Random thoughts from John

I\’m making a wool picker, which is a device used to break up clumps of wool from a sheep\’s fleece into individual fibers, which can then be carded or combed before spinning. You can Google it if you want to know more.

I\’m documenting this for my spinning audience, where this might be of some interest.

I don\’t have any pictures to post at this point, so a progress report and a simple description is about all I have to provide.

I started the picker by cutting the sides, top, and bottom to length. The sides are made out of 1×10\” pine, which is really about 3/4\” x 9 1/4\”. The top and bottom, which will be inside the sides, are 1×8 stock, or about 3/4\” x 7 1/4\”.

I fashioned and attached (glue and countersunk screws) a couple of cleats (1×3\”) at the top inside of the sides, about 3/4\” from the top edge. The top piece is intended to rest on the cleats with the top flush with the top edge of the sides.

I don\’t yet know where to place the bottom of the box. That all depends on how the teeth of the picker end up, so making those is the next step. I failed in my first attempt, so I purchased more lumber for my next try.

I started the toothed inserts with 3\” 20d finish nails. The nails are angled about 45 degrees from the vertical, with five rows angled left, the next five rows angled left, and the last five rows angled left again. I drilled slightly undersized holes for each nail (13 nails per row x 15 rows = 195 nails. Then I started hammering in the nails, row by row. Due to my miscalculation, about two rows in, the board split right down the middle.

The next run at it I\’ll use a 1/8\” drill bit, which just allows the nails to slide through.

I have no idea why Jimmy Buffet popped into my head. Sorry…

On March 5, 2016 I took a couple of fiber dyeing courses taught by Kate Bachus of A Hundred Ravens.  I don\’t know anywhere outside of the fiber world where people will divulge their secrets and tell you exactly what they do to achieve the results they get, be it a particular knitting stitch, how a quilt corner should turn out just so, and in Kate\’s case, just that perfect shade of fuschia. She explained the basic principals of dyeing (at least for us – we were using wool that Kate supplied). And the principals are quite simple – you need a protein fiber (wool, alpaca, goat, rabbit, etc), an acid dye (no, no, the dye itself isn\’t an acid, an acid (vinegar works, citric acid works better), and heat. Water is there only as a suspension medium for the acid and dye, to help evenly distribute it over the fiber. (Dyeing stuff like cotton is an entirely different process, which I\’m not interested in learning yet.)

In the first class we each got two ~400 yard skeins of so-called sock-weight superwash merino yarn. Merino is the sheep breed, and they are known for their fine, soft wool. Superwash is a processing technique that makes the yarn less likely to shrink or pill, so the yarn is delightfully soft and about bulletproof. The yarn was in a plastic bag, still wet with a citric acid solution in which they were pre-soaked. I was completely winging it, and mixed two parts of fire-engine red, one part of sunflower yellow, and got this horribly blinding orange, which is not where I wanted to go. I added one part of black, which toned it all down to a nice rose color.  I dyed both skeins the same – dipping one-third into the dye bath for a while, then another third for a while, and then the rest of the skein for a while, all roughly ten-minute steps. I then squeezed the bulk of the dye out of the yarn and stashed it in a plastic bag. Done with Lesson One.

In the second class (mostly the same people) Kate and her minions passed out bags with pre-soaked \”blanks\” of sock-weight yarn. The blanks were just knitted rectangles about eight inches wide and long enough (almost a yard) to contain about 400 yards of yarn. The pretext here was to design a gradient color pattern. I chose root colors of approximately turquoise and mauve, so I dipped one end of the blank into a dark turquoise, then about two thirds of it (same end) into a lighter turquoise bath, which added some color to the already-died portion, then I moved to the mauve bucket, and gradually slid the other end into the dye, resulting in a dyed blank that started at dark turquoise, progressed to a lighter turquoise, then into  a light mauve, progressing (in a gradient) to a fairly dark mauve. It\’s going to make a wonderful shawl…

Not being enough of a geek already, I\’m adding to my bag of tricks. I took a class on spinning fiber into yarn a few weeks ago with Ann Corbey at The Fiber Loft in Harvard, MA. I got to try a couple of wheels that were OK, but didn\’t really enthrall me, but I learned a bit about spinning, and I learned a bit about what sort of wheel I might like to own.

