David Taylar Daniels was one of those willing to test spin the rovings I have for sale in my shop.  The purpose for this was two-fold – to get other spinners’ opinions on them as to spinability and such and to see if I did a good job judging the fleeces I had purchased and had processed.  I have given the test spinners a month to get it all done (5 ounces total), but Dave got his all done in less than a week.  I am impressed!

Dave will tell you more about his experiences with spinning these on his blog when he gets it posted (edited 6/29/10, they are posted here), but he kindly sent me pictures of each skein with a sample of the fluff as well as the valuation forms simplified down into an Excel spreadsheet (which I will do for the rest of them when I get them – thanks for the idea Dave!).  So, here are the pictures of what he spun.

I am really pleased with this yarn from Ulf’s fleece.  It came out a little darker spun than I thought it would, but that is fine by me.  I still think it will over-dye beautifully and intend to try doing just that later in the summer.  If you want to purchase this 100% Corriedale roving, it’s just $2.75 per ounce.  I have sold quite a bit of this one already, but I still have more than one fleece.  Dave’s spinning of it really bring out the quality of this fiber nicely.

Sandy was hoping this fleece from Ukulele would spin up nice and dark, and it did!  Both Ulf and Ukulele were coated Corriedale fleeces and we have dibs on these sheep fleeces each year.  With them being coated, they are very clean and free of vegetable matter.  Again, this roving is for sale at $2.75 per ounce.  Like Ulf above, Dave’s spinning of it shows it off to its best quality.

This mixed-breed sheep was also coated.  The Romney, Shetland and Corriedale is its genetic make up means this is a very easy spinning fiber.  According to David’s spreadsheet (see below), it has a nice halo when finished, so this would make a great sweater.  Again, this should dye up nicely and we will be testing this, too, later this summer.  This roving is for sale in the shop for $1.50 per ounce.

Another coated, mixed breed sheep of the same genetics as the one above.  This one is coarser, and I think it would be suited for sweaters or warm outer wear for the winter.  I would love to see this woven up and made into a coat or jacket.  Even with its dark color, I believe this would be lovely dyed with Indigo, and I intend to try that in a few weeks.    I have been spinning this on a medium-weight drop spindle, and I really should have used a lighter one for it.  It is spinning up very easily on the spindle.  Dave’s spinning looks wonderful!   This is for sale in the shop for $1.50 per ounce. 

This is the same genetic structure as the two above, although it is a finer fiber than the others and was coated as well.  Really, this is a very nice fiber and I’d love to see it knitted up into Irish Fisherman style sweaters.  Also, dying this and using it for Fair Isle would be lovely.  And look at how nice it looks with Dave’s spinning of it.  This, too, is for sale in the shop for $1.50 per ounce. 

Dave’s Samples Sheet-sm

Here is Dave’s valuation on these fleeces, and you all know how great of a spinner he is.  Since he is used to finer fibers such as merino and silk, the fact that he would recommend these to other spinners thrills me to no end.

Thank you Dave, and I can hardly wait to see what the other four test spinners come up with.  Since they still have over three weeks to finish them, it’ll be a while before we hear about them.  Not everyone can be Speedy Spinsters.

I have added a new skein of Superwash Blue-Faced Leicester to the store.

Camouflage handspum yarn
Handspun yarn spun by Benita Story out of Superwash Blue-Faced Leicester - fiber hand dyed by Amy King of Spunky Eclectic (her colorway "Lame Duck Mallard". There are 443 yards of this finger weight yarn and it weighs 113 grams. There is enough here for an average pair of socks for women.
Available Qty: 1
Price: $35.00

Please check out this yarn and the others, plus the roving, handwoven fabric, and T-shirts I have for sale in my shop.  Thank you!

First I want to start off by saying that Paige did indeed finish weaving her scarf last night and washed it.  It is beautiful!

This is simple hopsack pattern, but the contrast between the green and the purple are wonderful.  The feel of the scarf was soft, yet firm and it will keep her neck warm this next winter.

