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Posting this a couple days late because I forgot to photograph it on Sat. night when I made it. I wove two Weavette squares from my hand-spun, home-grown, naturally coloured, brown cotton. Then I sewed the squares into a bag. I messed up the weaving a bit because I was in a hurry on Friday when I was weaving the squares (Thing 22). I learned that brown cotton, loosely woven, bears a visual resemblance to burlap, so next time I’ll probably choose a different technique for this cotton.
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I wove a couple squares on my small Weavette loom from the handspun naturally coloured cotton that I posted a couple days ago (before my eclipse pictures). I love Weavettes because you can make something from small amounts of yarn but the last few rows are a bit tough on handspun. The yarn can get badly abraded, so you want to start with a fairly sturdy yarn. I hadn’t originally planned to ply the yarn, but after producing half a square of brown cheesecloth, I decided that plying would be a good thing. It wasn’t worth setting up my Schacht spinning wheel. I had wound the cotton single into a center-pull ball, so I plied it on a square whorl drop spindle and wove it straight off the spindle (didn’t bother setting the twist of the plying since it was going straight onto the Weavette and I was in a hurry).
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Today I finally spun some of my homegrown, naturally coloured cotton. Here’s a picture of the raw cotton. Yes, it really is chipmunk brown. I gin it (remove the seeds) at boring meetings at work. I love naturally coloured cotton and I grew a few plants in pots almost every year, alternating green or brown strains. It’s really cool stuff, because the colour doesn’t fade with sun or age. But you do have to be careful not to grow it near white cotton, to eliminate cross-pollination. For more info, see www.vreseis.com (my cotton isn’t FoxFibre, BTW).
Cotton rolag with hand carder (it’s a wool carder because I don’t own cotton carders:
Spun on a tahkli (Indian supported spindle). I did this during breaks at work. It’s a bit slubby because it wasn’t carded commercially:
Skein wound off on a niddy noddy:
Setting the twist. The twist of cotton has to be set with heat and moisture. I added a tsp. of baking soda because the colour deepens in an alkali solution.
Drying the skein. The weight of the cup is necessary to help set the twist:
If all goes well, I hope to make something with this skein and post it tomorrow.
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The rovings from day 17? Here they are in their new and improved form.
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February 15th 11:49 :43 pm by
robayre
Last minute thing for the day. I plyed two super thing yarns I’ve spun and have been sitting on bobbins for months.
-robyn
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February 06th 9:21 :37 pm by
robayre
I finished this bobbin of a light magenta/red single. Hopefully, I’ll finish the other half tomorrow and ply them together.
-robyn
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The process was this: take some white rovings, dye them with acid dyes (spruce and royal blue) in an oldschool olive green crockpot (for dyeing only!), then spin it all up on my little upright spinning wheel. I call this skein ‘February Storm’, as much for the color as the monstrous piles of snow that have landed overnight.
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Dyeing pinks and yellows, for my Month of Love series of yarns, which will be spun into a Patrick and Spongebob yarn.