I have to admit now that my weeks involve mostly spinning, they sort of bleed into each other. I’m having a hard time differentiating them; I should have written this back in week seven. I’ll do my best to remember what I did, though my log does indicate I mostly spun.
I did start reading another book: Greek and Roman Dress From A to Z. It’s written in an encyclopedia format, though I’m reading it like any other book – starting at page one and going until I get to the last page. This is how I tend to read encyclopedias and I’ve done this since I was a child; I’m a bit odd, I know. It works for me, especially in this case, because I’m picking up terms I never knew about. This is very helpful when it comes to colors and dyes, which I’ll focus more on next quarter when I dye the yarn I’m currently spinning.
But mostly, I spun. It’s a nice escape from the rest of the world; I put on a podcast and spin for hours, taking breaks to eat and stretch my legs. It can be a little lonely, though. I can see how spinning was an activity that was done in groups, women grabbing their spindles, or later on in history their wheels, and socializing while doing a very necessary activity. Though, before the pandemic, I did have opportunities to spin with other people (of all genders these days!) but I never took advantage of those opportunities. In the end, I’m an introvert.
There’s a different feeling to spinning when I’m spinning for pleasure versus spinning for necessity. I’ve always spun because I enjoy it. Whatever I made was created on my own timeline and was technically something I could find somewhere else. This is not the case now. I am on a timeline and what I am creating is unique. Sure, I could buy fabric and with a sewing machine (and even then that’s not a necessary tool) easily make something resembling a chiton. But it wouldn’t be anywhere near the same. All of this somehow changes the way I feel when I spin. I sort of feel like my spinning wheel is a time machine.
This is where I spend a good chunk of my time
It’s been a fun challenge trying to keep a consistent thickness with my yarn. I’ve only had my wheel for about 6 months and it’s a bit different from spinning with a spindle.
This week was all over the place. I did a little bit of everything. This was the week that I started spinning. I had a good amount of wool prepared to spin and I needed a change of pace; combing wool is a bit, well, boring. I imagine it’s a much more enjoyable activity when in the company of other people. I decided to clean my spinning wheel a bit before I started. Spinning wheels need to be regularly oiled before use, but that oil can accumulate and become messy, which was happening with mine.
My spinning wheel, a Kromski Fantasia. I assembled and finished her myself and painted the wheel to look starry.
I love spinning. One could argue that spinning yarn is not that much more exciting than combing wool, and I suppose they could be right. For me, though, it’s very meditative, and I love seeing the transformation of raw fiber under my fingers. Until recently I have only had drop spindles, which are one of humanity’s oldest tools. I treated myself to a spinning wheel in the spring, though, and I’m glad because if I tried to do this project with only a drop spindle….well, I would spend the entire school year only spinning. The first thing I did before spinning in earnest was spin a small sample of yarn. I want the yarn I weave with for this project to be a fineness of 24 wraps per inch (wpi), meaning that the yarn would wrap around an inch of a ruler twenty-four times. I spun up some of the wool, plied it, and washed it to see if I had put enough twist into it, if I needed to spin finer or thicker, etc. Once I did that, I could officially start spinning my yarn.
If you look closely, you can see that my sample yarn wraps around about 21 times in an inch of space, which makes it 21 wpi. Ideally, the yarn for my project will be 24 wpi. Now I know to spin finer.
I also spent a good chunk of time looking for books this week. I found myself becoming interested in what fiber work looked like inside the home in ancient Greece. There’s a good amount of information about cloth production in the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, but that’s too early and too industrial for what I’m curious about. There is also information about fiber production on a small and large scale in ancient Rome, but while ancient Greece and Rome are often grouped together they are distinctly different. Finding information about “women’s work” in archaic and classical Greece (c. 1000-300 BCE) is oddly difficult. Looking through the bibliographies of the books I currently have has helped, but either the books are in another language or unavailable to me. It’s quite frustrating. Granted, I’m also distracting myself once again from researching ancient Greek clothing. My attention span seems to go everywhere these days.
