A good day for spinning.

First, here is the red silk that was last on my bobbin. I chain plied it and it is finished now. It turned out beautifully. I'm not sure what it wants to be yet. There is 2.8 oz, which won't do a whole lot.

My plan had been to not really do any spinning until Spinzilla in October which, frankly, was a silly plan. Today was our local spinners guild meeting. I'm so glad I went! Firstly, my lovely husband said he would watch a friend's children so my friend could go for the first time. Her daughters are similar in age to mine, and it seems like it went well. 

My friend, K, wanted to rent a spinning wheel so she could join us for spinning in general as well as Spinzilla. She's taken to it very well and seemed to be having lots of fun! 

I brought some blue wool that I bought about a year ago to spin for a sweater. I've already spun 8 oz or so of it. I'm two plying it. I had just plied what I had on my bobbins so my bobbins would be ready for spinzilla. Today I put more of it on my bobbin:

I guess the next thing to do is fill this and a second bobbin and ply them before October 5.

The thing that got me today was 8 oz of this gorgeous merino combed top. I always browse what the vendors bring. I started lusting over this and had to go back to get it. I had just enough cash for it, so perhaps it was meant to be. I can't wait to see how it turns out, but I probably should finish the blue first. I'm not sure what the colors will do when spun. I've gotten out of the habit of buying these multicolor rovings because the color often just seems to muddy when spun. I couldn't resist this.

I am somewhat proud of myself for not buying the lace/fingering weight uber soft yarn that another friend pointed out. She had purchased some and let me pet it. The thing is, I have so much yarn of that weight (but not nearly as soft) that I need to get working through before I can really justify buying more. That didn't work so well for the combed top above.

Another thing that I have on my needles: 

This is a project I've been working on for a little while. It is simply an entrelac scarf. The yarn is Happy Fuzzy Yarn  superwash sport in July Garden and Pollen. I adore the July Garden, but I'm a bit saddened by the really short color repeats. I thought that entrelac would be the way to show off this beautiful yarn and, while it is better, the color repeats are still too short to get blocks of color. That's the main reason I don't buy much multicolor yarn. It looks gorgeous in the skein, but as soon as you ball it up, you can see that it muddies. It also muddies in the project.  I do like how it looks, but it wasn't quite what I was aiming for.

What's off my bobbin?

While on vacation in July, I spun up this beautiful fiber that I bought from Inglenook Fibers via Etsy. It is 3.5 oz of beautiful Tussah silk.

Beautiful braid from Inglenook Fibers

Midway through spinning silk singles

It felt like it took much longer to spin than a similar weight of wool, possibly due to the extra twist required. Possibly it was also due to my Dad repeatedly telling me that it would be easier just to buy the yarn. He just doesn't understand.

I chain plied it to maintain the colors and wrapped it in a skein and kind of forgot about it until this week when I set the twist (am I supposed to do this with silk, like with wool?), thwapped it and hung it to dry. It turned the water an impressive shade of green.

Thankfully the wool I had in with it was dark colored. It didn't seem to affect it.

Here is the final project. I'm not sure what I want to do with it yet. By my calculations, I have 105 yards.

This is what's on my bobbin right now. It is 2.8 oz of Tussah silk, also from Inglenook Fibers. Tonight I get to ply!

I know Spinzilla is coming up, but I didn't think silk would be the best option to get lots spun during the week, but then I finished plying this silk in two evenings after the girls went to bed, so that wasn't bad.

Next is plying this and then working on a couple samples to be ready for Spinzilla. When I bought wool last fall, I had this idea for some barber pole striped yarn. I'm not convinced anymore that the yellow and brown that I got for it is the best idea.

Mints

This morning I collected herbs from my herb garden (OK, it's really my Mostly Mint garden) to dry. Last year I planted 5 kinds of mint (peppermint, spearmint, chocolate mint, apple mint and lemon balm) in this area after mostly cleaning out the saplings and other things that were trying to take over this area.

Mostly Mint Garden

I also planted oregano, which I was happy to hear is part of the mint family, so it may have be able to hold its own among the mint and sage. I was a bit surprised that the sage stayed somewhat green over the winter.

My two oregano plants took off over the last couple weeks, so it was definitely time to harvest. The peppermint and spearmint (no surprise) were trying to spread far and wide. Thankfully they look different enough to be able to separate out.

Lemon Balm

The lemon balm has the largest leaves of my mints. Once you cut a leaf, the lemon smell is pretty obvious. When this plant was given to me, I was a bit skeptical of using it for tea, but now that I've smelled it, I'm looking forward to trying it.

