color fiber festival fall 2008

An excellent weekend! How could it not be... it was Color Fiber Festival! :)


i also took way more CFF pics than i could fit here... you can find them here and the flickr color fiber festival group is here if you have some of your own to add. i'd love to see them! :)

Once again held on the Pacific School of Religion campus (many, many kudos to Sara for wrangling and orchestrating this beautiful scene)-- a breathtaking place with lots else going for it.



I didn't take any classes this time around, but instead hit the market and spun with a great circle of fiber lovers. Some market pics:


Tactile Fiber Arts (mid-set up)

I bugged Maia away from setting up her booth to find her Spindlewood stash since Malia has almost converted me... I barely escaped the clutches of a ebony/ebony square whorl. BARELY. I was heading back in to buy it when I realized I was a whole five minutes late-- turned on my heel emptyhanded :)


Handsome Books and...


...Pigeonroof Studios. With lots and lots of stock ;)

Krista's booth had her gorgeous Luminosity Project yarns on display-- they look so great in her pics, but in person?! Amazing. She also hinted at a fiber and yarn club in the nearish future. I'm a brat, I was thinking I'd not say anything til I'd already snagged a spot :) She has a mailing list that I'm sure she'll dish more on when the time comes.


Girl on the Rocks and abmatic

I finally met Karrie! We've been joking the other must not exist since we never seem to be in the same place at the same time :) I was bummed not being able to take her weaving on a hand loom class, but more than made up for it by purchasing a vintage Weave-It from her.



Don't tell anyone but instead of my two front teeth, I've been lusting over a 25" Schacht Flip. Still thinking, but the hand loom has taken the edge off for at least a week. Some things don't change :)


A Verb for Keeping Warm

Another almost falling down experience here as always :) Receiving the second shipment of the aVfKW fiber club a few days back helped... but Kristine had batt rolls! in PURPLE!! (I'm trying to actually whittle down the stash, both yarn and fiber. I am afraid of the 15# of roving I'm expecting from 2 mills in the too-near future. Serious nightmare scenarios about woman living in a shoe, having so much roving she didn't know what to do...)


Ceallach Dyes

A stunning booth. Where Tactile and Verb both use natural dyes-- Ceallach uses a solar dyeing process, the heat of the sun setting the dyes to be fast. Stepping back to think how much energy is used in heating water and that she avoids this while producing beautiful, huge skeins of color is jawdropping.


Flynn Creek Churros

A really neat booth. I had a chance to spin some Navajo Churro locks Maia brought for the class I took at Color in the spring, a dual coated sheep. I especially loved those little boxes of colored roving Flynn Creek had for sale-- I'm big into the natural colored fleece gradation colors right now.

You should be proud-- they had fleeces, and I didn't buy one! :)


Pan's Garden Yarns

Pan's Garden had a beautiful, BEAUTIFUL booth with handspun (true) art yarns. The kind where it's okay to buy them without a project in mind because you just want to admire them and be happy they exist and were made by hand and it feels good to have them near. Really.

For all of the amazing (local! woo!) vendors, my favorite part was the spinners and knitters who came out. Oh, well maybe my favorite was Susan and her og Columbine wheel...



The bobbin on this thing! Size doesn't matter my...

Anyways.

I started here under one tent, before the fog burned off...



...and eventually, another tent and a bunch of spinners and knitters appeared to just sit and be excellent in each other's company. And ogle the wheels and spinning and yarns and purchases and and and... :)



Fun-fun :) A good start to a great day-before-turning a year older*.

That's right, not a brain but still...



Made my wish and didn't share :) No, I don't feel any different! Not about my birthday, anyways.

Til then!


*last day for free shipping in my shop! :)

easing in

Long time no nothing! :) Feels weird, trying to get back into writing about what's going on fiberwise when there's that stretch of time between... my little hater says I need something more stunning than a not even half finished sweater after coming back from so many days of silence but here goes nothing :)


Wisteria in handspun Corriedale

I started with 2 skeins of handspun corrie and have been spinning as I complete parts of the sweater... the spinning actually has been going very quickly-- it's the combing that is taking the time. This is the corriedale I have been combing out on my Craftsmiths, I'd guess the sweater has about 650 yd and 10 oz in it-- the bag is still pretty full :)

I was excited when I saw Wisteria, the cabling is just enough detail for me, and since the corrie was 2.6# washed and I lose quite a bit to combing in waste, I wanted a sweater that wouldn't eat yarn and still fit (I'm knitting the 47" inch size!) I also liked the way the sample looked with the slight variegation in color-- Umpqua was a variegated fleece, and try as I might I wasn't going to get a consistent color without lots of combing and blending pre-spinning (mixing different slivers together to even out the color)... I know I should probably have waited and spun each skein at the same time, but I just don't have the patience :)


love the taupe hints in the grey from her oddly colored fleece

I have been using my spinner's control wpi card from vip fibers to help... I'm pretty happy with the result when spotchecking the wpi of the singles and plied yarns, I haven't had any weird variation in gauge. I'm also spinning this up in a 'true worsted' style, inchworm from the handcombed sliver, and though I prefer the freewheeling of Spinning for Softness and Speed, the prep and the method of spinning is giving me a really consistent yarn.

