The Great Lakes Fiber Show

I went to the Great Lakes Fiber Show today in Wooster, Ohio. I saw some animals, including alpacas:

 

and sheep:

 

and I bought too many fleeces:

 

No, those aren't ALL mine, but combined with what I picked up at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, it feels like I have that much stashed away in my garage.

 

I also picked up some mohair and some angora. I don't know why I bought mohair, it's so expensive, and I don't really like it that much. But I did get a really good deal on it. Angora is expensive, too, but if you blend it with other things, you can get the benefit without feeling too much bite in the wallet.

 

I have a lot of work ahead of me to get all of that wool washed and combed/carded/dyed/spun. Good thing I like it so much.

 

Flax to linen experiment - Spinning the flax

Here is the latest installment on my growing flax for linen experiment. It all started last spring with the planting of the flax. Over the summer it grew, and in the fall I harvested it. After processing the flax plants into flax fiber, I am ready for the next step: spinning the flax. All of the previous steps are documented in various posts which can be found here.

Here is the hackled flax that my garden produced. It doesn't look like much, it's only 1.4 ounces, but keep in mind that only 10% of the flax plant results in fiber, and of that 10% only 3% is the, nice, long kind. The other 7% is tow flax. I do still have a little bit that hasn't been broken and scutched and hackled, but I think the whole lot will still come in at under 2 ounces when all is said and done (click on any of the pictures to see them larger):

 

 

Now, I do have a bag full of tow flax which brings the total up to about four ounces or so. The tow flax is what's left in the hackle after hackling the flax. The tow flax is shorter. I'll probably card it up, and maybe experiment with blending in some cotton, and spin that up later.

 

It can't be any courser than the longer flax. I'm not sure if the coarseness and stiffness is due to the quality of my particular garden flax (it grew under near-drought conditions), or that I didn't pull it at the optimum time, or that my retting, breaking, scutching, and hackling leaves something to be desired:

 

 

 Here's my hackle:

 It's an antique, really, made in 1834, but it's still sharp and sound and got the job done. I found it on ebay and paid $70 for it. I don't think anyone still makes these, at least I haven't found any contemporary ones in my searches:

 

 So, my bundle of hackled flax is roughly the length of my arm:

 

 I divided it in half, spun it onto two bobbins, and then plied it:

 

 The resulting skein is about 119 yards long:

 

 It's rough and stiff right now:

 

 

 But the thing about linen is that with washing it will soften and relax. Here's little swatch of linen that I knitted up a couple of months ago with a small amount of the flax that I processed before all the rest:

 

 

 I spun this a little bit finer than my skein above. I'm not a proficient flax spinner, I have lots of room for improvement:

 

 

 You can see that it is a bit 'hairy', but it's soft and flexible: 

 

I'm hoping whatever I make with my little skein will turn out as soft and flexible:

 

I still don't have a loom yet, and anyway, I only have a small amount to work with, so I'll be knitting whatever it is that I'll be making. It'll probably turn out to be a small kitchen cloth/towel. If I wait to see if I get something good out of blending the tow flax and cotton, perhaps I can make something else. In any case, that's the next step in the experiment, and fodder for another post.

Continuing progress in my growing flax for linen experiment

My flax-to-linen experiment continues. A few posts ago, I wrote about pulling the flax I grew this summer in a 5x10 ft. plot. I let the bundles dry for about two weeks:

 

 

When they were dry, I combed the seed pods off with combs I bought at the pet store which are really for dogs. Once the pods were off, over a few days, I mashed them up to release the seeds and winnowed the mess on windy days to come up with about two ounces of flax seeds.

 

It's probably a poor haul, but I think the drought affected productivity. I won't plant these next year, I'll order more for that purpose. These I'll sprinkle in muffins, etc. It's enough for a few batches of muffins, at least:



 

 

After removing the seed pods, I put the bundles of flax in a large plastic container, weighted them down with old paving bricks, and added water. I let them stew like this for just over a week. This is called retting the flax, which basically means getting the outer parts of the plant into a nice, rotted condition so that you can access the stronger flax fibers:



 

 



After the retting was done, I dumped the water out. Wow! What a smell!!

 

I rinsed each bundle with the hose, hoping against hope to rinse away some of that stench, and I now have all of the bundles laid out to dry:

 

 

Once they're dry, I can move on to breaking (breaking away the dried, rotted parts), scutching (swiping away the dried rotted parts that are still clinging to the flax fibers), and combing (with a flax hackle) the flax fibers so that they can be spun. More on all of this in future flax-to-linen posts!

Dyeing with tickseed flowers and marigolds

Dyeing with tickseed flowers today. The flowers are yellow, but they make a pretty orange dye:

 

 

Here is some superwash merino roving in the dye pot:

 

Here is the roving out of the dye pot and hung up to dry, I can't get over that shade of orange:

Below is a wider shot of everything that's hanging to dry. The greens are from yesterday's dyeing.

 

The dark green on the right is superwash Bluefaced Leicester wool that had been dyed blue with Japanese indigo about a month or so ago, and then overdyed yesterday with a yellow dye made from marigolds.

