⚧passing beyond memory and into forgetting⚧ @milkweedman - Tumblr Blog

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i started knitting squares for this blanket several months ago, and I dreaded it. It was very hard to figure out how long they needed to be, and no matter what kind or length of needle I used it was very annoying to knit.

Now I am crocheting granny squares with the yarn instead and much more excited about it. It's a lot easier for me to gauge a granny square. I'm still deciding the size I want to do but having a lot more fun with it.

This is my 'sitting in bed' project at the moment :)

(Please ignore the bad colors--my nighttime lamp is very yellow)

#I was so caught up on knitting it because all my other summer blankets have been knit #But i dont think thats necessary at all and i can do the cool designs with crochet a lot easier i think !#Yay no more dread.#Crochet #Granny square #Blanket #Crochet blanket #Crochet summer blanket

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I'm making a New Spinner packet for my friend/coworker who has wanted to learn to spin for years. I'll also be throwing in a 1oz/28g batt and a bigger drop spindle that will be a very good beginner plying spindle, but this is just the basics.

My old cross arm spindle--the very first spindle I ever got. Her partner does woodworking so I'm hoping they can make her a nicer shaft because I broke the original years ago, but the chopstick absolutely works.

And then 1 rolag (made by me), and a bit of batt that came as an extra, and then a bit of roving that came as an extra as well. I figured its good to try many different preps and see what one prefers (as well as see the different effects each prep gives on the finished yarn).

And I also had to make a second rolag to try out, in case they were no good. Very nice to spin :)

#Spinning #Handspun yarn #Cross arm spindle #Drop spindle

allonsybadwolf

okay guys this will be my first year that I am able to participate in tour de fleece and I am SO PSYCHED

I know the basic idea (we spin on days that they spin, rest on days they rest, there are teams (but you don't have to participate in a team), you can do challenge days)

what am I missing what do I need to know give me your hot tour de fleece tips ALSO do we have a #spinblr team?

ofchaosgoddess

I think the spinblr team is just posting on tumblr? At least that’s all I do 😅 tour de fleece on tumblr is a great time though! This year will be my second year i’m very excited

affreca

I haven't been successful in previous years about have a goal or accountability, but maybe this is my year. A guild mate has gone all in with planning weekly meet ups and organizing a 21 breed study. So that will be my goal to spin a breed a day. Most days will be the half ounce I got from her, but I will pull out additional fiber for that breed on the challenge days. If I am really energetic I will post a short write up on each breed on the same day.

littlebirdinagarden

I like to do little daily blogs here during tdf, sometimes I do polls to vote what I spin next. We also have a bingo board in the discord server! I’ve never spun as part of a team so I don’t actually know what happens there.

zooarchaeologyatdinner

What if instead of any sort of formal team (because I at least am not volunteering to organise the herd of cats that is spinblr lmao) we invited people to submit the data for how much they spun during tdf and combined it? Could allow for quantity and length (plied or unplied) to give some sort of final numbers? With no purpose other than to point at big number and go We Did That!

milkweedman

that sounds fun ! I mostly just browse the tags and post my own stuff in there, but maybe we could do a spinblr tumblr community on here too ? It would help filter out the tour de france posts, if youre not as interested in tour de france lol

#Is it called a community i cant remember lol #Tdf 2026

opheliacordelias

I FINISHED IT! I KNIT A SWEATER FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER! YAY! so thrilled with the result and excited to knit more sweaters in the future. this was an incredibly satisfying project to work on. took a little over two months, would have taken less time if i hadn't freaked myself out and not worked on it for nearly three weeks because i was scared of picking up the stitches for the sleeves wrong. we live and learn.

pattern: clay sweater by ozetta. yarn: juniper moon patagonia, colorway juniper.

#:O #really lovely textured pattern !#knit sweater #knitting

okayyoureacab

Hexagon Quilt

rumade

This is the second time I've seen a video of this technique and this explanation is so clear! It does use more fabric than English paper piecing (EPP) but you end up with a double sided hexagon so don't have to source fabric for the backing.

I'm doing EPP at the moment but I have a hole punch to make the papers and just use leaflets and junk mail, so it doesn't feel wasteful. I don't think it's difficult either- in the video she mentions it's not for beginners, but I don't have that much experience with hand sewing or EPP and I've been finding it pretty easy so YMMV

lindstromm

I saw this video yesterday and was seized with the need to try it out immediately. Lookit my cute lil' hexagon baby!!

Here is what the backside looks like. OP notes this takes more fabric than paper piecing, but that excess fabric makes it already triple-layered. Besides not needing backing fabric, I don't think you'd need batting for this quilt at all. It's already thick and soft just from folding all that fabric into a hexagon.

lannamichaels

Hexagon quilt tutorial video by tiktok user camelscrafts. Method:

Each hexagon begins as a 6" circle. camelscrafts does this by creating a paper template using a compass. According to the video, a 6" circle will create a hexagon that is 2.5 inches tall.