And the lovely Miss Paige wearing her scarf.  She said her roommate was stunned last night that she was wearing a wool scarf and kept saying, “Paige!  It’s 85 degrees outside.”  Awesome!

Paige actually put another warp on a loom today and wove a second scarf, this time in a bricky-red and black houndstooth.  After Janet’s houndstooth yesterday, she just had to make one for herself.

Speaking of Janet’s houndstooth…

This picture just says it all.  Look at the look on her face as she hugs her scarf.  That right there is why I teach.  That face of sheer joy of creating something new makes all the hard work so worth it.

The next person to finish was Peg.  Remember I said that she took yarn and dyed to it look more like she wanted it to look?

Well the skeins are what she bought, but after a bit of over dyeing, look at what she came up with and wove with?

I told Peg that it reminds me of the Caribbean – of the aqua blue of the water, of the sun, of the waves coming into to the beach.  What a joy this scarf is, and yet…  I have the feeling that it isn’t going to remain a scarf.  Knowing Peg as I do, it will become something else and live a very happy, fun life.

There was a battle to the finish between the last two scarves in which who would finish first.  Kathy barely finished before Nancy and here is what Kathy wove, both the front and the back.

The front of the scarf is on the left and the back is on the right.  As per my usual, I like the back best.

Nancy veered a little with her scarf in that she wove it with recycled sari silk and wool.

Now tell me that you think that is a lovely scarf!  It’s like jewels and gold – very rich indeed!

Everyone has been asked to send me pictures of their finished scarves and I will post them as soon as I get them all.

And here is my whole class, garbed in their new finery, standing in front of the shop.  I am so proud of all of them.  They made something beautiful with their own hands.  All are as unique as their creators and I love them all.

In another month I have another weaving workshop scheduled, this one being the 23, 24 and 25 of July.  If you live in east central Indiana and want to join us, please contact me to reserve your place.  It’s lots of fun and look what you get to go home with when you are finished.

Today, everyone got to warp their own looms and one thing Scott and I have done to make measuring out the warps easier for everyone is to make small, individual sized, 3 yard warping boards.  They can sit them on their laps if they want to, and two people did while three sat on the floor to measure out their warps.

Having each student with their own boards speeds things up and is easier for them to understand what they are doing.

It took them until about quarter after 1 to get their looms warped completely and ready to weave.  Before too long, there was silence except for the clacking on the looms.

This is the pattern Janet chose to weave for her scarf.  We all went nuts over this one.  Janet is just a wee bit from having her scarf done, and she is intending to weave a second scarf tomorrow.

Peg chose her yarns when she was here on the 6th, but the yarns she showed up with today were rather different.  These were the colors she wanted, but the only thing in the shop these colors were superwash wool, so she bought a blue and an yellow and overdyed the yellow (and I believe some of the blue) to get the color scheme she wanted in the first place.  Gotta love the creative energy in someone like Peg.

Kathy chose a wonderful broken twill pattern in which the weft color shows up the most on one side and the warp on the other.  I really like this pattern and she’s going to have a lovely scarf.

Paige’s eye-popping colors are going to make a cool scarf.  I can hardly wait to see how this is going to look once it has been fulled.  Also, she took the table top loom home with her tonight to finish this scarf because she wants to weave a hound’s tooth like Janet’s, only in different colors tomorrow.  Go Paige!!!  If both she and Janet weave a second scarf tomorrow, and I don’t see any reason why they can’t, then this will be the first class I have taught where I have had students have time to weave a second project of their own – and I will have two doing it!

Nancy is using a combination of wool and sari silk in her scarf and I am loving how it is coming out.  This just looks rich!  It’s like something out of Arabian Nights.

It never fails to amaze me how differently people chose to weave their first scarves.  The colors, the patterns, even sometimes the choices of fiber are so different from one another.  I love walking around and watching the creations being made and marveling over them.  There isn’t one I don’t like.  I am in awe of my students.

