For a great many of those years I posted on a regular basis ( usually at least once a week) but lately I seem to have drifted away from here and have not posted with much frequency. Perhaps I will regain my enthusiasm soon, or perhaps it has run its course. I guess only time will tell.
It is not that I have been idle, I have simply been lax in documenting the things that have taken up my creative time. But, while I am here I may as well show you what I have been up to lately. I seem to be drawn more to spinning and knitting these days. I recently finished this sweater, it is cotton. I did not have a "sweater's worth" of the grey so I used some reclaimed yarn I had (in a post some time ago I showed how I had taken apart a sweater and dyed the resulting yarn) the blue denim-ish looking colour you see is that yarn....I kinda made it work, so the sleeves are a little different. I am actually quite happy with the way it turned out and more importantly it fits great.
I am still in the process of learning about spinning, while I have spun some fibre and am gaining confidence, my goal is to begin spinning yarns that I can actually knit with and like in the days when I began quilting, I am experimenting and finding out what works and what doesn't.
So far I have found that many of the tools associated with spinning can be rather expensive. A case in point is a Hackle. I wanted to experiment with blending fibre and creating the combed top I would spin into yarn, but soon discovered that a Hackle would run me $200 or more. What is a hackle? it is essentially a piece of wood with strong metal tines that you can use to separate and blend fibre. how hard could it be to make? I decided to give it a try.
I started with a discarded piece of wood (looks to be from a frame maybe) I went to the hardware store and bought the longest finishing nails I could get. ( 4" ) In order to get my spacing fairly even, I first marked the increments on a piece of masking tape. I laid the tape in place and began drilling smalls holes at each point.
note the block of wood, it was there to prevent me from drilling into my desk
then it was just a matter of hammering the nails through each drilled hole
I will likely try making another, this time placing the "tines" a little closer and see if I can find a thinner nail, BUT this actually works pretty good. (oh...and it cost me $1.43 to make) I tried blending some white and red merino.
I did not have a proper "Diz" to pull the fibre through, but that plastic knitting gauge worked just fine
now to give it a test spin.
