Unlaconic Draconic

I have spent a large portion of the last two weeks working on a pair of Really Big Socks.

It's my first time knitting in the round (well, after a small failed attempt at wrist warmers) and I'm using my handspun, so I decided to go with the simplest sock pattern I could find: Quick and Chunky Sock Pattern.

It works great! However, it does contain one lie: You need between 90 and 100g of wool for a typical pair of socks." As you can see, I ran out of my first 75g skein two-thirds of the way through sock number 1... Handspun just too chunky.

Cuando empecé a hilar me enseñaron a mover la mano que lleva el huso, y es lo mismo que he visto en los tutoriales de youtube. Sin embargo, mi problema está en estirar y preparar la lana con la otra mano, pero eso es algo que nadie acaba de explicar, se da por sentado.

He pensado que a lo mejor no he preparado bien la lana (también está esquilada de aquella manera y la trabajo como viene), pero noto que la mano izquierda es torpe y débil. Preparar y estirar la lana requiere mucha coordinación y control de la fuerza y no estoy acostumbrada a hacerlo.

Total, que ayer se me ocurrió que a lo mejor puedo girar el huso con la mano izquierda y estirar la lana con la derecha.

He empezado a hilar en la calle a veces, lo que suele traerme a señoras de más de 70 años que hilaban de chicas y que vienen a decirme cosas (normalmente, que qué bien lo hago). Hace décadas que no hilan y ya no tienen las manos con la misma agilidad, así que nunca me acaban de enseñar cómo lo hacían ellas.

Hoy me ha parado una por la calle para corregirme la técnica según me vio ayer y me dijo, cuando le conté que lo que me cuesta es sacar la lana con la mano izquierda, que es que debería de parar para estirar la lana y prepararla y luego guiarla, que no hilas del tirón constantemente. Tiene sentido porque la fibra de la lana es bastante corta, a lo mejor puedes hilar sin parar con lino porque la fibra es más larga, no sé, no consigo lino ni para atrás.

Otra cosa que mencionó como de pasada es que tienes que aprender a hacerlo con las dos manos "como el bolillo", que sí lo haces con la mano izquierda así, pero claro que si te pasa alguna otra cosa, lo tienes que hacer con la otra mano. Como una obviedad grandísima, claro que hilas con la derecha o con la izquierda, y preparas la lana con las dos, algo que nadie me había dicho nunca antes.

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When I learned spinning yarn and what I have seen overall in youtube tutorials is how to spin with the drop spindle hand. However, what I struggle with is drafting with the other hand. And nobody seems to show how to work on that, as if it is secondary.

Maybe I haven't prepared my wool right (I work from poorly sheared fleece), but I also notice that my left hand is clumsy and weak. Drafting requires a lot of coordination and strength control and I am just not used to it.

Just yesterday it occurred to me that maybe I can try to spin with my left hand and draft with my right hand.

I started spinning in the street sometimes, which gives me a lot of conversations with ladies that are over 70 years old who used to spin as kids, and they usually congratulate me on how well I do it. Unfortunately, they haven't spun in decades and their hands are not what they used to, so they cannot show me how they do it themselves.

One of them today told me that actually, you are supposed to stop spinning, prepare the wool for drafting and then kind of guide it with that hand. So it's not supposed to be a constant and continuous flow, which makes sense for wool because the fiber is quite short. Maybe you can draft from flax easily because it's way longer, I don't know, I don't have access to flax.

(I'll admit I haven't tried to learn spinning the other way around yet!)

Have you considered putting your wool on a distaff? It might make it a bit easier to control the fibre. I just watched this video showing a Spanish lady spinning from a distaff. Unfortunately the original Spanish description has been overdubbed with an awful English translation, but there are some pretty good shots of how she is drafting.

