2012 GLASG Dye Festival: Follow Up Post 2

I realized I haven't given an update about how the rest of my Dye Festival yarn turned out after the last follow up post.

Dye Day 2012 Follow Up Post 1

I spun some samples and spun up one of the 2 oz braids that I painted on Dye Day.

The samples turned out like this:

First Drum Carding Experience

In April, I borrowed a Fancy Kitty Fine Drum Carder from GLASG to card up some mohair. I admit what I did was a bit wasteful, but here goes:

I started with 4 oz of drum carded mohair I got from GLASG's Secretary, Loan Nguyen.

This is beautiful on its own, and Loan already spent the effort to drum card it, which is why I think what I did was wasteful. I had ideas other than just spinning it up for this pretty fiber.

I also had 1 oz of undyed 50/50 cashmere and silk just sitting around, and I wanted to blend the cashmere and silk in with the mohair. I first dyed the cashmere/silk into a pretty lavender color, then carded all of them together about 3 times. It was a process. The carder could only handle 1.25 oz of fiber at a time, so it took 4 batts to card up everything. I then layered the batts and fed them through the carder again. I did this twice. The result was kind of unexpected.

I expected a mild purple-ish blue color, since the mohair to cashmere to silk ratio was 8:1:1, but instead, the cashmere/silk color dominated the batt, so you could hardly tell there were 4 oz of light blue mohair in the batts. The batts ended up like this:

Here's an over exposed version:

Sorry, I need better lighting.

In any case, you can see there's hardly any blue left in the batt.

For now, my plan is to attempt brushed mohair yarn. The plan is to spin all the carded mohair/cashmere/silk into lace weight singles, WPI 60 or so, and spin up 5 oz of tencel into WPI 60 singles as well, then ply. After that, I will try brushing out the mohair with a slicker brush. If that doesn't work, maybe I will knit it up first then brush out the mohair.

Once I spin this up, I will post results.

Overall, drum carding was surprisingly simple and I didn't feel there's a need for extensive classes on how to drum card. I feel it's something you can just "wing it". All I had to remember was to not put too much fiber through the carder at one time. The batts I made, because they were carded over and over again very carefully, they are smooth like babies' butts. I'm rather excited about the idea of spinning them up.

Follow up to GLASG Dyefest and my wool combing experience.

I said I was going to do a follow up but obviously I was super lazy...

In any case, here goes:

The dye fest yarn I tried to make into projects.

The red one turned out great:

I made it into a beaning. Someone offered to buy the beaning off my head! Of course I didn't sell it. It's the first slouchy beanie I made with my first hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn. How could I possibly sell it? It looked like this:

The blue yarn was dyed this beautiful purple-blue, but unfortunately it was my very first skein of yarn, and it was lumpy beyond belief. The cowl I tried to make with it looked so extremely ugly I destroyed evidence of both the yarn and the project. I will pretend it never existed. I still have pictures of the yarn... so here goes:

The Dorset I hand-combed, hand-spun, and hand-dyed, I haven't used. I unsuccessfully tried to dye it two different shades of brown, and it didn't turn out well, so I overdyed it with Wilton black. 

I didn't like this color break initially, but it's growing on me. I want to see what it'll knit up like, but I haven't gotten to it yet. 

GLASG Dyefest Recap

Last Saturday was GLASG's Dyefest. I had a great time!

My friend wanted to join GLASG earlier and come with me, but we did not find out that this is the one day where a person can't just show up to a meeting and join on the spot, so my poor friend missed this year's Dyefest. We will probably do our best to make next year's Dyefest. 

Everyone's lovely products. The two on the left are mine.