a quickie

Here are my hats - the red one is a combination of rust/red huacaya and the white is from suri.  The two green hats are highlighted with silk hankies and these were all done on a lissome ball.  I'm going to try and do one a day for a while because it's actually a lot of fun especially when it comes to putting the nylons on the fiber-wrapped ball to hold the fiber in place while it gets bounced to start the felting process.

Hats for the last few days

And yarn.  I'm plying the singles I spun up last year at the Redmond Market - around making a few more hats.  I had some leftover hearts from a scarf I made a while ago and they worked perfectly as prefelts.  This is a bit on the small side, but I think it's cute.

I've got the pictures of the start of this when it looked like a big, green, fuzzy blob, wrapped in the nylons and this is what it looked like as soon as I took it off the ball.  The shiny stuff you can almost see inside is from the thin layer of silk hankies I used.

Here is my son, Edyk, modelling (mainly so he can stay up and watch some TV).  The highlights from the hankies are a bit more visible.  This is also after it took a "hand wash" tumble in the washer (front loader - yay).

Finalist with Camelid Quarterly

This is going to be a quickie - I just found out that my "Suri 'n Silk" felted scarf made it into the finals of Camelid Quarterly's Natural Fiber Showcase.  I'm amazed because the picture was not good (alright it was really bad) and the other entries are so gorgeous.  Anyway - it's there in www.llamas-alpacas.com/showcase if anyone wants to check it out.

Now that we're back in the house, sort of, I'm starting work again on suri 'n silk as well as other scarves and hats and such.  I've got about a month before the market season really gets going!

the pictures say it all

I think everyone got tired of my grumping about everyone sitting on their butts while I worked!
Edyk is spinning, he turned out his first 1.5 ounces of 2-ply merino yarn yesterday. Roman is running alpaca fiber through our PG Triple Picker and Tim is working on his NZAK circular sock machine.

And the momentum continues

I didn't fib - the pile of fiber at the end of my last post went into this lattice scarf.

I ran it in my felting machine for 10 minutes, unrolled it and rolled it in reverse and ran it another 10 minutes to get it to this stage. I laid out a single layer for all the lattices except where they intersected. At those points another "shingle" of fiber was laid down for extra strength.

Once I got it started I put it in my Laundry Alternative spinner:

I thought it made a cool kind of "spin art" (-:

I hand fulled the piece and there was significant shrinkage. The red, dyed huacaya, fulled much more easily than the black, natural black huacaya. It has been a while since I did some hand fulling and watching and feeling it shrink as I worked it was very rewarding.

After this I worked on hand fulling my test suri scarf and now I'm considering needling it for a while. If it responds to that I'm thinknig that a Felt-o-Matic by Dianne Stott to speed that part of it up might be a good investment. Since I'm serious about focusing on suri it could be a good investment.

Finally this is a scarf I started today - started this on the felting machine and this shows the shrinkage from hand fulling with the bubble wrap and the wash board.

Edyk spinning merino roving

Edyk, our youngest son, has decided that spinning is a good idea. I'm not sure if it's because he knows he can watch TV while he does this, genuine interest or what. But he started spinning on Thursday. He carded the alpaca with my hand cards, put the drive band in place (a tricky maneuver) and worked his way through the fiber he carded. He wouldn't let me take a picture of it and I thought that was it as far as his spinning adventure was going to go.

To say I was surprised when he asked where the roving we bought a while ago was is an understatement. Last night I had offered to let him use that roving until he was comfortable with spinning, but I really didn't expect much. The pictures tell the whole story.

I'm wondering how long it's going to take him to ask to use my e-spinner?

finally, back in business

We got a new camera last night so I'm back in business updating the blogs today!

I'm trying to do seasonal scarves this year and this is my first. As you can see it's a bit thin at the edges, but with some hand work ala Lori Flood (I had a fantastic felting workshop with her last August and learned a ton of things, including how to encourage the fiber to migrate to the thin spots).

The other end is much more stable, but I still did quite a bit of hand work on it to make sure it shrank evenly along the length. I also wanted to make sure that the hearts were firmly in place.

I made the hearts as prefelts - I needle felted almost a dozen in a variety of colors for the scarves I'm going to work on the rest of the week.

Here's the scarf after doing a few minutes of fulling by hand. You can see how much it's shrunk compared to where I started. And the ends both look nice and solid. My one quibble is that the one end that was on the inside for the last roll on the machine shows the bubble wrap pattern vs the other end.

I was going to throw it a bit to see if I can beat the pattern out, but I'm pretty happy with it as is so I'll probably leave it and start my next one.

My next scarf is going to come from this pile of fiber