Resourceful Nomad | Creating beauty from ordinary objects

June 15, 2014
by Kristin
4 Comments

Flying Turtles

Turkish spindles are a wonderful toy for spindle spinners. I’ve always been fascinated by small things, and especially small things I can take apart. While exploring spindle making the last year, I asked my woodworker friend to cut out some cross arms for me. I worked on carving the shaft and thread notch in the right place to get a balanced spindle. Tricky. Below is an oak/ maple one we made for Renee’, a guild friend of mine.

I’ve found that Turkish spindles are best for spinning yarn for knitting. Below is a 3-ply wool made on a 1 oz Turkish spindle. I plan to dye this yarn with indigo and knit some fingerless mitts.

I’ve also learned that making a Turkish spindle takes some finesse. The one below was an experiment that didn’t turn out so great. Shaving the arms down to points made the spindle lighter and gave it an interesting shape, but this really made the spindle S L O W. Too bad, cause the zebra wood is beautiful.

This walnut/ oak one turned out much better.

So I’ve decided that I will leave Turkish spindle making to the pros. Last fall I received a Kuchulu from Ed Jenkins. Most everybody who knows about these spindles are enamored by them. At this time you could special order spindles, but now I think Ed can’t fill orders fast enough. I had one made of osage orange.

“Kuchulu” means cute and tiny…the perfect name.

There’s nothing more pleasing than a fat, little turtle!

I love how the spindle comes apart, and the center-pull ball can be plied immediately on the same spindle. Ingenious!

I’ve spun Pima cotton on this little spindle:

And silk:

But I’ve found that I enjoy spinning wool on it the most. Because it is so lightweight, it can be used to spin cotton, but for me, it’s a bit too slow. Spinning silk is pretty nice, but you have to be careful with the center-pull ball or it can easily collapse and become tangled. For spindle comparison, I spun two yak/silk blend skeins (below). The top skein was spun on the Kuchulu. The bottom skein was spun on my 6g Akha, which is much faster.

The Kuchulu skein is loftier and much softer than the bottom skein. The Akha-spun skein is more appropriate for weaving. I spun the rest of the fiber on the Kuchulu and knitted these fingerless mitts. The pattern is a sock pattern called “Hermione Everyday Socks.”

So even though I love my Akhas, the Turkish Kuchulu makes me squeal like a schoolgirl.

June 2, 2014
by Kristin
2 Comments

Pebble Weave Band

I finally got back to doing a little Pebble Weaving on the backstrap loom. This is a lovely motif from Laverne Waddington’s 2nd book More Adventures with Warp-Faced Pick-Up Patterns. The design was taken from a Baluchi storage bag. The Baluchi are semi-nomadic people traditionally from Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. A legend of the Baluchi people tells of their migration to Sistan (an area in E. Iran, S. Afghanistan, and W. Pakistan). A ruler of the region, Badr-ud-Din, demanded a bride from each of the 44 clans of the Baluchi. The Baluchi had never paid tribute to any ruler in this form; Instead they sent 44 boys dressed in girls’ clothing and fled the area! The boys were returned and the Baluchi pursued by Badr-ud-Din, who was defeated (Wikipedia).

Front

Back

I must have been feeling rather enthusiastic because this warp is over 13 feet long! Presently it takes me about 20 minutes to weave 1 inch, or 1 repeat of the pattern, and I’m pretty slow. At that pace it will take me 40-50 hours to weave this band. With some practice, though, I should get faster. The band is 1.5 inches wide and woven with some re-spun commercial knitting yarn. Reminder to oneself: Next time put contrasting borders on front instead of the back to make it easier to pick the cross!

June 1, 2014
by Kristin
3 Comments

Acquisitions

The Guild’s stash bust for 2014 was a big one; I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but needless to say I came home with a small mountain of stuff. The first thing I came across was a pile of fabric. My hand knew immediately it was silk, but it was very different than the silk you see in American fabric stores. It has a somewhat rough texture, but a beautiful hand. It’s tussah silk, probably from India; there are lovely subtle stripes throughout due to the inconsistencies of the silk. It’s close to a medium weight silk, being about 18-19 momme (habotai is ~5mm). The 10 yards weighes about 1.8 pounds or so. Not bad for $4.

Looking under the little 10X microscope, I could see that the warp is reeled, but the weft is a 2 ply spun tussah, which probably gives it the rougher feel. Who knows how old it is, but it is in very good shape and very strong. This would make a nice salwar kameez or kesa.

Close up fabric

This was probably the most luxurious find: 2,000 yds (9oz) of handspun cashmere/ silk singles.

Naturally Dyed Silk Noil

Linen Thrums for Hang Tags

This unusual cone caught my eye because the little random white coils could create an ikat look.

And summer reading books from the Guild Library. I also checked out Peter Collingwood’s 400 page masterpiece Techniques of Tablet Weaving. It just may take me all summer just to read that one!

I’m the youngest member of the Guild, so everyone else has much larger stashes than me. My stash used to fit in one box, but now it has grown tremendously. I think it may need to go on a diet.