I am one tuckered teacher tonight, though.  The several bad storms that wandered through here last night did not make for good sleeping and I started the day not fully rested.  Once I get a load of laundry moved from the washer to the drier, I am going to bed.  Tomorrow is the last day, and tomorrow five newly graduated weavers will walk out of that shop and on to their own lives of weaving.  I know the four that don’t have looms already are looking for them, and I have two of them both staring at the same loom for sale on eBay.  Good luck to them both!

When I arrived at the shop today, I was startled by a mouse in the kitchen, so Susan’s husband and I set out a mousetrap with some bread on it.  Then, I made tea, went upstairs and set up and organized everything.  Two of the looms needed to be moved and at 8:00 on the nose, Kathy showed up and we moved them together.  Soon, I had three students ready to start their day, although I suspect a couple of them were a little bleary-eyed.

The first day is always the hardest on the brain because the students come in knowing nothing and walk out weavers.  They learn all about the loom, the equipment, terminology, how to throw the shuttle, press the weft in gently and evenly, watch their selvedges, feel treadles with their feet, weave tabby, twill, reverse twill (I love messing with their brains) and lots of other things.  Then, in the middle of the afternoon, when they are all tuckered out, I make them play with math formulas and calculators so they would know how much yarn they needed for their scarves.

I wish I had been better at taking pictures.  I got good pictures of two of them while weaving, but Nancy’s face was obscured by the tool box perched on top the castle of her loom, so I need to do a better job tomorrow. But at least I got her at the end of the day showing off her sampler.

That’s a pleased-with-herself smile if ever I saw one.

Then there was Kathy.

She has had a little experience in weaving, all taught to her by her daughter on the fly, so she wanted to start from scratch and pick up on things she might not have learned.  I could tell she was really enjoying herself.

And here she is with her sampler.  Didn’t she do well?

The third student today was Paige.  Her only history with weaving was either a great-aunt or a grandmother (I can’t remember) who used to weave and Paige was given the loom.  But the loom was pretty rusty and after hours of trying to clean it, she had had enough of weaving.  Luckily she had a change of heart because she really picked it up and ran with it today.

Paige is my first student ever to weave off the entire 3 yard sampler.  And she pushed it as far as she could as you can tell by the picture above.

Look how long it was when it came off the loom!  Taking loom waste and take-up out of the 3 yards, she ended up with a 79.25 inch sampler.  I am very proud of her.

And here is Paige modeling her sampler.  She brought lots of stuff from her personal stash to weave with – lots of ends of projects and stuff she had no other real use for and shared her bounty with the rest of the class.

All three are ready for tomorrow and have their yarn and projects all picked out.  They’ll be back at it by 8 in the morning along with the two students who started a couple of weeks ago giving us 5 students for the rest of the weekend.  I’m just hoping the mouse in the kitchen is history by then.

Last night, Scott and I were at the shop until after 9:30 getting two looms completely warped and the third wound on from being threaded earlier.  Scott drew on the next page of Johnny Saturn while I threaded the two looms, then he sat at the front of each of the three looms applying the necessary tension while I was at the back of the loom winding on the warp.  Once I had the warp tied on to the front apron bar and made sure there were no boo-boos (none, thank goodness!), we were finally able to go home.

Tomorrow begins the three-day beginning weaving workshop and I have 5 students in this class (three tomorrow and the other two rejoining the class on Saturday).  It promises to be a hot (90 degrees) and mostly sunny weekend (chance of thunderstorms for Saturday) and I am looking forward to it very much.  I have a couple of hours of work tonight to gather supplies together and load the car, but once that is done, I am ready.

Here is a picture of the two students whom I met with on June 6^th with their samplers.  Don’t they look so thrilled?  I know that Peg, the one on the right, is already putting feelers out for a small, used loom – and that’s after just one day of the workshop.  Go, Peg!!!  Janet, the lady on the left, is a higher math professor at Ivy Tech so weaving is right down her alley.  When we were working on the calculations for warp and weft yardages required for their scarves, Janet flew through them with no trouble.

