 Spinzilla is a yearly competition to see who can spin the most yarn. There are two categories: teams and "Rogue" spinners. There are winners in each category, based on yardage spun. It's all a friendly competition, and registration fees help fund the TNNA foundation, which helps to educate the public about fiber arts. I wasn't so sure I was going to participate in Spinzilla this year. Last year I signed up to participate, and ended up spinning almost nothing. All the emails asking me to submit my yardage were a little depressing, since I was so disappointed with myself. This year, I knew I was feeling overwhelmed with other commitments, and thought it would be silly to add one more thing to my plate. Naturally, I signed up! As I had done in the past, I chose to sign up as a Rogue spinner. I don't usually participate that much on forums, and there wasn't a team close by, so "going rogue" seemed like the best fit. I decided to be gentle with myself this year. Just spin a little bit in the morning and evening, and don't worry about how much yarn there is at the end. I figured that schedule matched my habits anyways. Plus, I thought it would be interesting to see just how much I could spin in a week without really rushing myself. I often spin for projects over very long periods of time, so using this week's spinning as a baseline for future estimates seemed like a good idea.  In the end, I spun 1,708 yards of 2-ply yarn.* Since I don't have many bobbins handy at the moment, I plied as I finished spinning the singles for each colorway. The middle red-orange colorway had one single that was significantly longer than the other, so I plied that with the bits left over after plying on the other colorways, resulting in a few mini-skeins that are slightly different from their "main" color. The fiber is Dorset Horn top from the Woolery, chosen because it was their "special" Spinzilla discount fiber this year. I bought 2 pounds (4 eight-ounce packages), and dyed each one a different color. The two darkest colors are very similar, and then there is a red/orange colorway, and a yellow/orange colorway. There wasn't really a method to the madness when I started dyeing the fiber - I just wanted to use up some pre-mixed dyes that were on the old side! I had a lot of red, orange, and yellow, so that's mostly what I used. The darker shades also have some purple and black in there to get the color to a deep burgundy. I used my guild's spinning wheel, a single-treadle Schacht Matchless, to spin and ply all the yarn. This wheel is really one of my favorites to spin on, since it goes so fast. Lately I've been experimenting with double drive as a tensioning system, and really enjoy that setup. I'm still undecided as to how I'll use this yarn. It's definitely not a soft-next-to-skin sweater yarn, at least for me. In researching the wool, I thought it would be a good rug yarn, and planned to use it in a warp. It might be a little bit sticky for what I had originally envisioned. I've also toyed with the idea of rug punching with it. Once I took the pressure off myself to break records, spinning for Spinzilla this year was really a lot of fun! *Because of the way Spinzilla gives credit for yardage, this is actually 5,124 yards (1,708 yards of single ply, multiplied by two, plus another 1,708 yards of spinning for when they are plied together). That's just under 3 miles of yarn!
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 Last weekend I had the honor of teaching at the Sneffels Fiber Festival in Ridgway, Colorado. On Friday, I taught a dyeing workshop, and on Saturday, I taught a drop spindle workshop.
Naturally, I forgot to take any pictures of my classes, but my friend Sharon managed to sneak a few pictures of the dye workshop. You can read her account over on her blog - Day 1 and Day 2. The marketplace was open on Saturday and Sunday. I did a tiny bit of shopping Saturday during my lunch break, where I picked up some plying silk and sari silk cloud from Phoenix Fiber Mill. I used some of the sari silk cloud in my blending board project - a little goes quite a long way, and I still had some leftover, but it's such a lovely fiber to work with I didn't want to run out! I spent a good bit of time scoping out the other vendors, too, but didn't buy anything because I needed to make sure there was room in my car! The only downside to teaching is that there's a lot of equipment to bring, and not a lot of space for extra cargo on the way home! On Sunday I had an afternoon demonstration of rigid heddle weaving. I think I might have blown a few minds when I described the direct warping process - it really is a lot faster and easier than the traditional warping process! Before and after my Sunday demonstration, I did quite a bit of shopping. I reconnected with Scott from Corn Creek Fiber Arts. He's the guy who taught me to spin on a wheel! I also picked up a merino/silk braid from them. I might have gone a little overboard with fleece purchasing...but more on that later!  As I'm typing this, I'm watching the much-needed rain outside. It's not the torrential downpour of my youth, but a light drizzle. The ground is so dry it's slurping up every drop. Depending on who you ask, we got either .2 or .4 inches yesterday, and are probably going to get about the same today. Here in the desert, we need every little bit.