As much as I love the grey, I needed a little color break so I started spinning the 1/2 oz samples from the latest Rhyme Times Sampler from The Bellwether.


spun samples unfulled-- they'll be super plush when set

You know I love this club, but I've never actually spun the samples before! Sure, they'd arrive and I'd be all !!! and pet them as they sat on my desk while I ordered a few bags of my favorites before they were for sale to the public (at a discount!)... but after a while I'd just stash them in the fiber closet and not look at them again. I think I'm going to start spinning each sample up and maybe knit them together into a lap blanket or something.

The Crosspatch Creations and Three Bags Full fibers are always a fun spin, texture and once shocked and set give a really soft, squishy yarn. Maybe a crazy scarf knit longways with tons of fringe? Don't know... but I'm keeping a half ounce sample in my spinning basket all the time-- it's a really nice distraction between larger (even 4 oz!) projects.

What else? I did receive my new camera (yay!) and took a bunch of photos of stitch markers for my etsy shop that had been lingering too long. I also toted it with me to the Asian Art Museum in SF last weekend...


full set here

I don't have a clue what I'm doing-- my sturdy Canon S410 was simple and reliable, but didn't really push me to think about anything other than being steady handed :) I am going to have to read a book on photography in the near future to do my camera justice. Work in progress, same as everything!

Aside from these mishmashes, I've been washing wool with Unicorn Power Scour and hope to have a (longish) post comparing it to my standby favorite blue Dawn rilly soon. Til then, moo!

color fiber festival and california red

I had a blast at the Color Fiber Festival this weekend, see?



That's the only photo I managed to take :) Karrie has set up a color fiber festival flickr group so you can check out the grounds, people, classes and fiber if this one doesn't do it for you ;)

It really was a fun time though, placing faces to (rav)names, spinning with a bunch of people instead of by myself, grinning cos I'm too shy to actually say hello, trying lots of new fibers thru Kristine and Maia's fiber tasting classes, buying lots of fiber... actually, I didn't buy anything (collective gasp)-- not because Pigeonroof Studios' booth was literally picked clean (no names ;)) but cos I blew my fiber budget this month out of the water with some 70/30 baby camel-tussah silk by A Verb for Keeping Warm already...


70/30 baby camel - silk, Succulent colorway (by way of Article Pract)

I'm glad for it though, and am half hoping Article Pract has more in stock next time I'm by cos I had a *blast* playing with the exotic fibers in Kristine's class and am dreaming of a three-ply of this one.

In the exotic fiber tasting, I tried splitting the fibers in half lengthwise and spinning 2 bobbins' worth of each. I then took them home and plied them together, and remembered how much I liked my Joy :) Worked well, and I even found a use for (some of) them...




ipod touch handknit sock

Who says I don't knit socks anymore? :)

My campbell's soup ipod sleeve has been looking worse for wear lately (totally my fault with hard use in a back pocket), and I just hate having handspun I can't use-- so a little sock was born. The fibers are from the top-- baby camel/silk, baby alpaca/silk, baby llama and baby alpaca, all available from A Verb for Keeping Warm. I didn't use the *cashmere* since the sleeve was long enough already, and worried it would be too soft for the choking I'll undoubtedly give it. I *so* did not want to like spinning cashmere, thought I needed a supported spindle to do so-- oy.

Maia's class on rare breeds was also interesting; I was thrilled to try some fibers I'd only read about as well as spin from several different fiber preps (top to roving to locks) all in one sitting... really neat and has me wanting to spin more from the lock more often. She did bring some California Red, which I have been meaning to share pics of myself since I bought a lamb's fleece awhile back.

The California Red is really neat-- a white to oatmeal colored fleece shot thru with red kemp fibers that give it a definite hint of red (though, isn't really red-red like I'd hoped). You can see the red hairs here on the underside/shorn end of a handful of unwashed fleece...



I bagged up the fleece in bunches using mesh lingerie bags and set them to scour in hot (but not running!) washing machines with Dawn, buoyed by the things I learned from my fleece day class at Deep Color Studio.





Now, the sheep was supposed to have been jacketed but had lots of burrs, filth, manure tags (poo!), and tips that had felted around VM... admittedly I was and am a bit bummed about that. I didn't know to try and open the tips up and get the vm out of them before washing, so now I've got a scoured fleece with tips that are matted with vm hiding inside. I've been a bit down about prep past scouring because of it; carding has to happen outside since so much junk is being picked out by hand and falling out of the carder that I don't want on my floors inside.

Just for fun, raw and scoured pics:


raw california red


scoured california red

Reminds me of the story in Alden Amos' Big Book of Handspinning where a customer refuses to pay for prepping a fleece she had brought in because they had washed all of that beautiful tomato soup color out :) It still has a nice overall color though.

I did a little handcarding and spinning with some of the washed fleece...


clockwise from top right: fiber on handcards, scoured fleece, california red rolags


woolen spun california red

...but most of it is sitting in a closet where I'm still mad at it :)

A lot was my fault I'm sure, but I'm taking more care now in knowing what I'm buying as well as in taking almost too much time pre-washing to get as much junk out and tips unstuck as possible. I've been on a fleece bender and have two more to share, but too long already :)

Til then!