Batt Editing--Part 2

Readers of this blog probably know how much I love glitz, but many battmeisters eschew such additives for a variety of reasons. Anna of Corgi Hill decided against working with Angelina fiber after a bag of it exploded and left her, well, rather sparkly. Others feel that Firestar (trilobal nylon) and Angelina are scratchy. And some feel glittery yarn is somehow undignified.

Not me! I love to spin with glitz, I love to knit with glitz, and search out batts containing glitz, preferably in high concentrations. So it should come as no surprise that I figured out a simple way to add sparkle to batts that lack what I consider an essential ingredient.

If you paid attention to my first Batt Editing post, you might recall that I showed you how to split a batt into two layers. But if not, let me show you again.

Here we have a perfectly lovely example of a glitz-less batt from the immensely talented Zauberzeug :

 

I carefully peel the two layers apart...

...and sprinkle the bottom layer with Angelina:

Just flop the top layer back on the bottom layer:

And roll it back up:

Needless to say, you can use this technique to add anything you might want to spin--strands of silk, Firestar, exotic fibers of which you only have a tiny bit, or slices of pepperoni, and so on. 

On another note, I promised you some killer tomatoes, so I would be remiss if I didn't include a photo, taken several weeks ago. At that time, the plants were approaching 11 feet in height, and had outgrown our double stack of tomato cages by a wide margin.

Roy, who was an Eagle Scout and knows how to do things like assemble tripods, crafted several out of our very own bamboo and is seen in the above photo tying one of the plants, fondly named Terminator One, onto the supports. I should add that the plants are now over 14 feet tall, although we are training them down the supports, because we don't have a taller stepladder and would feel idiotic trying to harvest our crop by tossing rocks at the fruit.

Last year we planted four plants, three of which promptly died. The survivor barely attained a meter in height and spent the entire summer generating six puny tomatoes. This year, we figure to harvest about 200 pounds of fruit from the four plants that were really cute when we plopped them into the soil but now consume a cow a day and we'd better be on time with the feeding....

Batt Editing

Although Harry is perfect, the rest of the world generally needs a little tweaking to rival his flawless stature. It's rare that I spin a batt right out of the bag--I usually add or subtract something, especially if I have a specific project in mind.

Harry thought it might be instructional for me to show his faithful readers how I edit a batt. According to him, I don't have any faithful readers, which instigated a shouting match (MORONIC BIPED!  HAIRY MIDGET OCTOPUS!, and so on). While we were hurling epithets at each other, Rambo kindly loaded the text and images into the blog and then proceeded to clean out the vegetable bin because nobody was paying any attention, and the lettuce was going to wilt soon, anyway.

Onwards to batts.
 
Let's take this lovely item from Lampyridae, euphoniously named Sarah Bejeweled. It's an eclectic mixture of  milk, bfl, silk, soy, merino, alpaca, and sari silk. but is very smooth, if a bit mussy. Notice the colors after the greens are kinda folded under...you can't see them in this picture.

If you've ever fooled around with batts, you've probably discovered that most of them are layered, and it's easy to separate the layers by gently pulling them apart. The blue and purple are peeking out on the bottom layer in this image:



Here are two two layers, side by side.

Now to strip the batt into bite-sized pieces. I started on the left, coaxing each color transition into a little swathe.



I took a bit of the next color, pink, into the second strip, and a little more pink in the third one--mixing the colors this way makes for smoother transitions.



Sometimes, when pulling off a strip, the wrong color crawls over....

It's easy to just peel it off and put it back where it belongs.

Here's what the deconstructed batt looks like now.

The next step is to do a little drafting. Although the batt is smooth, it has a fair amount of fibery locks lying on the surface. When you try to spin it them in, the loose bits can fall down or become folded over, creating a snarl. If you're spinning thick yarn, this fluffiness isn't a big problem, but for fine spinning, it's better to try and incorporate the little rogues into the main wad of fiber. And because I will be spinning fairly fine on a supported spindle, I want to loosen up the fiber, as well. Both of these tasks are done simply by gently pulling sections of the strip like this:



And here's the first attenuated strip. Notice there's some white fiber that refused to play nicely with the rest of the strip. I just inserted a few twists to keep it from running away.

Here and there, I found some bits of fiber that didn't belong, as well as a few nepps that would simply make a blob while spinning. I just  picked them off.

And we're almost finished. Notice the adorable cat toy...Laptop couldn't be with us today, due to a prior engagement, but she left a clownfish proxy for Harry's faithful readers to admire.

The transitions looks pretty good, but  the sequence is a bit lacking in blues and purples. Dipping into my batt stash, I found colors that would work, and added a few extra strips.

To  keep everything neat and tidy, I rolled up the strips, one after the other, into a squooshy ball...






And put it into a plastic bag. It's ready to go.

On another note, I report that over the course of the last few months, the occupants of the fleegle household endured three eye operations and two root canals, thus triggering our favorite floating holiday: Celebrate Something Random Day. To commemorate such occasions, we always have a cake, decorated especially for the occasion being celebrated. And so I present to you the Infamous Fleegle Eyeball and Teeth Cake of 2011. It was delicious!



And before you ask, Nancy, it's from the Country Bakery on 75 between Ingles and White County Jail. :)

More Wickedness

A while back, I posted a pattern link to this lovely shawl (Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Karen Walker).

 Although I love the red, I know that I would be bored to tears knitting miles of it, and this shawl is BIG. And it seemed to me that Something Wicked needed Something Black...the most wicked of colors. I begin a thought process.......

......Time passes. Aliens come and go in the back yard. Harry assassinates karaoke from Albania to Zanzibar. The RIAA sends Al Jolsen a copyright infringement notice. The FDA issues a recall notice on water (too much water will cause people to explode and that's not acceptable). Blue Cross/Blue Shield announces that having been born is a now considered a pre-existing condition and will no longer cover any illness or injury for any claimant who has undergone this process........

.......I think about knitting the edging in black. Nah. Too abrupt. Then I think about dip-dying it. Nah. Too chancy. Then I think about spinning the yarn and new possibilities present themselves. I finally emailed Anna at Corgi Hill Farm, sent her a picture of the shawl, and explained what I was looking to do. She's brilliant, folks. She carefully dyed a graduated series of silk/merino batts for me that will, after I spin it all up, give me a nice flow from Wicked Red to Wicked Black.

I have about 7 ounces of batt, and need about 2200 yards of two-ply, which works out to 314x2=628 yards per ounce. And that, after consulting various tables, is about 80 WPI. Doable, but it's going to take some time.

So the only Wickedness you're going to see around here for a while is Harry. Apparently, he had a nice gig at the Two Tables Restaurant in Zanzibar City. Unfortunately, a two-table audience was way too small for his ego, so he's taken some time off to kayak the Zambesi river. The guides discovered on his first day that Harry's rendition of  Moon River caused crocodiles, algae, and hippos to flee from the river at Mach 2. The tour company is trying to sign him to a long-term contract. I personally wrote him a stellar letter of recommendation.