Odyssey 19.149–150. Emily Wilson translation.

a weaving based on Dora Wheeler's "Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night", which is one of my favorite works that looks woven but is actually embroidered. I wanted to try out deborah silver's split-shed weaving technique, so I chose polychrome taqueté with linen and cashmere. I maybe should have chosen an easier technique with fewer colors to start, but here we are! on the right side, I left the uppermost warp threads bare to show the unraveling.

reference below the cut:

after much experimentation, i’ve come up with the following process:

four singles: easy. four lengths of singles, one for each ply. three on a lazy kate, one on my wheel’s integrated bobbin holder, done.

three singles: still pretty easy. turn one of your remaining bobbins into a plying bracelet. this gives you two ends from one length of single. that, plus the lengths from the other two bobbins, makes four plies.

two singles: now we’re cooking. where we go from here depends on whether your plying bracelet ran out, or one of the other bobbins ran out:

a) two bobbins: chain ply one single, while simultaneously plying with the other. the chain ply gives you three plies, and the additional single makes it up to four. a fun discovery i’ve made with this is that it doesn’t actually make a difference which single you pull through the loop in the process of chain plying - you can essentially alternate which of the singles you chain, as long as you’re only ever pulling one single through the loop at a time and letting the other single ply normally. (you can also do (b) below with two bobbins, but this is way is much less of a hassle.)

b) one bobbin and one plying bracelet: turn your remaining bobbin into a second plying bracelet, on the other wrist to the current plying bracelet. now you have two ends of singles from each wrist, for four plies total. this is exactly as much of a nightmare to control as it sounds, especially if your singles have a lot of twist in them. good luck!! you’re going to need it :) also, probably turn your wheel’s tension up a bit. that helps.

People often say that your first FF will end up being your favorite, but I bounced HARD off of 7 when I was a kid (I haven’t retried it as an adult and should!). It was 8 that did it for me. I love the world, I love the music, I love the characters, but most of all, I love the Junction system and anyone who hates the system is weak. It’s one of those weird, experimental games that is very of the era and while it has flaws that are inherent to being of that type, it’s so, so good.

The aesthetic of the academy in FFVIII was unlike anything I'd ever seen before - sort of sunny and futuristic. It might have had the best graphics of any game I owned at the time, or at least the least cartoony graphics. The combat system and advancement system (junction?) were fascinating and incomprehensible to me.

Anyway, one time I played and got a really long way in - all the way to this boss fight on top of a building. I struggled through the boss fight, finally won, and then there was a cutscene where Squall was flung off the building and falling. Slowly. Stop-start motion. Cut to Rinoa watching him. Freeze frame (5 seconds). Cut to Squall falling. Freeze frame (30 seconds). Cut to Rinoa. Freeze frame (30 minutes and counting).

Turns out my brother's old CD was scratched.

Years later, I bought a new copy of Disk 1 and played back to that point. Turns out that was the very last scene on Disk 1, so finally I could proceed to Disk 2 and continue the game.

When my aunt said "I'll get you some lambswool at the next shearing", I really thought she meant November rather than May!

When my aunt said "I'll get you some lambswool at the next shearing", I really thought she meant November rather than May!

Glad you asked. I have arrived at 'modern flax is Bullshit compared to what we had in historical textiles, the flax widely available for handspinning is basically the tow that would be discarded from textile creation and used with tar to caulk ships back in the day'

This naturally led me down a hole of 'why is the staple length of this stuff a bullshit 6 inches' and the answer is 'we have bred modern flax more for the oil than the fiber because cotton usurped the place of everyday textile thanks to slavery and the cotton gin'

Anyway, THIS led me to a rabbit hole that culminated in me finding flax seed bred for proper 30 inch tall plants for fiber, sold by some fellow minded nerds on a website that has not been updated since 1998 and you have to email them to buy anything.

"Bertas Story

Berta was a farmers girl from Austria who married in the 1940ies. As it was common, she got a huge trunk full of unspun flax and one full of linnen fabric as a dowry. Both trunks were treasured by her till her death but she never used any of it.