Wednesday 2 April 2008

Plugging along

Another "in progress"  work

I'm finally starting to pick up fibre projects that I put down awhile ago to get some books out the door, and the break has been productive. It's amazing how one's perspective changes when you haven't looked at them for awhile.

The picture above is a good example: the cords are about 1 cm (3/8") in diameter, and I'm going to use them as warp and weft to create a take-off of my family's tartan pattern for a project I've been messing around with for awhile.

Black and white are commercial Merino roving (I haven't spun any of the black yet), while the red is Corriedale: for the uninitiated, those breeds of sheep produce fleeces that are generally very soft and fine, with lots of crimp (the sheep equivalent of curly).

That quality, particularly in a processed roving, means that once you loosen the fibres up, it's very easy to spin them consistently and results in a very springy singles.

Straight off my bobbins, I ran them through my little I-cord machine (similar to Inox's seemingly now-defunct Strickmühle) and turned each bobbin into a fist-sized ball of cord, which, when I'm finished, I'll start warping a wooden frame constructed from canvas stretchers.

What I've found interesting in the spinning and knitting is the minor change in colour between the roving and the finished cord: the red is just slightly darker, while the white takes on almost a creamy overtone. I'll be curious to see what happens with the black.

And not that I'm counting, but two weeks' tomorrow, I leave for my adventure in the United States. I've got a seriously hardcore itinerary, particularly for my weekend in New York City, that I'm looking forward to implementing.

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