What I did on my summer vacation

I just got back home after being away for about a month. Classes started today too, which was a little annoying; I'd have liked to have a bit of time to prepare, I had to use a shopping bag as a backpack today because my backpack was still full from camping. But at least there was only one class, and we didn't really do anything, so I'm not really sure what I'm complaining about.

I spun some yarn! I'm getting better at making it even-ish, which is nice, and I've also now made 3-ply:

From this top:

I made this yarn:

(The colour is more accurate in the second picture.) I split the top into three before I started spinning, but they didn't all end up the same length, so I made the single underneath with the leftovers. I quite like the way both bits turned out. No plans yet for what the yarn will be used for...ideas?

This yarn is made from recycled sari ends, which is my new favourite fibre! It's kind of tricky to spin since it isn't really prepared all that much, but you get a great texture from it, and I just love the colours! I ordered a bunch more sari ends off ebay, because I enjoyed making it so much!

I also finally got around to using my people stamps I got aaaaages ago. They're unmounted, so kind of annoying (I should really figure out mounting stamps), but I really like them!

I also finally used the silver pigment ink pad I've had for a while! It doesn't seem to like to dry, particularly since these two cards are coated in mod podge, so the ink had a tendency to rub off a little. But I really like how they turned out, so like whatevs, right?

In other news, Harvest was amazing! The property (which was huge) had all this really neat art, and they had made fantastic deco! It was spread out all over the place, so you could wander around and find random things in the middle of the woods. My favourite thing was the hammerhead sharks they made out of chicken wire and clingfilm. There were 3 stages, which all had really good music. I blew so many bubbles, decided I was part of a circus, wandering around, somehow ended up serving soup off a truck, and was eventually found by friends cuddling with people in the woods a couple hours later. It was wicked fun, but I burned out pretty fast, so I've decided that next year I will actually try to sleep more and eat regular meals instead of just when I remember. Everyone there was really friendly, there was a real sense of community. Oh, and I want to learn to hula hoop properly, because there were people with light up hula hoops and it was SO AWESOME! I can hoop around my waist, knees, and arms, and I can toss it from arm to arm, but that is it and I am UNSATISFIED.

Vacation and Neat Things

I've been on vacation with my family for a little now, another two weeks to go. Spending extended amounts of time with my parents always makes me a little crazy, and having little to no internet access doesn't help. I've gotten some spinning done, which is nice, and a little bit of knitting. Here's a ball I'm going to ply; it's Lion's Brand Homespun (I can't remember the colourway).

I'm planning on chain-plying it, since I've only tried that for a very short length of yarn (and also so I don't have to break the ball up). Next: recycled sari ends! (below) Oh, and I've plied the green handspun skeins (that I mentioned in my last post) together without redying...I quite like the pale green, I have to say. No pictures till I'm back home though.

I've only been knitting intermittently, when I can't spin easily (like when I'm in the car, or reading in bed, etc). I'm using up those annoying little balls that are always left over when you finish a project - I have SO MANY of them, and have no idea where half of them come from. But they are going to good use, I suppose...I'll probably send the tags I'm making with them in the Yarn Bombs Away! swap Kadie is hosting on swapbot. My partner is my new roommate, so I can make them as big as I like without worrying about shipping. Heh. Anyway, here's what I've done so far, rumpled up a bit:

I'm using my treasured glow-in-the-dark needles! They are so wonderful, I can knit in the dark! I embarrassed my father because I was knitting at the grocery store and dropped my ball of yarn in the parking lot, and it rolled away without me noticing. But a nice lady told me I'd dropped it, so it's ok!

My website really needs some work, particularly since I label my yarn bombs. I almost went to a seminar about how to use photoshop to make webpages, and now I'm regretting that I didn't, because that is pretty much what I want to do now. I'd like to learn site design, I think, but I'm not passionate enough about it to teach myself. Probably the thing to do is to decide what I want it to look like, sketch it, then talk to people who know what they are doing. For the mean time I guess I will just put some info about yarn bombing up?

Tonight I have learned to not listen to this mix right before going to bed. I like it, but it keeps me awake!

Here are some cool things:

• Dewey Decimal Crafts - "Crocheted skulls for all occasions. No two skulls are the same, and no skulls rival these." I feel this is an accurate description.
  
• plastic bag mushrooms yarn bomb - hot damn this is awesome!
  