My goals for after each class is to redye Roxie’s T-shirt – Friday night, dye; Saturday night washout and dry; Sunday evening applying image and packing for the trip to Oregon.  Poor Roxie has been so patient with me, but she has been my guinea pig on this and I will be offering several designs with additional stuff on them very soon, now.

So, do I get to rest on Monday?  Nope!  I have a nuclear stress test on my ticker bright and early Monday morning and as I have to be at the hospital at 7:30, I don’t even get to sleep in.  No worries, though, I have to endure these tests every other year and this is the year for the next one.

I am hoping that next week is a bit less hectic for me.  My only real goals are to catch up the cooking, cleaning and laundry, and to get Herald warped up for my own weaving pleasure.  Since Scott and I disassembled and move the Herald loom downstairs, I’m only putting on a short warp (about 5 yards – enough for a couple of scarves) to retune him before loading him down with a longer one.  Gosh, I can’t wait to get my hands on a shuttle for some serious weaving of my own once again.  I have missed it something fierce!

So, here’s to a busy and productive weekend.  Let’s have some fun with it, eh?

As promised, here are pictures of the shirts Sandy and I dyed on Sunday.  We think they are a resounding success – as have other people because between Sandy and me, we have orders for 13 more shirts as soon as we can get them done – and 11 of them were ordered before 8:00 this morning!  There is only one failure among the shirts, and it was an experiment that didn’t work as planned.  I’ll show it to you last, before the fabric.

Sandy and I both liked the V-fold design from the DVD, so we ended doing more of them than any.  Let me say this, before I go further – Sandy’s color sense is a lot more uninhibited than mine is.  I don’t think mine are as interesting as much as I think I have a definitely more subtle design sense than she does.  It’s so much fun watching her apply color because she is so much freer with it than I am.

Sandy’s V shirt.

My V shirt.  And, BTW, this is a size MEDIUM!!!  I can now wear a medium!!!  Woohoo!!!

Then, Sandy wanted to do a spiral, but she couldn’t decide where to start it, on the chest or further down, so I said why not both?  And we did!  This one is a double spiral that Scott calls pinwheels.  I named this one Pinwheel Fireworks.  And for you fellow spinners out there, please notice the design is an S on the front and a Z on the back.

Then, I’ve always been fascinated at the wildly different designs you can get from just scrunching up the fabric in a random manner – sort of like creating a Rorschach pattern in dye on a T-shirt.  Can you see the cat’s face in the middle of this one?  I like this method a lot!

And then, there’s my failure.  Roxie ordered a shirt with the I Spin, I Weave, I Dye in Latin on it, and I offered to dye to pink.  Well, guess what – the image bleeds through to the back.   So, I will be redyeing Roxie’s shirt, then applying the image.  This one will go into my “Lesson Learned” box and I may wear it for Dye Day.

Now on to the fabric.  Remember, this fabric is 50% Cotton/50% Bamboo and we tore it into one-yard lengths before washing and dyeing.  They are no longer 1 yard lengths, though.  Next lesson learned is to wash the fabric in hot water BEFORE tearing into the 1 yarn lengths.  Rats!

This first one we forgot to soak in the soda ash solution first, and it’s not as bright as the others, but for all of that it is my favorite.

Next is the one you saw in the last post that was folded up like an X and we dyed each corner a different color.  This is my second favorite.

And last is one where we were just squirting left-over dyes from various bottles on to see what it would do.  It was folded identically to the first one, but we needed to apply more dye to this one as there is too much white on it.  Scott says this one reminds him of sound waves and I can see that, especially in the top turquoise line.

All of this took about 8 hours on Sunday, but we spent a lot of that mixing everything, washing all the fabric and T-shirts and watching the DVD so we would know what we were doing.  We were dog-tired, but it was fun and we have another dye session coming up on July 5^th.  I’ll be adding dyed shirts to the store and you’ll be able to order them with or without certain images on them like the Latin phrase and the Men of Peace and Woman of Peace designs.