Washing a wool fleece is no easy task, but it’s good to do before you card, comb, or spin from the lock. A fleece fresh off the sheep will feel greasy to the touch; it’s covered in lanolin, which is sort of analogous to sebum. Lanolin keeps the sheep’s skin moisturized and protects it, along with the wool. It’s quite effective, enough that we use it in skincare products and various ointments. Some sheep breeds produce little lanolin, like Navajo-Churro, and others produce quite a bit, like Merino. Along with the lanolin, there may be dirt, vegetable matter (VM), and fecal matter in the fleece as well; it depends on if the sheep was kept covered (known as coating the sheep) until it was sheared and how attentive the owner of the sheep was.
But even if the sheep was coated, you may still want to get the lanolin out, though there are people who prefer to spin wool with the lanolin in, known as spinning in the grease. For my project I do not want the lanolin getting all over my spinning wheel, so washing was a necessity. I’ve never washed a fleece before, so I read a few different articles about it, sifted through Facebook fiber arts groups to see what others did, and watched a couple of YouTube videos. I took all of what I learned and did my best.
An important fact to know is that lanolin melts at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. When trying to get lanolin out of a fleece, the water should be at least this temperature and shouldn’t fall terribly lower than that, otherwise the lanolin will continue to stick to your wool. Many people will have a large pot and wash the fleece on a stove. You also want some sort of cleansing agent such as washing soda, dish detergent, or specialized wool scour. I don’t have a large pot, so I did my washing in a plastic tub I placed in my bathtub. I ran my water as hot as I could and added to it about two quarts of boiling water. If I ever decide to wash my own fleece again, I am definitely investing in a large pot.
The other important thing to know is that agitating the wool too much in hot soapy water will felt it. I decided to place my wool into a large mesh laundry bag (the kind you would use to wash delicates). This kept the wool together and allowed me to easily move the wool around without actually agitating it much. I could only fit about a pound of wool in the mesh bag, so I did the following process four times over two days.
First, I filled my plastic tub with hot water and some Dawn detergent. I then placed the mesh bag full of wool into the tub carefully and let it sit for about 20-30 minutes. I covered the tub with a lid and shut my bathroom door in an attempt to keep the water from cooling too much; I’m not sure if it worked as my thermometer, it turned out, was defective. While the wool was sitting, I boiled more water for the next step, which was to take out the wool, empty the soapy water out of the tub, and replace it with more hot water but no soap. Again, I let it soak for 20-30 minutes. Afterwards, I emptied the tub once again and did my best to squeeze out the excess water from the wool without actually wringing it, which would result in felting. I took the wool outside and let it dry in a vertical storage thing made of fine mesh that you would hang in a closet. I wanted something that would let air circulate. I also placed wool on the table outside. Every half hour or so I would move the wool around so the dampest parts would be exposed to air and sun. Ideally I would have had some sort of setup where the wool could sit on mesh and and be allowed dry without my help.
Here is the mesh bag filled with wool in soapy water.Freshly washed wool drying in the sun and 90F heat.
I used quite a bit of water for this and I probably should have used more, as I didn’t get all of the lanolin out. I chose not to wash the fleece again, as it was only a little lanolin and, to be honest, I didn’t want to run back and forth from my kitchen to my bathroom with boiling pots of water again. The fleece cost me $60 plus shipping. I would have liked to buy something local; my plan had been to attend the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival at the end of September, where many farms have fleeces for sale. The event was cancelled though, due to the pandemic. I did buy the fleece directly from someone who is a fiber artist and raises their own sheep. I even know the name of the sheep my fleece came from: June.
June is a Blue-faced Leicester (BFL) cross, meaning she is a BFL crossed with another cross – California Variegated Mutant (CVM) and Lincoln/Corriedale. Knowing the breeds can be helpful, especially when buying wool without touching it first, because it can tell you the nature of the wool. BFL is very crimped and stretchy with a long staple (staple is the length of the fiber). It’s also very lustrous. CVM also has a long staple, and both breeds have a low micron count. Micron count is the average width of a single fiber. Anything under 28 or so microns is usually considered soft enough for next–to-skin application; micron counts of over 35 or so are usually too prickly to be next to to the skin. All of this information is important to me. The chiton I plan on weaving is going to touch my skin, but it needs to be not so delicate that it can’t withstand wear and tear; the micron count of the breeds I mentioned are around 21-28 and are usually in the higher range; this means it will be soft but not as delicate as, say, Merino. The long staple will give my yarn strength, enough to withstand being under tension on a loom. It will also be beautiful when dyed due to the luster.
