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July 6, 2009

Cellulose and Cellulosic Fibers

Yesterday I took a fun class with Brooke of Tactile on spinning cellulose and cellulosic fibers. Basically, cotton, flax, tencel, bamboo, that sort of thing. I'd never spun any of those fibers (not surprising since I've not been spinning very long) and wanted to try them out.

Here are my samples from the class, plus remaining balls of fiber:

This is a 50/50 merino/tencel. It was very sticky to spin, almost to the point of squeaking a little on my fingers. I admit I wasn't totally keen on it, and I'm not sold on this as a blend. Maybe if I were spinning for sock yarn.

This is 100 percent tencel. Very very smooth and slippery. More so than silk, but I've only spun silk on a spindle and in this case I was trying to spin on a wheel. Not a big fan, but in general I'm not a big fan of fibers that try to be silk but aren't.

This is bamboo and wool, 60/40, but I didn't write down which was which. It spun very nicely, and I almost didn't want to stop. The difference in the worsted versus woolen samples was marked for this one.

Bamboo/wool/alpaca (about 50/25/25 but not quite): spun nicely but had some funny crispy sections. I didn't like doing this from the fold, it just didn't seem to want to be bent that way.

Wool/flax, both undyed and dyed. I ran out of time on this one and had to rush through. It drafted nicely and was pretty easy to handle.

Flax. Man. I must get some flax. This was so much fun, and I love knitting with flax yarn. Flax and the resulting linen have all the qualities I love in a fiber: durability, improving softness over time, and machine-washability. I have a silk/linen blend sweater I love to death. I can't think why I didn't immediately order a bunch of flax when I started spinning.

Carbonized bamboo. Weird stuff. Very smooth. Doesn't take dye at all. Soft and shiny. I think I'd like to get more of this and spin with it for a while to see if it feels less weird.

Seed cotton. Arg. Little bolls of cotton with a seed in the middle (so a bunch of free cotton seeds!), such a pain in the butt to spin. I felt like I was alternating between having my single fall apart from not enough twist or snap in half from too much twist. It was terrible.

Cotton punis. Cue about ten minutes of a bunch of spinners sitting around giggling at how they look like tampons. These were also very hard for me, because of the same not quite getting enough twist in/omg, too much twist issue. I didn't even get to the dyed ones.

Cotton sliver. My new best friend. After suffering through seed cotton and punis, this was the easiest thing ever to draft. I had a great time.

And another cotton sliver, only natural colours this time (no dye; the cotton comes off the plant this colour). When heated or washed, this cotton gets darker.

We also tried out tahklis (Indian support spindles); that was really hard. And we watched the use of the charkha, which is an Indian spinning wheel.

It was a good class. I felt like I learned a lot, but also like I still had a lot to learn.

Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn

Posted by ayse on 07/06/09 at 1:53 PM