 

The two olive greens are two sections of polwarth roving which I had wanted to dye yellow in the marigold dye pot. However, I wasn't thinking and put them in with the blue roving when dyeing. Apparently some of the indigo must have bled off of the BFL roving and got picked up by the polwarth in the yellow dye bath. The result is the olive green you see. Not my favorite, and not the beautiful yellow I was hoping for, but I will find a use for it: 

 

 

And here is a picture of Japanese indigo blooming in my garden, such a pretty color!: 

 

Pulling flax

I pulled my modest 4x10 foot plot of flax today. I bundled it as I pulled it and then put it in the yard to dry out a bit before further processing. Here I am with my flax before I pulled it =>

 

Here is the flax:

 



 

Here's the plot after pulling the flax:

 



 

 

All the bundles in the wheelbarrow, ready to take home:

 

 

Here are the bundles in my yard. I'll let them dry out a bit before moving on to the retting stage:



 

The first of the flax is in

I pulled a bit of my flax today. This is one of the two bundles I pulled:

The two bundles represent about 1/8 of what I have growing. Keep in mind that only about 10% of the flax plant produces flax fiber, and only 3% of that is the nice, long stuff that can be used to make linen. The other 7% is tow, which is short fibers which can be used to make more utilitarian things (like rope, I think, and probably rough cloth).

I'll be pulling the rest of the flax later this week. I'm just nervous that I'm doing it too soon, so I only pulled these two bundles today. Traditionally, the pulled flax is set in upright stacks which are left to dry in the field for about a week before the retting process begins. I'll let my bundles dry out in my warm, dry garage before heading into the retting stage.

I found a very helpful group of videos about the stages of flax processing, the first of which, about pulling flax, can be found here.

My flax isn't as tall as it could be. Gardening in general has been a bit of a challenge for me this year. The weather has been very hot, and I don't like heat. Keeping everything watered under drought conditions has been a big challenge, and our dog became ill with lymphoma. I spent a lot of time with him and less in the garden. We had to put him down three weeks ago, and I can tell you that it's been really hard. I'm just now beginning to care about the garden again and get back into the swing of things. He was always with me, either helping me outside, or sleeping nearby while I spun or did other wool or fiber work, so everything that I do reminds me that he's not there. Time heals all wounds, they say, so we'll just let time do its thing while I get back into the rhythm of the rest of the world.

On a happier note, my birthday is this month. My husband asked me yesterday what I want, so I'm trying to think of something really good to ask for : )

Growing flax for fiber

I've posted about my Japanese indigo experiment - growing and dyeing with Japanese indigo for the first time. Now I'll begin posting about my flax experiment.

Ever since reading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's, A Midwife's Tale, I've secretly wanted to grow flax, process it, spin it, and weave it into linen cloth. This year, along with my indigo experiment, I decided to finally see if I could grow flax.

I ordered seeds from the Hermitage, a monastery in Pennsylvania that grows flax for linen. I planted my quarter-pound of seeds on one half of my 10x10 plot. The Japanese indigo plants took up the other half. In the picture below, you can see my husband helping me with my second indigo-leaf harvest on the right, and the flax is in the middle of the picture:

My flax is almost ready to harvest, I think I'll be harvesting this week. It's not as tall as it could be - the soil in these plots isn't the best, although I did add manure and lime and alfalfa to it, and the drought hasn't been helpful. But I think it will do just fine for my first foray into the world of flax production.

Processing flax takes time. After harvesting, I'll let it dry out. Then comes the retting; then the breaking, scutching, and combing; and finally the spinning and either knitting or weaving. But I'll get into all of that in future posts if all goes well.

This much flax will not produce very much at all for the purposes of either weaving or knitting, but this time is just for experimenting, to see if I can actually do everything it takes to make linen. If I get encouraging results, I'll plant more in the future. Also, I don't have a loom yet : )

More on the flax experiment in future posts!

Grow Your Own Clothes: The Fibershed Project

Read about The Fibershed Project, textile artisan Rebecca Burgess's one year commitment to wearing clothes made from fibers found within a 150 mile radius of her home, here.

And visit the Fibershed blog, here.

Truly inspiring.

Dyeing wool with dandelions

On Mother's Day, I made my daughter come with me into the park next door to fill a plastic grocery sack with dandelion flowers. My son was happy that he had to work and couldn't join in the fun : )

I used the dandelions to dye a little over 4oz. of wool roving that I had combed up from my Christmas Fleece.

It came out a very nice yellow. I spun half of it into a skein of about 380 yards of two-ply - pictured above.

I only wish I had spun it a little better. It wasn't my best. My intentions were to add it to my slowly-growing inventory of handspuns that I'm going to offer for sale at the two vendor booths I have lined up this summer - one at a craft fair and one at a 'fiber fling' weekend. The quality of the spinning wasn't that great for this particular skein, though, so I might just keep this one for my personal stash.

I'm currently working on the other half of that roving. The first bobbin of what will eventually become a two-ply, is on my wheel right now:

I'm paying more attention as I spin this one. The problem with the last one, I think, was that I had just come off of spinning a four-ply of a different kind of wool and it took a while to adjust back to this type of wool. Hopefully I'll get a sellable skein out of it. We'll see...

Woo hoo!

photo from this site

Sixteen ounces of Gotland sheep's wool just arrived in the mail. This is the same kind of wool that the elvish cloaks in The Lord of the Rings movies were made out of. They're New Zealand sheep. I can't wait to spin it up! I only wish I had a loom so that I could weave some cloth. I'll have to content myself with knitting things out of it. And, of course, I'll put some of the skeins up for sale at my vendor booths when I participate in craft fairs and fiber shows this summer. Maybe I'll make enough money to seriously put toward a loom. I can dream, can't I?

photo from this site