sky that had never been in my life, and might never be again, and about how that rare gift was borne out of this thing, this attack. This horror.

And I remember this – not from that day, but from later, the first night of the first attack against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Before we went to the wrong war for the wrong reasons. I remember watched the lights of rockets over Kabul (we were at a retirement party for a friend), and being filled with a fierce and terrible joy at going to war.

Those two things I remember. The sky owned by birds, and that fierce terrible joy.

ETA

bumped for 2009.  I move this post up every year,  and will do so until I have the voice and heart to write a new one.    For now,  I can say it no better then I first said in 2006.

Wool work.

I’ve got the second skein of cabled cormo finished, and tucked up with the first. I wrapped this one on my 2 yard niddy, and it’s made a very pretty skein indeed.

Today is a carding day – I finished picked over the last of the Cormo last night, so it is all fluffed up and ready to card. I’ve got two bags now, one of neatly fluffed locks, and one of rough fluff. The rough will make worse rolags, so I am carding it first, and saving the pleasure of the locks for ending with.

So far, it’s going nicely – lots of neps and VM to take out, but that’s okay.

11 years, 3 hours, 11 minutes ago today.

To My Dear and Loving Husband

by Anne Bradstreet

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me ye women if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay;

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,

That when we live no more we may live ever.

Happy Anniversary to us!