These hexagons are hand-sewn. Thread the needle.

With the fabric right side facing, find the center of the circle by folding it in half right sides together, then folding it in half again (wrong sides are facing). The top of the triangle shape is the center of the fabric circle.

Make a small stitch into the center of the fabric. The wrong side is still facing.

Unfold the circle. There will be a small stitch in the center.

Now the hexagon is created by folding the circle into itself: With wrong side facing, take the needle to one of the edges of the fabric (it doesn't matter which one). Pull the needle through and pull the thread tight. This will fold down the fabric and create an edge of the hexagon. Crease the fold with your finger.

This fold has two corners, one at the top and one at the bottom. Put the needle into one of the corners and pull the thread taut. This will create another fold.

Continue this going around the circle until all of it is folded down, creating the hexagon. camelscrafts notes that the last corner pulled in may be a little bit "wonky" (no precise point in the corner) if the corners were not done precisely. However, that corner is pulled into the back, so is not visible from the front.

The hexagon is now formed. Sew around the folds in the middle of the circle to hold the folds in place. Tie off and cut the thread.

Attach hexagons to each other along the sides. With right sides together, whip stitch the sides together.

#This seems shockingly doable even for me #Altho cutting all the circles would still probably make this impossible (for me) if i have to use scissors #But still. Very cool #Quilting

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Every june without fail im like Oh its tdf time !! I cant wait !

And then i relearn every single time that tdf starts in july

#I cant wait #I think i can actually do it this year with my espinner ! My setup is finally decent and i can sit in my wheelchair with it reclined #And spin which is about as good as it gets #This year i think im just aiming for like half an hour a day #And thats the only real goal. Spin Something idc what #Im thinking the red batts but who knows !#Tdf #Tdf 2026

behaviornerdwithahat

So many fiber arts have difficulty levels that are less about your level of skill than your ability to tolerate extreme multi-step processes.

#So true #I think a lot of hobbies are like this tbh which means if you can do fiber arts you can probably also do like. Pottery.#Whittling. Oil painting.#I have found as i learn pottery it helps to think back to learning spinning #Your hands have to learn a delicate balancing act along with using a tool like a wheel which complicates it #But also makes it quicker and often easier #Your hands have to learn to percieve things that your brain will always miss #On every process in like a 50 step routine #Its fun i love it

aeide

By day I wove the web, and in the night by torchlight, I unwove it.

ἔνθα καὶ ἠματίη μὲν ὑφαίνεσκον μέγαν ἱστόν, νύκτας δ᾽ ἀλλύεσκον, ἐπεὶ δαΐδας παραθείμην.

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:

#This is so cool #Weaving #Classics #Art

ofchaosgoddess

If you purchase rolags, how do you expect them to look/feel? How tightly rolled do you expect them to be, how dense/airy, how much fiber per rolag, any other descriptions you can think of or are relevant to you. Do you expect rolags you purchase to be any different from ones you’ve carded yourself?

milkweedman

No particular expectations because so much of it Just Depends, in my opinion. If I card some southdown rolags and some shetland rolags those should look and feel very different ! But even then dense vs airy can yield totally different results on both those breeds (and the majority of breeds) and are both desirable depending on what you're going for.

For size I personally decide on my own rolags size depending on how fine I plan to spin the yarn. A rolag for a thick yarn will be much larger than a rolag for a fine yarn, mostly because if I'm spinning off the same rolag for several hours and multiple spinning sessions on a hand spindle then it's going to get messed up over time. And conversely if I'm going through a rolag super fast I don't want to join them more often than once a minute (and preferably more like every 2-3 minutes at most). So I tailor the size of the rolag to the width of the yarn.

Thus as a general rule an airy low micron count rolag should have more fiber than a dense high micron count rolag, in my opinion !

(Same with cotton punis--if I'm thickspinning them they're pretty big but if I'm spinning thread on a bird spindle I want the smallest possible puni because it's going to take forever and they get messed up very easily and then the thread quality suffers.)

I don't often buy rolags but when I do the info I would want is weight per rolag, a picture with an object to show scale (unless it's in person of course), the carder's description of whether it's dense or airy, and then, in an ideal world, what the carder has successfully done with those same rolags. A sample of it spun up with a brief description (ex: "Spun on my wheel with the lace flyer, 3 ply 30 WPI" is very valuable info for me because that tells me a lot about the fiber as well !). I definitely wouldn't expect a spun sample but I would be very happy if there was one.

#i have a lot of feelings about rolags lol #i think no batch of mine are ever the same and that is on purpose. so as long as its well made i will happily spin any rolag #and do not expect it to be any particular way other than it shouldn't fall apart or be super lumpy #mostly i just want the info because i want to know what it would work best for and whether i want the resulting yarn #rolags

Visited my sister and her extremely large puppy today and went home with a small bundle of his inner coat fur to try and spin. He's a Great Pyrenees (possibly mixed with lab ? Unclear) so it should be spinnable

Had to submit it for Inspection first obviously. Chuck deemed it wool but pronounced it "worthy of great concern" and "a cause for alarm".