This past weekend Peg and I were in Maine anyway (for another hobby-related event – Lobstercon ), so while in the area I took the opportunity to test drive two spinning wheels in two different shops. At Halcyon Yarn in Bath, ME, I tried the Kromski Fantasia, and at Spunky Eclectic in Lisbon, I tried the dual-treadle Fricke.

I ultimately settled on the Fantasia, and a lot of the reason falls to Peg. She said that the look on my face when I sat down at the Fantasia told her I\’d found the right wheel already.

UPS should be delivering the wheel tomorrow afternoon. I\’m kind of excited.

Of course, one does not need just a spinning wheel. There are all manner of accessories to purchase over time. One of the first is a niddy-noddy, a device upon which yarn is wound from the bobbin to both balance the twist and measure the yarn. Some folks dye the yard on the niddy-noddy as well.

Looking around at various vendors, I found that the durn things range in price from about $28 for unfinished wood to $50 or $75! It\’s three sticks, people. Yes, they are often lathe-turned and beautiful, but I don\’t think so. I read the Wikipedia article referenced earlier, which mentioned that \”budget spinners\” have fashioned them from PVC. A stop at Home Depot last night yielded two 10 foot pieces of 3/4\” rigid tubing and four TEEs. A bit of measuring (two 6\” pieces on either end and a 18\” piece for the main bit), and a minute of assembly provided me with a niddy-noddy for a price I haven\’t even calculated yet. I paid $6.20 for the materials. I have enough tubing left for at least three more, TEEs enough for another, and the TEEs were cheap. I estimate that they are going to be about $2 each – not even in quantity. (I wonder if the local yarn shop might have a market for dead-cheap niddy-noddies?)

Stay tuned!

Not being enough of a geek already, I\’m adding to my bag of tricks. I took a class on spinning fiber into yarn a few weeks ago with Ann Corbey at The Fiber Loft in Harvard, MA. I got to try a couple of wheels that were OK, but didn\’t really enthrall me, but I learned a bit about spinning, and I learned a bit about what sort of wheel I might like to own.

This past weekend Peg and I were in Maine anyway (for another hobby-related event – Lobstercon ), so while in the area I took the opportunity to test drive two spinning wheels in two different shops. At Halcyon Yarn in Bath, ME, I tried the Kromski Fantasia, and at Spunky Eclectic in Lisbon, I tried the dual-treadle Fricke.

I ultimately settled on the Fantasia, and a lot of the reason falls to Peg. She said that the look on my face when I sat down at the Fantasia told her I\’d found the right wheel already.

UPS should be delivering the wheel tomorrow afternoon. I\’m kind of excited.

Of course, one does not need just a spinning wheel. There are all manner of accessories to purchase over time. One of the first is a niddy-noddy, a device upon which yarn is wound from the bobbin to both balance the twist and measure the yarn. Some folks dye the yard on the niddy-noddy as well.

Looking around at various vendors, I found that the durn things range in price from about $28 for unfinished wood to $50 or $75! It\’s three sticks, people. Yes, they are often lathe-turned and beautiful, but I don\’t think so. I read the Wikipedia article referenced earlier, which mentioned that \”budget spinners\” have fashioned them from PVC. A stop at Home Depot last night yielded two 10 foot pieces of 3/4\” rigid tubing and four TEEs. A bit of measuring (two 6\” pieces on either end and a 18\” piece for the main bit), and a minute of assembly provided me with a niddy-noddy for a price I haven\’t even calculated yet. I paid $6.20 for the materials. I have enough tubing left for at least three more, TEEs enough for another, and the TEEs were cheap. I estimate that they are going to be about $2 each – not even in quantity. (I wonder if the local yarn shop might have a market for dead-cheap niddy-noddies?)

Stay tuned!