Spearmint

OK the lemon balm and spearmint look much alike in these pictures, but the spearmint is a bit fuzzy. This makes it not fun to get clean as the little hairs want to hold on to the dirt. Research tells me that spearment can be anywhere from not fuzzy to fuzzy, so this must be a fuzzy variety. It looks like it could be apple mint, which is usually fuzzy. Making a drink from it, I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't more minty. (See apple mint below)

Peppermint

OK the lemon balm and spearmint look much alike in these pictures, but the spearmint is a bit fuzzy. This makes it not fun to get clean as the little hairs want to hold on to the dirt. Research tells me that spearment can be anywhere from not fuzzy to fuzzy, so this must be a fuzzy variety. It looks like it could be apple mint, which is usually fuzzy. Making a drink from it, I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't more minty. (See apple mint below)
The peppermint has more deeply veined leaves. No fuzz, so it's easy to tell apart from the spearmint.

Apple mint

This looks like the peppermint in that it has no fuzz and relatively deeply veined leaves, but it has a dark stem. This has the best, most minty smell to the leaves in my opinion. I really need to try it for tea. I wonder a bit if this is actually the spearmint and I messed up the labels. I'm looking forward to trying this one as tea, but it's one of the smaller ones.

Chocolate mint

I saw chocolate mint at the store last year and couldn't resist. It has a dark stem like the apple mint, but it is smaller and has a darker tint to the leaves. The leaves do smell a bit chocolaty along with the mint.

blurry oregano

I need to replace this picture, but it's getting late. The oregano definitely looks like it is part of the mint family. No minty smell here though.

Oregano

I have two plants about this size of oregano. It really shot up over the past week or so, so I decided I needed to harvest some. I wanted to try drying it.

Dabbing gently

I cut the stems with kitchen scissors. Most of it needed at least a brief rinse to get any soil off. The spearmint needed more of a going over to get it clean. I put it on paper towel and dabbed it a bit with another piece to get the water off.

Bundled up
L-R peppermint, spearmint (top center), lemon balm (bottom center)
and four bundles of oregano on the right.

I bundled it up in 4-7 stem bunches. Two bundles have twist ties, the rest are tied with crochet cotton. I can see why they don't recommend hanging the mint to dry. The spearmint especially has thick stems. I can see them taking a while to dry.

Hanging to dry

I put loops of string around the supports of my drop ceiling in my basement craft room. There is a dehumidifier running in the room anyway, so I thought this might be a decent place to dry the herbs. A safety pin joins the tie of the bundle to the loop in the ceiling. 

Fairy door

Valerie's friend has a fairy door in her house. She leaves little things for the fairy and the fairy leaves little things for her.


I thought this was a good idea. I'm not so sure any more.

Her friend's mom, K, gave me a door (and the door knob to go with it) that she had purchased. It was plain wood. Oddly enough, I could only find two tubes of craft paint. I used to have tons of the stuff, but must have cleared much of it out for some move. I had purchased violet paint for the sand tray and managed to find a lonely tub of white.  I painted the door.

I put on two coats. Our house is dry so the paint dried very quickly and I was mostly able to keep going without pausing. Two coats just covered better. K said she used a glossy paint and thought it worked better. I just wanted to use what I had so I used the craft paint and put two coats of Modge Podge on it. The Dorr has a window, so I glued a scrap of fabric to the back for a "curtain".

Our house has this perfect place for a fairy door. Where the stairs come down, the bottom step wraps around the partial wall.

I used double sided tape to stick it to the wall on K's recommendation. The double sided tape we have is the padded, thick stuff so that's what I used. I didn't think to ask if she meant that or the thin stuff. If you look, you can see it, but I think it's OK.

The fairy left a note that says something like:

To the Fleming Family,

We heard from our friends, who live with your friend, A, that you are nice. We hope it is OK that we share your house with you.

Love,
The fairies.

Valerie wrote back welcoming them to our house.  She was upset that they didn't give her anything the next day. She's been upset about this often. She's left more notes and little gifts for the fairies, and gets upset that the fairies take her notes and don't leave her anything. Trying to explain that the fairies aren't likely to give her something every day or that they're busy does no good.

The fairies have given the girls an origami star each and another note. Valerie asked what their names are. The mom is Pennyroyal (Penny), the dad is Hibiscus and the daughters are Zephyr (Zip) and Wren.

This has mostly been fun so far, but I'm a bit annoyed that Valerie expects things from the fairies daily. I'm going to continue working on getting her to understand that the fairies have their own lives and won't be able to give her notes or gifts every day.

I'm not sure if Valerie would recognize my hand writing, so I've been writing notes for Valerie on the computer with a script printed font.

Carding

An update on what I'm working on:

What I'm most excited about at the moment is some alpaca fiber. I bought some brown alpaca at the Fiber Expo in the fall.

Off the top of my head, I think it's the fleece on the right. Both brown are alpaca. I've now washed all of these fleece. The original plan was to blend the alpaca with some wool to knit a sweater. I don't want it to be 100% fleece for two reasons. 1. Alpaca is warmer than wool and I don't really want to make the sweater so warm that I can't wear it much. 2. Alpaca doesn't have the elasticity that wool does. If I made a sweater of it, it would droop over time and get out of shape.

