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The cover photo shows much merriment taking place on St Distaff's Day, Distaff Day or Roc Day as you prefer. It involves water dousing and possibly fire-setting. As is traditional in January, we take a look at the customs and myths associated with the feast day of this non-existent saint. JillianEve has covered the subject beautifully for us. She demonstrates the use of a distaff and shows us her own Distaff Day tradition along the way.
January is named after Janus, a Roman two-faced god who appropriately looks back and ahead at the same time. That's what we tend to do this month too, reflect on the previous year's projects and plan new ones. I don't know whether Janus is also responsible for January sales but look out for the odd January sale in the pattern suggestions this month.
Yvonne needs cheering up and I hope you'll find some reasons to be cheerful in this month's feast of fibrey fun, features and freebies for spinners, knitters, crocheters, dyers and weavers.
We often consider nettles a weed but they are nutritious and contain a usable fibre.
Allan Brown became curious about how this fibre would have been processed and used in the past with the tools that were available at the time.
Dylan Howitt's first film, Nettles for Textiles, followed Allan as he gathered nettles, retted, carded spun and dyed them. It's a worthwhile 15-minute watch.
Allan wants to make a dress by hand and film the whole process. The crowdfunding campaign met its goal in December. You can see the preview on the kickstarter page at the link below.
Many people used the extra time in 2020 to immerse themselves in big projects. This is Josie George wearing her temperature scarf. She recorded the temperature each day with two rows (you can see her colour chart on the tweet. It looks as if she held double with one of 4 colours of a finer yarn to record conditions.)
The finished scarf has 732 rows (2 rows per day) which makes 70,368 stitches and 1kg of yarn.
How long can fibre survive in your stash and still be usable?
That's such a good question, I'm going to post it in the HSN Ravelry group.
One of Knit/Wit's 2021 goals was to spin the oldest fibre in her stash. I use the past tense as she has now crossed that goal off her list. It caught my eye because of the beautiful colours, which are all tones of one colour (possibly technically 'tints' but a colour expert is welcome to clarify that for me). She bought this braid way back in 2008 (actually late 2008, so a mere 12 years ago rather than 13).
She says that the shades are well-distributed. I look forward to seeing how they play out when knitted.
Last month Josefin blended wool and mohair for a natural sock yarn. In this post she looks at the best techniques for spinning a strong sock yarn without making it so tight that it feels like string.
When I first started to spin my yarn was always underplied because I tried to make it balance. The problem is that your singles may be relaxed.
I'm glad to read that this isn't uncommon. I now tend to judge whether it looks right, and try to keep a consistent number of treadles per yard. (see also twist-angle tool elsewhere in this issue).
Amelia Garripoli makes the case for underplied yarn being suitable for certain projects and suggests how you might achieve this on purpose.
Kaffe Fassett's Painterly has been getting a lot of attention.
Kay of Modern Daily Knitting has been "cranking out" these little houses from that book but she has a warning, which I think applies to spinning as well as knitting.
This breed, which I'm glad that I don't have to pronounce, is a conservation breed with a dual coat. In the larger version of this picture you can clearly see the long silky fibres and the fluffy undercoat. You can separate these for two different types of yarn, or spin them together either woollen or worsted.
In this post, Josefin shows the two yarns that she has made. The outercoat combed and worsted-spun and the undercoat carded and spun longdraw.
The yarns are very different but both very beautiful.
Here's a fascinating experiment. You can make fibre from a blending board (or drum / hand carders I suppose) into fauxlags or sliver. The results are very different, as demonstrated here by beechwoodcraft.
Perendale is a cross breed which has fleece that is hard to classify. Janelle received this as part of the Breed School programme and spun this beautiful skein after sampling different spinning methods.
Here are her notes about the breed and her experiments.
If you've never combed wool, then you could try with a dog comb - a different technique to using large English combs but the result is the same. Onion holders can be used the same way as mini-combs.
The 1764 Shepherdess has put together some videos showing these various techniques.
The fibre you want from a camel is the fine downy undercoat. It's short, can be fine and each camel doesn't produce a great deal of it. It's generally camel-coloured, unsurprisingly.
I recommend JillianEve's video. In it she looks at the traditions / myths around St Distaff's day - the reason for this day, the shenanigans which may or may not be factual, a look at distaffs themselves and her own St Distaff's day tradition along with a demonstration of how to use a ring-distaff.
There isn't very much to say about a twist-angle tool. Using it isn't very complicated and checking your twist angle regularly will improve your yarn's consistency.
But the amount of twist in your singles and plying changes its properties. Being intentional about twist angle is as important as being intentional about the thickness of the yarn.
If you're not aware of twist angle or the twist angle tool then this article is for you.
"Knotting and weaving have always had great technological impact for humans", says David A. Leigh, "who's to say it won't be the same for molecular structures?"
This video shows how molecules have been manipulated to form a woven 2-dimensional fabric that is just 4 nm thick but hundreds of um across.
With thanks to Fibre Sprite for highlighting the story in her newsletter.
If you like Yvonne, click the image to find her page, you can use next and previous to explore more cartoons.
Keeping this wheel spinning
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The Coronavirus pandemic is causing havoc in all our lives at the moment but what about the charities and organisations that rely on public fundraising to maintain their care services? Martin House Children's Hospice is such a charity, with an annual running cost of around £9 million to provide their vital services to families, they need our help.
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Please see their blog for more information about Martin House and the fundraising products.
