The O-Zone

Nothing happening, just watching the frost coating on the trees, and waiting for it to snow, and looking at seed catalogs.

Today the fog finally lifted away from the mountains, though it's still hanging around in the valley below us.

Makes us glad to be up on the side of the mountain on a day like today.  We are a little tired of all the foggy weather and not seeing the sun shining on our solar panels.  We’ve used a lot of gas in the generator so far this month.

Pine needles hold a lot of frost. And when the sun does come out, the frost drops off the needles, like a miniature snowstorm under the trees.

Really frosty tree a bit down the hill from the house.

Just a pretty tree.

It was really warm last week, above freezing temperatures during the day, and the snow on the ground really settled a lot, from a foot of snow to about six inches of really hard and icy snow pack.  We need more moisture.  This has been an extremely dry winter so far.

This week the temperatures are more normal, and so the cook stove is getting used to make breakfast.

Banana pancakes, maple syrup heating in the blue pan, and a pot of tea on a trivet is keeping warm.  Having two wood stoves going heats the house up very quickly.  Yesterday we also baked some potatoes from our harvest last fall.  They are keeping really well, so far, and now we have a better idea of how many seed potatoes to plant next year.  We are doing a lot of thinking about the garden.

It’s hard to believe but in roughly 85 days we will have hummingbirds back, wildflowers will be blooming, and the grass will be green.

The Winter Solstice gave us a nice snowfall, a perfect start to the winter.

Three inches of snow makes it really feel like winter has arrived.

It was a good day to stay inside and start with Phase Three of my spinning project.

The first fiber being spun onto the bobbin. This is a couple of hours of spinning. The finer the thread, the longer it takes and it doesn't fill up the bobbin very fast.

Finally, enough fiber spun to start the plying it with the silk thread.

I put both bobbins on a lazy kate, and started making a two-ply yarn.  It takes as long to ply the yarn as it does to spin the single.  Since I need to ply the yarn the same day I spin it, none of my balls of yarn are going to be very big.  There is only so much time I can spend a day to make yarn.

The paper clip is holding the twist in the plied yarn - that way I can wander off and do something else. The paper clip also holds the twist in the yarn when I'm spinning it. A useful tool, indeed.

I spin the yarn clockwise, and ply it counter-clockwise.  I put slightly more tension on the bobbin when plying so the yarn is taken up to the bobbin a bit quicker than when spinning the yarn.

A finished bobbin of plied yarn.

The silk gives the finished yarn a little bit of shine and the qiviut is so soft and silky on it’s own.  It’s not fluffed up at this point but will get that way as the knitting actually proceeds.

Next step is to transfer the yarn on the bobbin to a niddy noddy (I love the tool names for spinning). Each revolution is one yard of yarn.

Then when the yarn is secured on the niddy noddy, I soak the yarn with hot water by holding it under the faucet in the kitchen sink, and set the yarn in a warm secure place to dry completely.  Since the yarn is very thin, overnight is about all it takes.  I set it propped up on the red plastic measuring cup, on top of the warming over on the cookstove.  This keeps it out of the reach of the cat, in case he decides to get frisky and play with what obviously must be a toy meant for him.

Four days worth of spinning, four little balls of yarn, and a total yardage of approximately 300 yards. Only 4200 more yards to go. I will be doing these same steps over and over again.

Last night we had a really gorgeous sunset, and Dan took pictures as the sunset evolved.

The cloud cover is in the perfect configuration for a nice sunset, so we started paying attention.

The color is starting to intensify and it looks like an orange sunset is what we're going to see, to the south west.

As the sun peeped below the clouds, a bright yellow flashed across the bottom of the clouds.

So pretty.

Swirling winds in the clouds gave lots of texture.

Peaked color, only about 15 minutes from start to finish on the sunset.

Northwest the sunset was all in light shades of rose, which was reflected in the snow on the ground and in the trees.

The final blaze of yellow from the sun, and then the colors faded into darkness.

Happy New Year!

My silk yarn arrived.

So pretty, all 6400+ yards of it, enough for two shawls, actually.

Not a very useful format, however, being in a skein.  I need to get it onto a bobbin so I can use it.

Hauled another spinning wheel downstairs and set up the swift, that orange contraption connected to the counter top. It spins around.

Next step is to get the skein of yarn onto the swift.

Once the skein was straightened out and snugly situation on the swift, i had to cut the white strings which were holding the skein in place for dyeing.

I discovered I have more than two yarn ends, which means there are some breaks but it doesn’t really matter since I won’t be spinning one continuous long qiviut thread anyway, since it has to be plied the day it is spun.

Then I can start transferring the silk yarn from the skein to the bobbin.

Another break, this one caused by me somehow.  Rats, but oh well, there’s enough yarn on the bobbin for several days (at least) of spinning.

From Wikipedia, these are the differences between qiviut and cashmere wools.

Qiviut is the downy undercoat from Muskox, and it is stronger and eight times warmer than sheep’s wool, and softer than cashmere wool. Wild muskoxen have qiviut fibers that are approximately 18 micrometres in diameter.  Females and young animals have slightly finer wool.  For some reason I was picturing animals about the size of a Woolly Mammoth but they are significantly smaller (not even as large as a buffalo).  Still a large enough animal with sharp horns and tons of attitude, to make handling them a risky business.

Cashmere wool is produced by a cashmere goat; the average diameter of the fiber of such wool product does not exceed 19 microns; and such wool product does not contain more than 3 percent of cashmere fibers with average diameters that exceed 30 microns.  There is nothing cuter than a baby cashmere goat, and if you have a bunch of them, the cuteness quotient is off the charts.

