I've done a few more shenanigans with the spinning angle changes conundrum - and here are pictures for you to look at.

Here's a pic of yarn before steaming:


and of a second bit of yarn after steaming:


and the same yarn used as weft for weaving a sample:

[caption id="attachment_2887" align="alignnone" width="640"] Weft is running vertically here, and the thing is quite weft-faced plain weave (I only had a puny frame with huuuuge warp spacing for the quick test...). I'd have preferred a more balanced plain weave, but well. Maybe next time.


In the weaving, the warp yarn was spun to about the same spinning angle, and the same thickness, only in the other direction. (Again - hitting an exact angle and keeping to exactly that angle is really hard, and there will always be digressions.)

So. Can you see differences?

First of all, sorry for the blog silence yesterday - I was away from the computer most of the day, and during the time I did spend physically close to it, we had internet connection issues. These do happen here occasionally, and they are normally no big deal when they do, as they will be over after two or three hours at most... but yesterday, it did mean no access during the time window I had for blogging.

Today is a holiday in Germany, so I had planned to blog yesterday and tell you there'd be no blog post today. Well, plans and how they work out... anyway, this means you are getting this picture today instead of yesterday:


That was my setup on the Long Night for spinning in Dinkelsbühl. It was a wonderful evening with many, many people stopping by for watching the spinning and asking questions. The picture was taken during one of the rare and short moments when there were no visitors there, right at the end of my presentation.

Time really flew by, and the evening was over before I knew it! I loved all of it, and it gave me the opportunity to demonstrate how much of a difference the fibre and the fibre preparation made when spinning on the Great Wheel. I had rolags made from Eider wool (industrially combed, smooth medium-staple wool that I just rolled together with the cards), from Bergschaf wool (industrially carded, crimpier wool with a shorter staple that I rolled together with the cards similarly to the Eider stuff) and from Rouge de Roussillon wool that I carded up from the washed fleece myself. The differences were astounding, with the smoothest, most even thread coming out of the Eider wool and the clumpiest, least even one out of the Rouge. That was partly due to my bad sorting and carding of the Rouge fleece I brought with me, though, and I am sure that with a bit more getting used to that specific fibre, the thread would also have improved a lot.

Demonstrations like these always yield some thread, but they rarely result in wheel spinning output that I'd find acceptable or even good quality. Talking to people to explain the spinning takes away some concentration from the spinning itself, and while I can happily chat along when making my standard yarn on the spindle and distaff, the wheel does take more concentration for me to get a good thread. Another factor is the quality of the rolags that I work with during those demos.

Even though I explain to people during these demonstrations that textile work takes time, and patience is oh so important, I usually skimp on the preparation of the rolags to speed things up a bit. I also make a rolag or two, then spin them up, then explain something else, then make rolags again - and that results in differences each time, which also has an impact. Finally, the combination of explaining and trying to show off the spinning speeds possible with the wheel means I'm not making the best possible thread out of the fibre I have, and switching frequently between spindle and wheel plus carding and combing means it is hard to find the rhythm and workflow for any of these tasks - because obviously, explaining and demonstrating the individual steps and how they work together is much, much more important on these events than making the best yarn possible.

So in case you are at a crafts demonstration one day and have somebody demo-ing with a lot of explanation, you might get to see slightly sloppier work than they normally do, because the priorities have shifted - from working towards the best result possible with the tools and materials available to giving the best explanation and demonstration for you. And that, I'd say, is one of the best reasons that somebody can have for not working up to the usual standards!

It's time again to prepare for a fair - the Ravelry Meetup at Wackershofen is this weekend, and I'm getting ready for it. I will be selling stuff in one of the houses - Haus Frank - where I will share the "Gut Stub" with Margit from Alte Künste.

On Sunday, I'll be giving a workshop in spinning with spindle and distaff.

So, as you can imagine, last-minute preparations are in full gear. Yesterday, I fired new spindle whorls:


so they got sorted today, and now I can restock the spinning kits.

Also on the list for today: find a good transport solution for my lovely new display boards. I made these to finally put an end to the endless and nerve-wracking game of pulling a gazillion samples out of a gazillion boxes and arranging them on a table.


Now I have boards that the gazillion samples can just stay on. These are, thus, incredibly helpful in setting up the table quickly, which is always good. And, of course, in packing up quickly. The boards are made with a black and a white(ish) surface, so I can also display light-coloured things on a dark background:


and the only thing necessary now is some way to transport them safely and securely... so I'll have to find, or cobble together, a suitable box.

One thing that I can tell you for sure: It never gets boring here!

I'm not entering a title, though. I'm not. Because today is somehow... weird. I did manage to get a stack of stuff done, most of it in preparation for the next fairs, but I'm still feeling way behind, and would have liked to be much, much faster. Story of my life.

Parts of that stack of stuff done today include:

Updating and printing my spinning instructions. (While the downloadable version is available for free through my shop, you get the printed-out instructions in the spinning kit, so I need to print some more from time to time).

Getting together with Gillian for a chat - we're planning a crossover blog interview in celebration of the Beast's release as paperback, and it was my turn to get interviewed. I'll have the pleasure of pestering Gillian with questions next week, and you will see the results here on the blog.

