In which we congratulate Erin of “The Anatomy of Knitting” on her two new baby boys, chat about the rewards of preventative medicine and Jan’s adventures and misadventures at the Pennsylvania Farm Show, listen to an interview with alpaca princesses and a local youth fleece to shawl competition team, avoid the worst of Jan’s flu experience, review knits on and off the needle, get into a disagreement over fulling and felting, offer some tips for finding fiber arts classes that will make you happy you took them, drool over edible roving, discuss how dye helps you find tippy tips of tippy fleeces, learn a tip to eliminate ladders in garter stitch knit on dpn’s in the round and look forward to fiber retreats this weekend and next.
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Jan and Ellen are identical twins who have always had an innate fashion sense. Crafting is an integral part of their lives and they stay stitched together sharing their love of knitting, family and community. Search on This Blog
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January 19th, 2013 at 2:26 pm
It so amuses me that you call it the Death Spiral…those later rows do get long. =)
For your drop spindling, I wonder if you might try turning the fiber around and spinning from the other end of the braid if you’re working with a top or a commercial roving. The combing/carding process can create a preferred direction for drafting, particularly noticeable in rougher fibers. The denser the preparation, the more this matters. I have fought and fought with a fiber, and then turned it around and had it spin like butter…might not have been you at all.
On the fulling vs. felting debate, I think that some of the discussion about lightly felted = fulled, felted = no stitch definition might come from weaving. I haven’t really thought about how they’re applied to knitting before. A woven cloth is fulled when it is wet finished and the yarn pulls together and just barely begins to stick. This makes a more stable, fluffier fabric, but isn’t really felted, in that the individual threads aren’t stuck tightly to one another. To felt a fabric, you need to do a lot more agitating in the washing, and you get a much larger shrinkage, and a much thicker fabric. Traditional wool felt (cloth, anyway) isn’t woven; as far as I know, it’s just layers of loose fibers felted together. Of course, all of these terms are used for all kinds of things, and with varying degrees of precision. Who knows what the “actual” definitions are, but that’s my two cents.
January 19th, 2013 at 3:06 pm
[…] Of course, that means that I now have to unply more yarn. This is not my favorite thing to do by any stretch of the imagination, and I’ve been avoiding the project since Christmas. Today, I finally sat myself down, wound a skein into a ball, and started in on it while listening to the latest Twinset Designs podcast. […]