Adventures with YarnInformation about everything to do with yarn, knitting, fiber arts, sheep…

What in the world is this device? That was the thought that went through my head when I saw its picture on a used item website. The seller claimed it was rare and the only other one he knew of was owned by the Canadian Museum of Civilization. In meeting with the gentleman, he showed me a copy of a salvaged publication with more information about the wheel:

Further research was done by means of asking the wise people of the Antique Spinning Wheel group on Ravelry. Prior to meeting with the wheel seller, I received an identification of this device from janclark. She said it was a John Bryce/Bruce tabletop spinning wheel, patented in the late 1800s in Canada and the USA. She gave me this link showing the device… in the American Textile Museum.

During this time I also made contact with the Museum of Civilization. They graciously sent me a massive PDF file of their entire spinning wheel collection, and sure enough two John Bryce wheels were buried inside it, although only one was complete and the other was certainly not painted green.

With such a rich back story, and with this wheel in such a great condition, I couldn’t pass it up!

Here is a picture of how it works. It clamps onto a table edge – a narrow one, as I learned while trying to attach it to this black countertop. The spinner turns the metal wheel with the knob, which makes contact with a leather pad on the other side of the big wooden wheel pictured above. The big wheel is locked into the small wooden receptacle on the spindle, and voila, one turn of the large metal wheel produces many revolutions of the small spindle. There’s your twist/stored up energy, now you can make yarn!

How many rotations exactly, and what kind of yarn it produces, are things I will have to determine later on in life. While the wheel is in excellent condition overall, the metal wheel does not make firm enough contact with the big wooden wheel to reliably spin. I have a few solution plans in mind, but they will have to wait until I’ve moved into my farm&house. Until then, it will just have to sit around and look gorgeous… not too hard of a task at all! Just look at those flawless wooden parts, made back before today’s world of plastics and disposables. I am honored to be the current guardian of this wonderful piece of equipment.

Above is my current work in progress. I’m calling it the Quad Blanket as it features four colors. The blanket’s pattern is a simple log cabin style, instructions of which I found on this page about a third of the way down. Simply summarized, starting with a center block, you knit an addition, rotate the piece 90 degrees, knit the next addition, and continue till the blanket is the size you want it to be, or you run out of yarn.

The inspiration for this was really just me wanting to use up the various small scraps of yarn I’ve created and dyed during the past half year. One benefit this has is that the blanket has many different textures and yarns, I enjoy the variety. I started by knitting up the blue/grey yarn made in August into a square just to see how it would come out. Then I found the log cabin instructions and decided to use the square for the core. Then I added on these pink scraps, followed by some green I apparently dyed but didn’t photograph.

At this stage I knew my next color was going to be yellow, but I hadn’t made a yellow yarn yet… thus I decided to document my yarn making process via the yarn dyeing tutorial I posted last week. At that time I also dyed up the rest of my handspun stock in blue and pink for the next layers of the blanket.

My next challenge will be the next green segment. I have some dyed already but it’s green/purple, not solid green. I think I want to keep the solid color motif going, so I’ll be taking some time to work on processing the washed fleece into yarn. I guess that will be the next tutorial here!

Here are the new yarns I dyed yesterday, including the yellow one featured in my yarn dyeing tutorial.

Their purpose is to be added to my Craft Room Knitted Log Blanket which will be the subject of my next blog post!

By the way, the picture of the red yarn shows how critical making those figure eight tied loops are – I felt lazy and only put in one, and now I have a huge mess of yarn on my hands! This will be fun to untangle…

Here is a tutorial I’ve written up, illustrating one of the methods I use to dye the yarn I spin (from the Shetland fleeces bought in the summer). It uses food dyes, so you do not need to purchase dedicated equipment. For more pictures of the process please visit my Flickr Yarn Dyeing album.

Equipment

Pictured in the two pictures above is all of the equipment you’ll need. Above are some spare pans for rinsing and soaking, jars for each color, the yarn itself, citric acid (can be bought online, I found mine at Bulk Barn), and food dyes. You will also need a pot to steam the jars in, and a rack to elevate the jars.

Preparation

Using yarn scraps of another texture, divide your skein roughly into two (or three if it’s really large), weave the yarn scrap to form a figure eight, and tie it together. This ensures the skein is loose enough to let the dye permeate completely, and also keeps it organized when moving it around. Using the different texture makes it really easy to find these figure eights later on when they’re the same color as the rest of the yarn!

Create an acidic solution using the citric acid and a spare pot. I don’t measure it at all, I simply make it so that it’s acidic when I taste it. Soak the yarn in this solution while mixing the dyes. Note: You can get a different effect if you make the dyes acidic instead of the yarn, and some people let it soak much longer.

Dye Mixing

Mix up your colours in the jars. Here I’ve used a shotglass in which I’ve diluted one small drop of red with water. I used this to change the raw yellow into this golden color. I also mixed another gold that was even deeper than this.

In this tutorial I am not being precise, thus I am not measuring the number of drops of dye I use, etc. If you foresee wanting to replicate the colors you make, it’s valuable to measure the amounts you add. Of course, there’s no guarantee that you can make the same size “drop” each time, or that your technique remains the same! I consider this a part of the art. If you know you want 5 skeins of one pattern, doing them at the same time will give you the best odds of making 5 similar looking skeins.

Note: the amount of water in the dye mix doesn’t really matter, what matters more is the number of molecules of dye. I’ll explain this in a bit.

Dyeing and Steaming

Put the dye jars into the pot and add hot water up to the level of the jar’s contents. Here I’ve dipped each end of yarn into one dye pot, as I wanted to go for a gradient effect. By quickly dipping, only a small number of dye molecules adhere to the wool. I then left a portion of the dipped part in the dye jar to allow the dye molecules to keep adhering and thus deepen the color.

If your skein length is too small to reach the dye in the jars, you can simply add water to the dye jars to bring the level up to where you want it to be. The color will not change, as adding water does not affect the number of dye molecules in the solution – while the dye will look lighter to our eyes, in reality it will result in the same yarn color.

Cover the pot and steam that yarn! For how long? I go for about 10 minutes, checking now and then to change the dip depth and look for dye exhaustion. This is when the jar’s mixture turns clear, and means all of the dye molecules have been absorbed, what you see colorwise is as good as it’ll go (with this mixture). This is what one should strive for, as leftover color mixture means you are using a bit too much raw dye, but in reality the cost of dye is pretty negligible so it’s not much of a big deal to drain it.

Once your yarn is done, transfer it to a draining container and rinse it out. Using hot water, indirectly filling up the container, and being gentle helps to avoid felting and tangling. I gently prod and shake it, and continue until no more color comes 0ut. Then, gently squeeze it out and hang it up on a hanger. I also give it a gentle pull to straighten out any excess twist. The hanger hangs in my bathroom until the yarn is dry, which takes longer for larger skeins of course. I usually give it a few days just to be safe. Then you can reskein it to get a better impression of the yarn, or keep it as is!

Here’s a view of the final yarn ready to dry. You can see the differences in the two yellow/golds, and while the gradient effect was much more muted than I would have liked, oh well, it still looks nice!

This yarn already has a purpose in mind, it’s the next color in my four colour log cabin knit blanket I’m working on. Once this dries out I’ll continue documenting its journey, taking the time to share this very simple yet pretty cool blanket pattern with you!