Taking photos of the oil lights in action. I'm still totally in love with these things - they have been produced for ages (the three-bladed swimmer has been made, unchanged, since 1808) and they are just so incredibly nice to use, both for atmospheric lighting and for keeping your tea hot. However, the concept of using these swimmers is rather forgotten today, so people often stand in front of the swimmers at my table, looking puzzled. So I obviously need some explanatory thing to sit around on my stall table at a fair - and this, also obviously, needs photographs.

[caption id="attachment_2574" align="alignleft" width="265"] Atmospheric lighting. With a wineglass, a bit of water and some oil... and the swimmer, of course.


[caption id="attachment_2580" align="alignright" width="265"] Keeping tea hot. Because life is better with tea, and tea is better when hot. Obviously, right?


Actually that was the main bits I did today, as these things all tend to eat up more time than you'd guess at first. (Photos, in particular. Never underestimate the amount of time needed to take good photos - especially if they involve tricky lighting conditions. Or gold embroidery.) The rest was eaten up by the usual day-to-day things such as sorting out emails and working on the current paper/presentation projects. And having coffee. Plus tea. Tea was obligatory since I had to take teapot warmer pictures!

I've been washing wool - and since I buy the wool from my suppliers, and sell it on after washing, sorting, and fluffing it up, I need to make sure to do the maths so my prices are okay. And I can tell you... wool maths is special. Also, it tends to make me grumpy, due to all this specialness. Want to share some of the grumpiness? Here you go.

Let's start with the basic inbuilt fudge factor that wool has. This lovely fibre can take up a lot of water before feeling moist, and while this is a glorious thing when you are wearing wool garments or sweating into them is a nasty thing when you are trying to weigh it. I try to make sure my wool is dry, and the weather is not humid, when I am weighing wool or portioning it out - but sometimes, there is no choice, so you have to estimate how much moisture is in the fibre.

So even clean wool can have weight differences due to different levels of humidity in the air. When you have raw wool, though, there's even more fudge factor.

One of the things the raw wool contains (apart from vegetable matter, which in the best case should not be relevant for weight at all) is lanolin. Then there's sheep sweat. In the bits that are usually removed, there can also be feces and urine. And there's also dirt, sticking nicely to the lanolin that coats the fibres.

So when you are buying a raw fleece, you are paying per kilo of fleece - and you might get a much, much lower yield out of your purchase, weight-wise, if things are unfavourable. For instance, if you buy a very dry skirted fleece (all the really dirty bits removed) with no vegetable matter, little lanolin and very little dirt, you can end up with a washed fleece that is about 15 or 20% lighter than the raw one. If, on the other hand, you pay for a fleece that still has a good bit of humidity inside, contains a lot of lanolin and a lot of dirt and has not been skirted fully, you can end up with a lot more loss in weight - up to 50%. That's half your raw fleece weight in washed fibre... which, if you have been counting on a specific amount of fibre to work with, can make for a nasty surprise indeed.

Just the amount of dirt and lanolin alone, by the way, can account for a lot - I've had a well-skirted fleece of about 3.8 kilo lose 1.3 kg of dirt and lanolin through washing; that's almost a third of the raw fleece weight.

Which means if you are buying raw wool, check it out thoroughly: Has it been skirted? Is there a lot of lanolin and dirt trapped between the fibres? Is it dry weather (cool temperatures are always less humid than warm ones) or is it humid? Count on a weight loss of at least 25% from raw fleece to washed fibre to avoid nasty surprises, and remember there will be some more loss when you are prepping the fibre for spinning or felting. When in doubt, do as usual when buying yarn or fibre for a project: add a generous amount on top, as a safety margin.

Wool maths. Grrr.

One of the nice things about events such as the IRM, or other fairs, is that you meet up with colleagues and get to chat with them about all kinds of things. Which includes learning about stuff...

When I met up with the guy who makes my bronze sewing needles and bronze pins, he told me about having had trouble with his arm (which had kept him from working for several weeks); and he also told me about having counted the tools and aids and other items that he uses to make a single humble pin.

Can you guess how many?

Twenty-one. Twenty-one items are used to produce each single pin, ranging from general things such as hammer and anvil and abrading medium to several special items such as the tool to wind the wire into spirals for the heads, and the special tool to compress the wire coils into the nice round shape they are supposed to have.

I think this is fascinating - and it shows again how easy it is to underestimate production procedures for small, everyday things.

There's not only seedlings sprouting, there's also, finally, something new in the shop again: Handmade iron needles!


I was able to buy the remaining stock from someone who made these needles for a while, and they are finally all sorted, polished, and ready to be sold.

Making needles such as these, I've been told, is not easy - there's a lot of breakage when the eye is punched in, for instance.

[caption id="attachment_2330" align="alignnone" width="640"] Closeup of the needle eyes.


That's one of the reasons the needlemaker stopped doing this, so the small stock I have of these needles are all that remain, and probably all there will be. So, like so often when I get my hands on remaining stock, I'm all torn between happiness that I have at least a few of the wonderful items, and sadness that these are the last, and there will be no more of it in the future.

For now, though, there are needles - and I am very happy about that!