I now have four, handspun by me, yarns available in the shop.  The first is the Blackwatch yarn I told you about.  Make sure you click on the pictures to see them at a larger size for more details.

Blackwatch Handspun Yarn
1,120 yards - fingering/sport weight - 50% merino/50% fine wool - This is a 2-ply, handspun yarn with the navy ply being merino and the green ply being fine wool. This is about 1 pound of yarn and should be enough to make a sweater vest for someone of size large or smaller. Also, this would weave up into a lovely shawl or into enough fabric to make a vest. This is a lot of handspun yarn for the price.
Available Qty: 1
Price: $99.00

The next is a skein of handspun Romney in a sweet turquoise, peach and gray colorway.

Summer Morning Handspun Yarn
This is a sport weight yarn of 100% Romney spun by Benita Story out of fiber hand dyed by Amy King of Spunky Eclectic. There are 245 yards in this skein and it weighs 113 grams.
Available Qty: 1
Price: $30.00

Third is a wonderful orange, yellow, red and brown, 100% Corriedale yarn that was a dream to spin.  I named it after the song of that name from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds as sung by Justin Hayward of Moody Blues fame.

Forever Autumn Handspun Yarn
This is a lace/sock weight yarn of 100% Corriedale spun by Benita Story out of fiber hand dyed by Amy King of Spunky Eclectic. There are 513 yards in this skein and it weighs 114 grams.
Available Qty: 1
Price: $35.00

And the last is a wonderfully soft 100% Finn handspun yarn in a soft blue, green and purple colorway that I had to think twice about selling.

Acadia Handspun Yarn
This fingering weight, handspun yarn by Benita Story is 100% Finn out of hand dyed by Amy King of Spunky Eclectic. There are 524 yards in this skein and it weighs 108 grams.
Available Qty: 1
Price: $35.00

Please go and check out the rest of the items in the store, including T-shirts, spinning fiber, and a 3 yard piece of handwoven fabric that wants to go to a good home and be made into something.

Remember the post where I told you about donating my glass yogurt bottles to a local glass painter?  Well, I wanted to show you a couple of pictures of what she does.

And

She doesn’t have a web presence and has no place at this time to sell them, so I have suggested Etsy to her as well as a free site like Wordpress.  I think her work is wonderful and see every reason for it to make her some additional income.  What do you think?

I can hardly wait to see what she can do with the milk bottles.  I’m saving up several and will take a load to her in early July.  To help an artist like this find an audience is a priviledge!  I’ll keep you up with how things work out for her.

(Edited 6/11/10 – I have my five test spinners, now, and I thank you very much for this.  This is going to be fun, informative and a real education for me.)

I am looking for 5 spinners who are willing to test spin and ply the rovings I have for review purposes.  I will send you an ounce of each of 5-6 different rovings (of different grades and colors) that you will spin and ply then take pictures of the finished product and submit those pictures and a written review to me to post on my site (I will email a form for you to fill out with specific questions, plus an area for your own opinions).  If you want to then knit, crochet or weave them into a swatch, or dye them and take pictures of that, too, that would be great.  I am looking for details such as spinability, suggested use for the yarn, what you like/don’t like about it and so on.  The more information, the better.

Spinners are needed of all levels, from beginner to experienced, so please let me know your spinning level.  Of the five who test spin for me, I will send 4 ounces of the fiber liked best (individual choice) as a thank you gift for helping me out.  If you are chosen, then the deadline for spinning, plying and submitting the pictures and review will be one month, so you’ll have plenty of time to get this done.  Please sign up only if you are willing to get this done within the time frame.

Thanks for your assistance with this project.  I will have more test trials of different products coming up later, so there will be several opportunities to help me out in the near future with different yarns, fibers, patterns, tools, etc.  Yes, I have lots in the works.