Qiviut has a peculiar issue when spinning, less forgiving than cashmere to spin, and it needs to be plyed the same day it is spun, not left on the bobbin overnight. So I’m going to end up with a lot of smaller skeins of yarn but the upside is when I have some spun I can knit them the next day. Spin/ply one day, knit the next. Theoretically I won’t get sick and tired of either activity.

I have ordered some hand-dyed silk yarn 120/2 from Treenway (a two-ply silk thread), that I will use to ply with my single thread of spun qiviut. If I’m careful with watching my thread diameter when spinning, my finished yarn will be 60/2 which means sixty wraps of the finished yarn around a pencil, per inch. My dark walnut silk yarn will be here tomorrow if the post office does their thing properly.

So today I’m getting set up for spinning.

This is a one-ounce bat of qiviut fiber, ready for the spinning process to begin.

I separated out a smaller bat, easier to work with.

Interesting enough, the table this is sitting on is about the same color as the silk yarn I’ve been waiting for, the past month.

One of my spinning tools, a brass dizz which has three hole sizes, which determines the amount of fiber than can be pre-drafted through each size of hole.

I’m using the smallest hole, which is very tiny indeed.

Pulling the fiber through makes a nice light fluffy roving from which to spin.

A completed roving.

Since today I can’t do any spinning, I’ll simply make a bunch of rovings in preparation for spinning tomorrow.

Only 4500 yards to go.

Today as the sun rose over the mountains to the east, a fog bank surrounded our house, and captured the morning light.

Looking towards the eastern sky, the brightest light shows where the sun was peeking over the mountains.

Looking west the sky is still the darker hues from the departing night. Even the hillside was other-worldly.

Looking north, one small cloud within the larger fog bank glows as a lighter shade of pink.

When the sun finally came over the mountains a few minutes after I took these pictures, the world changed back to its normal colors, but for a moment it was truly magical.

Progress is being made again.

A part on my spinning wheel broke as soon as I started using it again, and I had to order a replacement part.  The internet is so amazing, I only had to wait a week for my new part to arrive which it did on Wednesday.  It took a bit of fiddling but the part was replaced and yesterday I started back on my spinning project.  It will take most of the weekend to fill up this bobbin, if I put in the hours.  It will give me enough yarn for a palatine shawl knit in an Orenburg lace pattern.  I’d almost forgotten how much fun it is to make my own yarn.  The internet makes it too easy to order yarn instead 🙂

I started knitting a lace pattern from “The Encyclopedia of Needlework” last night, using the hand spun yarn and size 0000 needles.

The silk component of this yarn gives it a really nice shine. And it's a smooth enough yarn that the stitch details is going to be really nice when I'm finished.

I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with this when I run out of yarn; I ended up with a bit more yardage than I thought I would have, initially.  But the pattern is only 4 rows and so it’s nice and easy for knitting while watching something stupid on television.

Now that winter has well and truly arrived, we’re thinking about gardening next year. Dan went down to the garden yesterday and sat under the arbor in the dry chairs. He said it was weird being surrounded by snow. Everything looked good, though, no broken canes on the raspberry plants.

I dyed a small skein of yarn I plied over the weekend, using Black Cherry unsweeted Kool Aid.

This started out as a variegated pink single that I plied with a white silk single to make a two-ply yarn.

There isn’t much yardage so I’m going to knit a lace border which will be perfect for something like a child’s dress or a doll dress.  I’m not entirely sure how colorfast the kool aid is, but it’s a much better use for that stuff than drinking it!

The reason I plied this yarn was to empty a bobbin on my spinning wheel, so I could start a new spinning project.  Ultimately I want to make a super-fine lace yarn with Qiviut plied with a silk single, but it’s been so long since I did any spinning, I started with something a little simpler.

This is 100% Angora from rabbit fur, slippery to spin so it's challenging but is good practice for spinning Qiviut which is not only extremely fine, very short fibers, and not much crimp which makes it also slippery to some degree.

I’ve ordered some silk from Treenway Silks which they are custom dying for me in Walnut, so it will be a complimentary color for plying with the Qiviut which is a natural soft chocolate brown.

A palatine shawl I just finished last week, which got me back into spinning and knitting again. I had started this a couple of years ago and just got around to completing it.

My goal is to knit a full-size Orenburg lace shawl from handspun Qiviut.  I may knit another palatine shawl from the Angora lace yarn I’m just starting to spin.  The dyed lace yarn won’t be here for four to six weeks, and that gives me plenty of time to get a lot of Angora lace yarn created.

Snowfall started this afternoon, after a very dark and gray morning – the kind of morning where curling up with a book in front of the woodstove feels perfect.

And it looks like it’s going to be serious today, a snowfall that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, like not until April.

Temperatures are hovering right at freezing, and the snowflakes are sticking to everything.

The snow pours from the sky.

The snowflakes are more visible against the side of the garage, but moving too fast for an individual flake portrait.

It's not foggy, it's flaky.

Only three inches of snow are expected to accumulate so this heavy downpour may not last too long.

One day it’s green, and then it’s all fall colors, and then this happens.

Tuesday morning we woke up to a white world. And it's still snowing, albeit lightly.

The weather forecasters keep saying it’s going to warm up and melt, but so far it has stayed white.  We have had about four inches of snowfall, so far.  Pretty.  Now that we have the right snow tires on the car, I can say that 🙂

More sidewalk shoveling today.  I cleaned them off yesterday so it isn’t heavy at this point.

Fog enshrouded the mountain side today, all morning long.  As the sun climbed over the mountain to the east, the fog began to lift.

Magic is in the air.

The plum tree leaves are turning gold, almost the same color as the plums themselves.

Lovely weather and fall colors.   Just amazing this year.