Speaking of rain...when it rains, it pours. I remembered this month just why I started these monthly reviews last year, as a way to corral the overwhelming number of to-dos on my list. Over the summer I wondered why I was still doing them. It felt like I'd finally gotten my list under control, until about a week or so ago when it all hit me like a brick wall. So - here's what's coming up in October: Rug Hooking/Needlepunch
Knitting
Weaving
Spinning
Studio Space
What are you working on this month? I recently finished a little rug punched piece from loom waste. Instead of turning it into yet another mug rug, I plan to use these instructions to make it into a little bag. Because we all can use another bag, right?
This isn't exactly a solution for the piles and piles of trash we're accumulating on this planet. But it's super nifty. More interesting tech - weaving meets 3D printing. This video from the BBC archives is fascinating - how flax was processed into linen in the 1950s. It's an interesting look - there's plenty of mechanization, but plenty of traditional hands-on work happening too. Wool prices are going up. Yes, that means our yarn is about to get more expensive, but this post shares why that's not entirely a bad thing. Dryers aren't so great for your clothes. The short answer is abrasion weakens fibers. The longer (and really interesting) answer is here.  The last time I blogged about this, it was still yarn. Now it's cloth, and I couldn't be happier with the outcome. Unlike some of my other projects, warping this piece was relatively easy - after two days of warping, and a little bit of sampling, it was ready to weave. As I often do, I threaded the loom for a twill pattern, just to keep my eyes from glazing over while I was threading the heddles. A plain weave structure is typically warped on shafts 1-2-3-4, and then that sequence is repeated until the end of time. For twills, there are endless variations of patterns, but the one I chose was 1-2-3-4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1-2-3-4. The upshot is that there are more pattern possibilities with that complexity, including plain weave. I sampled several twill treadlings, but didn't like them on the cloth. I often find that with a gradient warp like this one (and also this), plain weave just shows off the gradient in a wonderful way. Originally, I had wanted to use a handspun weft in a dark brown. But I wanted to get the fabric woven more than I wanted to wait while I spun more yarn. Instead, I ended up using an olive green wool/alpaca blend that I bought as mill ends. It's 24/2 (laceweight for you knitters), and I bought a 4 pound cone of it that seems like it will never end. Even with about 5 yards of weaving on the loom, I barely made a dent in it.  I originally set the warp at 12 ends per inch, but it seemed too sticky. I re-sleyed the warp at 10 ends per inch in my 8 dent reed (the 10 dent is rusty), double-sleying every fourth slot. It turned out that the yarn was probably a bit too thick for a 12 dent reed, and I probably could have gotten away with 12 ends per inch if I'd started off in the bigger reed. After re-sleying the warp into a different reed, though, I was not in the mood to re-sley yet again. Once I got weaving, there was no stopping me. It took a few days, weaving in one or two hour chunks, and then the warp was ready to take off the loom. I wet-finished it in the washing machine. I was a little hesitant to do so, since even though I have a top-loading washer, it locks as soon as the cycle begins and it's just about impossible to pause the cycle to check on the progress. I set the washer to cool water on the gentle cycle, and selected the "deep water wash" option so there would be plenty of room in the water for the fabric to move around. It still needed a little more fulling once it came out, so I tossed it in the dryer for about 20 minutes, checking on it every five minutes or so. The results look like this:  Because the weft is so much thinner than the warp, but I wove it as a "balanced" weave (10 ends per inch in both the warp and weft), the fabric is fairly thin and lightweight with a really nice drape. I'd been intending to make a Wiksten Kimono Jacket from this, and started to gather fabric for a muslin when I realized how much of a yardage eater it is. My mom (an expert sewer) suggested the Fit for Art Tabula Rasa Jacket instead. I'm currently waiting on the pattern (and most of the extensions) to arrive in the mail. Then I'll make a muslin and hopefully be ready to dive in to actually do something with this fabric!  ~Pamela
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