Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2015 från Spin-Off

Check your local retailer for these necessities. If you have new product information you would like to see included in Get This!, please contact us at spinoff@interweave.com. Greenwood Fiberworks 50% yak/50% silk top is 100% luxury. With cashmerelike softness, it has lovely sheen and great depth of color from its dark undertones. Shown here in the Fields of Flowers colorway; also available in bundles of 1 ounce each of coordinating colors. $36/4 oz. Greenwood Fiberworks, www.greenwoodfiberworks.etsy.com; www.greenwoodfiberworks.com. The Pocket Bucket from Chicken Boots is a perfect project bag for spinning. The stiff fabric bag is freestanding, perfect for holding fiber at your side while you work. Translucent vinyl pockets around the outside are perfect to hold tools you want to keep close at hand. Shown in Night Flight. $56. Chicken…

When you spin your own yarn, a whole universe of possibilities becomes available to you. You can control the color, weight, texture, content, number of plies, and more. Handspun yarn comes in all shapes and sizes, and each has its uses. They also have varying desirability for spinning: singles are by far the easiest to spin, but they are not always the easiest to use, nor are they front-runners in a strength contest. When you start adding plies, you add more options and opportunities. With these options, you need to make more choices in your spinning. Take three-ply yarns for example: Do you ply from three separate bobbins? Or do you Navajo- or chain-ply from a single bobbin? Do you use three of the same singles, or do you mix…

A reaction to color is one of the fastest, most visceral responses we have to fiber. We often pass up seemingly flat solid-colored fiber in favor of hand-dyed rovings and multicolored fiber with depth and variation. Who hasn’t seen a luscious dyed roving or dreamy batt and wanted to dive into all that glorious color? Yet sometimes it can be hard to figure out what to do with one of these beautiful creations without muddying or losing some of the color we first responded to. Other times, you may find that you have some more muted solid-colored fiber in your stash that just isn’t calling to you colorwise. In these cases, optical ply blending can come to the rescue, and that flat, solid color can be the color hero of…

I like texture. Not flamboyant or dramatic texture—I’m more intrigued by modest, subtle texture. So when I spin textured yarns, they are on the quiet side. Many textured handspun yarns (which you may also know as novelty, designer, or art yarns) are created with sewing threads or millspun “core” yarns, by manipulating the texture of the singles, by adding nonfiber objects to yarns, or by combining twist directions in interesting ways. But it is also possible to create textured yarns with ordinary Z-spun singles. All you have to do is take the “rules” for creating a nice, consistent balanced two-ply yarn . . . and then break those rules. Typical guidelines for a smooth two-ply yarn include: • Similar twist and thickness of the singles being plied together • Equal…

We spinners can choose our raw materials from breeds of fiber animals with diverse fiber quality and a myriad of natural colors. But there’s yet another choice—different colors within a single fleece. Imagine an artist’s palette of color from one animal’s coat! THE SEARCH FOR SPOTS BEGINS As a designing knitter, I relished having a yarn store’s shelves of thirty colors of a single yarn base to use as my palette. As a spinner, I found the amazing range of natural colors in fiber animals irresistible. Realistically, thirty fleeces of different colors seemed unlikely for me to process, so fleeces with variegation offer me the most colors for the time spent washing. The visual impact of multicolor fleece is alluring. Jacob sheep’s dramatic black and white colored areas offer incredible…

Do historic textiles set your heart racing? The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., has settled into its new home at the George Washington University. The museum’s extensive collection of textile artifacts from around the globe has drawn researchers and enthusiasts to the capital for decades. Begun in 1925 by George Hewitt Myers with just 335 objects, the collection grew quickly but was still housed in the Myers’ historic residence until last year. In 2011, the museum announced that it would join the George Washington University, beginning a process to relocate the exhibits and collections to the George Washington University campuses. The move afforded the opportunity to design state-of-the-art storage areas for the museum’s nearly twenty thousand textile objects. The new exhibit site opened this spring on the university’s Foggy Bottom…

Chevron and zigzag patterns are not just knitters’ motifs. They have been reinterpreted by artists, both ancient and modern, time and again in many mediums. Whether on pottery, in architecture, or embroidered on cloth, these symbols are common to many different cultures around the world. The famous chevron columns of Durham Cathedral in the north of England inspired this cowl, which is knitted as a tube with alternating colors and a bit of texture. Designing a yarn to meet a grand plan is one of my favorite aspects of handspinning. I choose not only the color of the yarn to create a piece but also its texture, drape, and character. For this project, I designed a cowl with undulating stripes made with two yarns, one airy and sheer and one…

When I first learned to spin, back before there were trees, I learned to make a classic worsted yarn—fiber drafted forward, no twist in the web, plied to a 45-degree angle. My spinning teacher, a Norwegian immigrant to Canada, believed quite firmly that there were only two ways to spin: worsted and wrong. And that is exactly how I spun until I had a burning desire to spin cotton. Imagine my surprise when I just could not spin it. Nothing in my quite successful (and very isolated) worsted spinning career had prepared me for short, crimpless fibers. I struggled and adjusted, tried, and tried again. Nothing but dismal failure. Finally, over time, much time, I developed my own secret way (I thought I was cheating) of spinning cotton. It wasn’t…

