Friday, January 4, 2008

Fiber Friday #1


I've been meaning to do this for a few a weeks, bringing Fiber Friday to the blog!
Each week I'll either be featuring one of my new yarns or someone else's that has a good story. Many fiber-y things are posted and Fridays tagged "fiberfriday", so go over and have a look!


This week I am smitten with First Flurries (the yarn seen in the above banner). I've often thought that snow piles look as soft and billowy as piles of yarn and I finally acted on that inspiration!
It very rarely snows here in East Tenessee. Well, it snows on the mountains, just not here in town. Last week was the first snow and then this week has brought a good bit of it. Last year it only snowed one day, while my little brother from California was visiting. He was thrilled with it and tried to skateboard through it. I was thrilled to get this shot...I love that the snow blurs everything but him.


Last week during our first bit of snow, I pulled out all of my fluffy, undyed fibers along with a bit of gold recycled silk scraps and piled them up.
I considered the various fibers: wool, mohair locks (mill ends), gold recycled silk thrums (long strands), eco spun (made from recycled plastic bottles!) and silk hankies (squares of stretched silk fibers). I knew I 'd want to hold the ecospun with wool, because it's hard to spin by itself, as its just a 'fluff' of fibers and not long parellel fibers. The recycled silk fibers can get a bit whispy if they are plied with something more elastic. All of this helped me decide that one ply should be the non-wool fibers held with a bit of wool, spun a bit tighter, so they'd be secure. The other ply would be wool/mohair spun light and lofty for that soft, snuggly snow feel. The first ply was spun with sections of the different fibers, so that for a few yards it's Ecospun, then silk, then recycled silk. There's no repeating pattern and none of the fibers are throughout the yarn (except the wool). Plied together it makes for a yarn that should knit or crochet into a supersoft fabric that has small stripes of the various fibers.
This is my first time really writing about my spinning process and I wonder, does it make sense? Is it boring to non-spinners or do you like to see the process?

2 comments:

Alpaca Granny said...

Can't speak for the nonspinners, but I thought your discussion of how you spun up that lovely yarn was interesting....

Felicia said...

Beautiful yarn :)