Spin, spin maiden...

Hiya.

I have been writing only in English lately for a reason. My keyboard is in English, i.e. it lacks essential alphabets for writing. In Finnish at least. It was the foreseeable (but in my case not foreseen) downside of buying it cheap from Amazon UK. Small complications make life interesting I guess.

But yeah, I was supposed to report how my wool project is getting on.

I´m spinning! With the wheel! It´s not as bad as I initially thought, though my wool is a bit gnarly at places even after carding.

And I managed to delegate the carding part to my 8-year old daughter. Success!

I´m not a great fan of carding. It is boring and repetitive job that makes my wrists hurt. For some reason miss M took to it and actually begged me to let her card the whole basket. By all means...

Now our bedtime story time goes as follows: I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows out loud and she cards my wools. When she goes to bed, I start spinning.

She tried some spinning too, but doing three things at the same time isn´t very easy. I promised her a drop spindle and some easier rovings (when I get around buying some. Karnaluks in Tallinn has some nice ones in their webstore) to practise on.

I´m so corrupting that little girl...

Now here is my precious! All cleaned and oiled and ready to go.

Only one bobbin so far, I should try to find more, but it won´t be an easy task, as the whole wheel is hand made...

And this is what happens when you complain about the tediousness of emptying the only bobbin when it gets full... My hubby presents the ingenious diy solution! 

I have no pictures of the actual spinning. But I´ll get to it.

Spinning is very meditative. I´ve taken to watching documentaries or listening to Audible lecture courses while sitting behind my wheel. And I could do that all day.

It makes me calm and happy.

As to what I intend to do with my yarn when it is ready, I´m not sure, but I have this vision of weaving a cloth for an iron age styled dress. It would be a fitting tribute to my old friend, whose wool I suppose I´m handling.

And apparently brown (and black) cloth was highly valued in iron age Finland, as it was lots of work and difficult to get dark coloured yarn. For black you had to dye it twice with two different colours. My friend´s natural dark chocolate brown colour would have looked spectacular those days.

We´ll see.

As a bonus here´s my other work in (slow) progress. Very wide tablet weaved band for a friend´s harmonium. So the band is meant for (drum roll) - a band!

Material is all flax and the design is modified from the absolutely fabulous book Applesies and foxnoses by Maikki Karisto and Mervi Pasanen. I´m not very happy with the colours but we´ll see how this plays out...

Oh, and the headline of this text is from a Finnish folksong. It goes like this: 

Spin, spin maiden, tomorrow you´ll get a young man/ Maiden spun and spun, but no young man came...

Still woolgathering

It has been a few days since my previous posting about washing wool. Turns out it takes two days to dry the stuff (at least in the autumn, when air is heavy and not very warm)

Also, dish soap won the round, no contest. It needed less rinsing and left no residue, so wool was easier to fluff and thus dried faster. I washed some more the next day, and they are dry now, but those wools that used pine soap and marseille soap are still damp at places.

Here you see the damp, still a bit soapy (after 5 rinsings) wool

And here´s some better dried wool from the first patch.

This is the second patch. All dry and ready to be carded or combed.

I don´t have wool combs (yet) so I´m using cards (again courtesy of my late granny) to prepare the wool for spinning. As I´m a novice in this preparing stuff, the spinning will be done with drop spindle. 

Here´s some carded and prepared wool and my spindles ready for work. The smaller, top heavy one will do the job here.

Let´s see what becomes of this. Carded wool will result in fluffier yarn, so I think I can´t use it as a warp in my precious loom.

To be continued...

P.S. I´m even more sure that the wool is from my old friend the young alpha ram. It seems to be all one fleece with big white splotch in the middle. Just like he used to have.

Packed in wool

Next sign of my insanity after all the knitting is (well, has been for a while) spinning and weaving.

During the summer hubby and I built a warp-weighted loom for me and some days ago I begun my upgrade from drop spindles to a spinning wheel. Meaning I went and confiscated my late grannies spinning wheel from the shed it has been kept since she died couple of years ago. More of it when I get to working on cleaning it. And my precious loom certainly deserves attention. But today my agenda is washing wool.

I dragged home a cardboard box of raw wool, mainly from a black Finnish sheep. It has been sitting in the attic at least fifteen years, so I´m not altogheter sure I can salvage it.

Here we are! First I cleaned the wool by hand (and the smell was pretty ripe and sheepy, I´ll tell ya... Handling 15 year old sheep poo... mmm...)

Nice and greasy. 

I love spinning raw and only lightly washed wool, but these I will wash pretty thoroughly in case there are insect eggs e.g. in the mix. Also Spinning wheel requires clean wool, if I ever get that far...

Here they are! Three buckets and three experiments.

This one has dish soap

This one Marseille soap

And this one traditional pine soap.

Water is as hot as the tap gives and all three patches soak for an hour or so.

Here´s the patch with dish soap going for rinsing. Lift ´em gently...

...And put to hot, clean water to soak for a couple of minutes.

Draining the wool without squeasing it.

The colour of the first rinsing water. I used three and the last one was kind of extra, as it was clear enough the second time.

Here´s the ingenious drying apparatus. Tomorrow I will see what becomes of it... 

The wool is a trip down the memory lane, as my grandfather kept sheep, and I spent a lot of my time with them when I was little. I know how to feed newborn lambs, how to help in the lambing and know that the stupid sods follow the alpha of the herd anywhere. I´ve seen them go to a muddy river when the alpha fell there and of course they couldn´t get out. It took grandfather and my uncle to haul the dimwits out, while my job was to prevent the rest of herd following their mates down the steep bank. Luckily our herd wasn´t very big.

I helped in the lambing many times, but once I had to fly solo with the job. I think I was maybe six years old. 

Grandfather (and my parents and uncle) were away and I was home with my grandmother. One of the ewes started lambing, and seemed to have some trouble. (most ewes needed help in lambing anyway, at least the first timers) Grandmother was fat and had bad feet, so I was the one who climbed in the pen and helped the lambs out with a warm towel (helps to get a grip and good for cleaning the tiny one after they are out). There were three of them.

I had a special black and horned ram, who followed me and loved petting. He was the alpha of a herd of yearling rams and had a passionate love affair with a half-brother of his. Brother was lazy, fat and unflappable white ram, who didn´t seem to mind in the slightest when my friend the fiery alpha mounted him at least once a day. Seeing yearling rams mount each other was a usual sight, but that was the only time when they seemed to have monogamous relationship. And one with a very clear roles of top and a bottom. 

I miss my black ram. He had Personality and was smart for a sheep.

As grandfather died, my uncle and father gave up keeping the sheep. I was very angry, when they started downsizing the small herds by slaughtering the yearling rams. It was the logical first step, I know. The yearling rams were due to be eaten soon anyway, but grandfather had promised me my friend (and his beloved) would be spared.

Come to think of it, my wool might actually be his.