Book Charkha

I received an exciting package in the post the other week whilst I was having a particularly crappy day at work. My car had refused to start that morning so I'd had to catch the bus in. A journey that usually takes 15 minutes or so took nearly an hour and a half and I knew it was going to take as long to get home again.  The parcel cheered me up though and I could hardly wait to open it.

Inside the plastic envelope was this

 

and stitched inside that was this

 

 

which opened up to reveal this

 

which when unpacked and set up looked like this

 

 

on which I managed to spin this 

 

 

I'm having great fun with it. 

 

SarahW on Ravelry (a rather more experienced cotton spinner than me) was kind enough to send me a sample pack of different kinds of cotton fibre from Cotton Clouds in the US so I've tried spinning from sliver, from punis, from cotton still attached to the seed, green cotton, brown cotton, white cotton. I've plied the singles (though I did that on one of the wheels, charkhas aren't great for plying). 

 

This is what I've spun up so far

 

 

The skein on the left was spun on the wheel with a quill attachment but the other two were spun on the charkha and plied on the wheel.

 

I went to World of Wool last Friday and bought 100g of Egyptian cotton top and my Tour de Fleece project for this year is going to be spinning and making something from cotton.

 

Bring it on!

Colour Blending Workshop

On Saturday the theme of the Bradford Guild meeting was colour blending . Alison Daykin came to give us a talk and lead a workshop on the topic.

We'd been asked to bring a selection of fibre in the three primary colours plus black and white; an inspirational picture; our hand carders and a spinning wheel.

Being me I forgot my inspirational picture but luckily Alison had some to spare so I borrowed one of hers; a picture of the Australian outback.

The idea was to pick four or five colours from the picture and work out what proportions of the primaries we'd need to blend to get the fibre to match the colours as closely as possible.

From the picture I chose the reddish brown of the earth; the sage green of the brush; the dark green of the leaf shadows and the yellowish white stripe across the landscape.

Having chosen the colours we laid the correct proportions of the primaries onto the carders and blended the fibre 'till we had the correct shade. If the shade wasn't quite right we adjusted the quantities. These are my second lot of rolags; the first lot weren't quite right.

Once we were happy with the rolags we spun them up and roughly plied them. I was pretty pleased with the final results and when we put them all together on the table at the end it was surprising what a range of colours people had succeeded in achieving with a very limited initial palette.