• insubordiknit handspun - I want to make yarn like this one day! Though I think a lot of it requires a wheel. Sigh.
  
• yarn-holding coffee can cubbies - These are neat, but a) I don't drink coffee and b) I have too much yarn!
  

Re-making Yarn

Lion Brand Homespun Yarn is, in some ways, really great yarn. I just love how soft it is, and how the colour blends, but it is incredibly frustrating to work with! It's corespun and then plied with thread (this is my guess, I am 100% willing to be wrong on this!), so it's very textured and bumpy, which makes it super easy to push needles or hooks through the middle of the yarn. Arg!

I made a couple hats with this yarn a while ago, so I had a little bit of yarn left from a couple skeins, but not enough to do anything useful with. Since the yarn is SO FRUSTRATING to work with, I tore it apart and respun it, since I liked the fiber so much. I've decided to make a tutorial, in case anyone else is interested in doing this!



1. Pick your yarn! You want a bulkier yarn, ideally one that is a thick single plied with thread. You can use whatever yarn you want really, but the thicker the singles are, the easier it is to separate and card.




2 - Look at yarn. This yarn has a fluffy part (the part I want) spun around strong thread (in the middle), and plied with a single white thread (which is visible here).




3 - Un-ply. Pull apart the yarn: here I'm starting with the thread the fluffy party was plied with. The thread I'm taking out is visible from the outside of the yarn.




4 - Remove the core. Remove the strong core of the fluffy part. Not all yarns will have this, but this brand does. You need to hunt for strong, thread-y parts in the fluff, then pull them out.




5 - After removing the core. The yarn will probably bunch up like this - that's fine, just straighten it out so you can see where to break the yarn.




6 - Break the yarn. Pull off the yarn that has had the thread-y parts removed. If you can't pull it apart easily, there may still be thread in it, try moving closer to the end. In this picture, the yarn on the left still has thread-y bits, the yarn on the right has all the thread-y bits removed.




7 - Different parts.
A - These are the threads from the middle of the yarn and the thread that was plied with the fluffy bit.
B - The fluffy bit of the yarn - this is the part you want! You could probably spin this fiber as is, but it would be trickier to draft, so it would be harder to get different weights.




8 - Break fluff into smaller parts. You're going to be separating the fluffy fibers, so break them into smaller parts. They're much easier to pull apart when they're this size.




9 - Pull apart fluff. Separate the fibers in each section.




10 - Separated fluff. This is what the fluff should look like when it's been separated.




11 - All the fluff separated. Put all the separated fluff in a pile, you're going to card it next! You actually get a decent amount of fiber from not much yarn, this is all the fiber from B in step 7.




12 - Card fiber. This is a pretty good guide to carding fiber. If you can't afford hand carders (they're pretty expensive), you can use two dog brushes! The carders in the photo are dog brushes.




13 - Rolags. The fiber has been carded into rolags, ready for spinning.




14 - Bucket of rolags. These are purple rolags from some yarn I took apart previously. Ready for spinning!




15 - Spin the Fiber. Spin the fiber from the rolags! This is some more reclaimed fiber I'm in the process of spinning.




16 - Yarn! The finished product! This is the purple laceweight yarn from the rolags in step 14. Now I have a usable amount of yarn from a tiny amount left over!


I hope someone finds that helpful! Spinning is fun, and this is a great way to try out small amounts of different fibers.

Dangle Bombing

As you may (or may not) remember from this post, I found a bunch of styrofoam balls covered in plant-y things in the Michaels dumpster. A friend and I put them to excellent use, stringing them on yarn and dangling them from a trellis on campus - we call it "Dangle Bombing"! It's like yarn bombing in that it's not permanent or damaging to property, and is awesome and exciting! Plus things hanging from strings are so much fun.

Anyway, enough talk, picture time:


Photocredit to Gaelan, who didn't want to put them on flickr himself, so I did.

It was difficult to get pictures because the balls blended into the background so well....which was part of the point. We climbed up on the trellis and crawled around to put everything up, and the construction workers who were on lunch break nearby were really confused about what we were doing. They didn't really seem to get it even after we explained, but ohhhhh wellll.

I really like making art out of things that would otherwise have been thrown away.


Coming soon:
I'm going to make a introductory guide to dumpster diving, since people seem interested! I'm not a freegan, so it really will only be an introduction, but I'll have pictures and such.