There are several methods of blocking to get your lace to be all that it can be. Steam-blocking doesn’t work very well for lace; it is important to let the lace object soak for at least 15 minutes in a hot bath so the fibers have time to absorb all of the moisture they can. This helps prepare the yarn to be shaped the way you would like. The basic mechanism of blocking is the same regardless of whether you have begun with a delicate singles or the strongest of strong multi-ply yarn. Once those stitches have been locked together, the fabric becomes stronger, so you can generally stretch the piece with no problems. A good swatch comes in handy to test the strength of your yarn before you’ve spun…

During a recent group discussion concerning plant fibers, the question was asked, “Just what is rope? I mean, how do you define it?” Things got lively as various answers were presented, running from “it’s fat string” to “something you tie up the dog with.” Within this article, we hope you find useful answers concerning ropes and how rope is made, and acquire interesting trivia to wave about whenever the conversation lags. DEFINING ROPE “Rope” needs definition. This isn’t easy because there are so many definitions—legal, historical, and technical. In terms of handmade rope, or what you might find at the local hardware store, rope is a collection of fibers or elements individually twisted in one direction and then twisted together in the same direction. The process of joining the elements…

Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do professionally. I have been teaching since 1999 at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. My research and teaching interests are in cultural geography, specifically in gender and women’s lives in different cultures and various places. How and when did you learn to spin? I first tried spinning when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the highlands of central Ecuador. One of the women showed me how to spin wool on a spindle, but I was so bad at it that first time that she quickly took it back from me. She needed good yarn for weaving, not the bumpy thick-and-thin stuff I made. I really learned to spin in about 2009. A good friend of mine was a wheel…

Q How do I spin more consistent yarns? Even using the same pulley, my yarns tend to get thinner and thicker as I spin. How can I keep the diameter and twist steady over multiple spinning sessions? A A good strategy to maintain a consistent thickness (diameter) and twist in your singles as you spin is to intermittently test them; that is, compare the singles you are spinning to some reference or measurement. It may help to first identify the factors that influence thickness and twist. Thickness Factors: The thickness of the singles you spin is dependent on only one thing: the amount of fiber you draft. Your hands are in direct control of the thickness of the singles you spin. The point where the unspun fiber starts containing twist is…

Corespun yarn is constructed by wrapping fiber around a central strand of prespun plied yarn. The resulting yarn has a resilience and unique beauty that can be hard to match. From hats to shawls to cowls to garments to rugs, the possibilities are endless when it comes to using corespun yarn as accents or even for crafting an entire knitted, crocheted, or woven project. What happens when you corespin? We have all done it by accident once or twice in our everyday spinning: when you are spinning fine singles, a bit of loose fiber spontaneously jumps from our lap and is snagged by the spun yarn, enveloping the previously perfect singles. In corespinning the wrapping is intentional. The outer fiber is captured and wrapped around the core as the wheel…

When we think of the classic Orenburg lace, the yarn we envision is composed of one strand of fine handspun goat down and a second strand of very fine plied silk yarn. Yet this unusual yarn seems to have been developed less than two centuries ago. The women of the Orenburg region of Russia developed their own particular spinning techniques based on economy of motion and overall simplicity, which fascinated those in the American spinning community. The first American article about Orenburg crafts appeared in the May/June 1995 issue of PieceWork magazine. Written by Melanie Falick, this article gave a brief history of Orenburg’s rich textile heritage in general and Orenburg’s knitted lace tradition in particular. Starting in 1996, I began traveling throughout the United States teaching classes featuring the…

How should you ply your yarn? Underply, overply, or balanced ply? There’s no easy answer: it all depends! Specifically, the amount of twist you put in your plied yarn depends on how that yarn is going to be used. If you are spinning a yarn for a lace shawl, you might spin a soft, fine singles and ply it with very little twist. A yarn the same size could be spun with more twist and overplied to make a strong, sturdy sock yarn. If you plan to spin a balanced plied yarn, the amount of plying twist you need is determined by how much twist you put in your singles. Softly spun singles will ply gently; singles with more twist will produce a firmer plied yarn. If you are not…

When Sara Lamb came to teach at the 2014 Fibre-East festival in Bedfordshire, England, she expressed a wish to visit a working silk-spinning mill. “I’ve read a lot about the process of industrial spinning of silk. Not reeling, spinning,” she said. “But I rarely see any photos of these mills, just photos of reeling mills. As a spinner, and as a person who had recently written a book on how to handspin silk, I wanted to see the industrial side of the process.” We were told that the Camenzind silk-spinning mill producing fine “Swiss Mountain Silk” in Gersau, Switzerland, stood as one of the last silk mills in Europe. Nicole Camenzind said we could indeed tour the mill, and thus the adventure assembled. When the time for the trip arrived,…