I do have some brown wool that I can blend with it. It is also brown (Border Leicester), but a darker shade. Blending the two would, in theory, give a color between the two.

Looking at the shorter staple length of the alpaca and knowing I wanted to blend the fibers, I got some cards.

Alpaca on wool carder

Alpaca removed from wool carder

I didn't mind the process of carding. It's pretty simple and does work. I wasn't excited about the rolags I got. I like spinning worsted from top or roving. I didn't like that I had no length along the direction of the fiber. It carded the alpaca well enough but, considering the length difference between the alpaca and Border Leicester, they didn't seem to want to blend well.

I did take the rolags, rolled from one end of the card to the other, so that the fibers would remain straight and aligned, and pulled to try to end up with something similar to roving. That's when I discovered that it wasn't blended all that well. Perhaps I just need more practice.  I took to combing wool quickly and like the results I got, so that will remain my preferred method of processing washed wool.

You can see the lighter alpaca and darker wool being blended

My friend bright over a drum carder that she had rented. I thought I might like that better as I'd get something that has a length equal to the circumference of the larger drum. I could split that more easily into something similar to roving and it might be better to spin. I was right.

We ran the fiber through the carder 3 times and ended up with a nice looking batt. We did have to adjust as we went as we weren't sure how much fiber we could put on the drum carder. In the end, we had two batts with different fiber ratios. One is close to 50:50. The other is roughly 75% alpaca.

You can see the color difference between the two batts. The one on the left is 50:50, and possibly not blended quite as it could be. The one on the right is 70ish % alpaca.

The thing that bothers me about the drum carder is the amount of waste. I did get a fair amount of waste with the combs, but this seemed like even more.

I've now spun and (Navajo) plied both of these batts.

75% alpaca on the left, 50:50 on the right

I think the 50:50 could have been better blended. It spun reasonably well. I enjoyed spinning the 75% alpaca better. The next step is to knit swatches to see which I like better. I think one more thing I want try is spinning singles of the alpaca and wool separately and plying the two different singles. I'm not sure if I want to do one ply of each or two alpaca and one wool or two wool and one alpaca. I'll probably try each.

I've now rented a drum carder for the month. I just need to finish figuring out how I want to process the rest of the alpaca. Once I get that figured out, I'll be able to finish processing the fiber.

Sand art

This was an idea I got from my sister-in-law.  My girls were playing at her house on Thursday and she had taken a tray, painted the bottom and put some sand in it. They drew in the sand with a stiff bristled paint brush.

I had been given this tray as part of a house warming gift. I could have left the bottom unpainted, but I thought the girls would like some color. If I had known how the finest bits in the sand lightened the paint, I would have gone with a darker color. I did have painter's tape so I used that to tape the sides to keep them paint free.

Cordelia asked me to write her name. Then she asked for mine, then Valerie's, then Daddy's. I then drew a heart. She said "Draw my heart. My heart very big!" That made this worth the work to paint it right there.

The girls have been having fun playing with it. The problem with this sand tray is the holes for the handles. The sand likes to exit there. I tried putting packing tape over them, but it didn't stay stuck. I still need to come up with a solution for this. I could put the painter's tape over it, but that wouldn't look very nice.

One of the nice things about this project is that it was inexpensive. The tray we had, the paint is just craft paint. I bought the big one as I didn't think one of the small ones would be enough, so the paint was almost $2. The sand is the fine craft sand, so it was originally $7 for a bag. I had a 50% off coupon, so it was only $3.50. This is a small portion of the bag, which is good because I suspect we will have to add to it somewhat regularly. I also used paint brushes that we already had. The bristles aren't as stiff as the ones that my SIL had, but they work.

Marshmallows

Last night's (and this morning's) project was...marshmallows

Friends have been posting the link to a marshmallow recipe and talking about how home made marshmallows are better than the ones from the store, so I thought I'd try it.

This is the recipe (Alton Brown usually has good recipes)
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/homemade-marshmallows-recipe.html

I thought I'd taken pictures of the marshmallows last night after I piped them out, but I don't see it so I must not have. I've been having problems with the camera on my phone.

The recipe was easy to follow and seems to have worked. Piping them out was a mess. The first bag full was fine, but it got sticky from there. Perhaps next time putting it into a ziplock where more will fit or I can use a second would be better. The piping is my main complaint about this recipe. I know I could have spread them in a pan and cut them later, but I wanted to try mini-marshmallows.

The other thing I tried was making shaped marshmallows. This mostly didn't work. I have silicone molds that I sprayed and dusted with the corn starch and confectioners sugar, but between the mix clumping and distorting the marshmallows and not completely coating the mold so that the marshmallow stuck in places, most of the molded marshmallows failed rather miserably.

The top are the piped and cut marshmallows. Across the bottom are gingerbread man, snowman, owl, a couple hearts, another gingerbread man and a cat. 

The marshmallows taste good. I had food coloring so I added a bit of purple, so the marshmallows are purple. Are they worth the work, perhaps.