This is Janelle's Pool Drops shawl made from a handspun gradient. It's one of two projects that she finished on the same day!
There's a warning in this blog post about running short of yarn. I'm sure we've all been there and one tactic is to weigh your remaining yarn after each row and thus calculate whether you have enough for the remaining rows.
By doing this, Janelle found out that handspun yarn can be less consistent than commercial yarn, with usage per row ranging from 1.9 grams to 2.7grams.
I haven't featured an Olympic spinning wheel for a while. I know that they're too ornate for some. I think the paintings on the drive wheels are amazing. Gary now has a laser machine and this nautical wheel has little engraved anchors and compasses.
I didn't notice the cute cat-in-a-diving-suit right away and I have to admit that it's very cute.
Jean did start with some commercial wool but switched to handspun, the commercial yarn being too fine for weaving the squares. She used it held double for the crocheted border.
Most of the projects I feature are recent ones, but I came across this project while considering the Blue Shimmer Cap as a pattern suggestion. There are a few handspun examples and it's great for colourwork junkies - the 'bohus' style has up to five colours per row.
mushinweaving's brown Blue Shimmer is made from spindle-spun handspun cotton. The scarab beetles are her addition.
Katies Kep was the official pattern of Shetland Wool Week 2020, which went online for reasons that we all know. The pattern is free and still available.
Nathalie Schlosser made hers from the first yarn that she made from fleece from her brother's sheep.
sheepishly_spinstruck hand carded some mini rolags to make her ombre yarn. The previous two pictures in her photostream show the spinning and the yarn.
She found that Yorkshire folk knitted stranded colourwork stars well over two centuries ago. This one has a festive feel.
The other nice feature of this hat are the corkscrew tassels. Use your favourite search engine to search for "knit corkscrew" to find lots of videos and written instructions.
In short, you cast on the number of stitches for the length of your tassel. For the next row, Increase two in every stitch. Finally bind off. Ann notes in this later post that her tassels are better if she casts on and off in purl, with only the increase row in knit. Hers certainly look neat.
Here's a project idea that I don't think I've seen before. For an employee makers' challenge at Schacht Spindle Co. Judy Pagels restored this chair by making a new seat from inkle bands.
She gives the patten for the weaving, which she designed using an online tool. There are also notes and pictures showing how she constructed the new seat.
Crocheted trailing plant pot hanger / holder by Sue Doran
Reminisent of macrame, this trailing plant hanger/holder pattern from Sue Doran is a is crocheted. You can use cotton or other fibre that will bear weight and won't stretch.
The page contains charts, written instructions and photographs. If you wish to print the pattern, there's a pdf version available to buy.
The handspun yarn she used was spun by Pigeonroof Studios (now closed.) There are loads of details about the yarn and her modifications at the post linked above.
The Free For All Cowl uses 200-225 yards of worsted-weight yarn but is easily customisable.
There's a lot of winter to go yet. If you want to wear a lot of wool around your neck then the fabulously-named Big Ol' Cowl might do the trick.
It's a "beginner friendly" brioche pattern, using big needles and yarn.
I've found one art-yarn rendition of this pattern. To achieve the required thickness you could hold multiple strands together. You'll need 150 - 180 yards of super-bulky.
This chunky cowl is designed for Jenn's Norfolk Horn breed-specific yarn. But you could use any yarn of the correct gauge ( 2 strands DK weight held together ).
It's aimed at the "novice knitter ready for a challenge"
I'm suggesting this scarf for two reasons. If you're new to colourwork, then this 'mosaic' or slipped-stitch technique is so easy that it doesn't feel like colourwork.
It's also great for handspun yarn, because even if you don't want to spin the 400+ yards of plain yarn for the background, you could use commercial yarn and show off ~100 yards of beautiful handspun yarn in the coloured sections.
Sadly I have no more details about skullrose13's Scrappy Gratitude Attitude shawl other than it's 'scrappy' which I assume means that it's made from yarn scraps.
The pattern appears to combine colours in a similar way to the Shift / NightShift (which is more obvious if you click through to the pattern page) and so I hope to see many colourful examples of this shawl featuring handspun yarn oddments.
The pattern is designed to "make the most of small, luxury skeins of yarn - particularly those wildly variegated, hand painted beauties that are gorgeous in the skein but pool unappealingly when knit up.
It's also an excellent project for using up leftovers - simply change out yarns after the gem box sections to create a striping effect - there is no limit to how many colours you can use!"
It seems a long time ago, but I used to keep a list of the larger UK yarn and fibre festivals, particularly those that would be of interest to spinners.
Some organisers are holding online events. Some are still hoping to go ahead, and very soon.
For obvious reasons, this picture is ever-changing. Being Knitterly has put together such a good list of these events, for now I'm going to simply link to that list.
Adrienne Hagen will be giving a lecture on 25 Feb for University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It's called From Sheep to Shawl: Wool Working in Ancient Greece and Rome.
Dr. Hagen will use reproductions of ancient tools to demonstrate how Greeks and Romans processed wool from a raw fleece to a finished textile, including spinning thread with a drop spindle and weaving on a warp-weighted loom. Along the way, we will see how textile production featured in ancient mythology and philosophy and will explore the role of women's labor in society.
I have confirmation from the university that this will be available to the public. We don't yet have a link for the actual lecture. If I have it before February's full issue, I'll publish it then. Otherwise, email the department closer to the time.
I'm Shiela Dixon, I've beeing doing this for around ten years in order to promote and encourage the craft of spinning.
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