I tried spinning it on a few different tools. First my mini drop spindle, then a very heavy spindle, and then a cross arm spindle, and then finally my espinner. Tbh it worked on all of them, it was just hurting my hands too much to spin it manually. The espinner made very short work of it, but allowed for no precision and flung fur absolutely everywhere.

2nd picture is of it plied. I ended up spinning it long draw. It really liked long draw but the halo is ridiculous and it ended up not very strong. It broke repeatedly while plying.

It's currently mid-blocking (2nd picture its wet). I'm a little torn... I think if I carded it it would be much better behaved, but I'm uncertain it would make a good yarn even then. Maybe I just needed a lot more twist ? It never broke from too much twist but I was trying to stop it from getting wiry because it already wasnt soft. But maybe it wants to be wiry, idk.

I did consider carding it after I had spun a few lengths but I am certain most of it would have floated away into my apartment which I really didn't want. So I'd need to do that at my sister's house really.

The dog in question (Subcommandante Marcos). He is about 6 months old and the size of a medium bear who almost knocked me over about 20 times. (Hes very sweet but so extremely huge, uncoordinated, and enthusiastic about biting everything that he is absolutely impossible for me to hang out with, lol. Maybe in a few years !

Anyway, I've only spun dog fur one other time and that was difficult as well. If anyone has any tips or insight (esp for great pyr fiber) I would appreciate it !

#Spinning #Chiengora #Great pyrenees #Dog #I also got to see the roo which is tbh the primary reason i visited. I love roo !! She is 15 now by the way...#Still very baby just also being an old lady about it #I have tried spinning roos fur but no dice. Same with chuck !#Theyre both varying levels of medium hair tho idk maybe it works better on long hair cats

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no-sharks-on-the-sun

"only a poor artisan blames his tools" is such bullshit, in almost every imaginable line of work the quality of the tools you have access to plays a massive role in the quality of the end product, sometimes in excess of the role played by individual skill! For example, some people have to code in javascript

#i understand what the phrase is getting at but it is still a bullshit sentiment #when you are good enough at something you can make high quality things with shit tools and while it might be a little slower or harder #nobody would be able to tell. spinning for instance. i've spun beautiful yarn using a pen as a spindle #but when you are newer that does not really fly. you can maybe make it work but your end result will suffer #but that doesnt mean blaming your shit tools isnt fully justified when youre still learning the basics !!!#if youre new and think you'll continue the craft it is worth investing in better tools #< is a beginner coder who only uses java #one day ill take my own advice lol

Got to introduce a coworker at my yarn group who spins to the concept of tour de fleece today and he was delighted. We got another one :3

#I am gonna do my utmost to do tdf this year ! I think my current espinner setup should be doable for tdf #And i know what im gonna spin at least initially #Anyway yeah. Good timing to mention it to him lol #All the non-spinners at yarn group were very charmed and baffled by the idea of tdf

So after I finished the fingering weight cotton bag, I thought to myself "that was great ! But what if I made a finer one ?"

Behold:

My 24/2 cotton bag. Pencil for scale. I'm not sure what 24/2 is in knitting weight--it seems finer than laceweight to me but idk. This took me a few months of off and on work--mostly on the bus. It was genuinely delightful to crochet.

Next to my fingering weight bag. I changed up the pattern somewhat because I didn't really like the effect I got on the fingering weight bag with the whole quadruple crochet chain 6 thing. It didn't look as nice as I was going for. So for the 24/2 bag I just did increasingly long chains. It was much more relaxing to crochet and I think it has a nicer effect.

Some glamor shots, including the tunisian crochet handles. They were so wide when I made them. Someday I'll learn that you really got to make them 3 or 4 times wider than the handle you actually want.

I want to make an even finer bag, but I suspect this yarn is my limit in terms of what my hands can deal with. It was very hard to tension.

Anyway, now I'm crocheting a new bag with super bulky macrame thread and it's a very different vibe lol.

#Crochet #Crochet bag #Im so obsessed with the texture. Also unblocked it was great as well. Like seafoam #I kind of want to make a top with it because it would stretch very nicely if i did this chain mesh #Maybe later #Eyestrain

batbetbitbotbut

Oopsie: started this as a Z twist single, but the plying muscle memory from yesterday kicked in and I switched to S twist without noticing. I have wound off that section and am slowly carefully re-spinning it in the other direction...

#I pretty much never experiment with twist direction for exactly this reason ! If its wool i spin woolwise if its plants i spin samwise #If its neither im probably not spinning it to prevent confusion #Spinning

aroedmundpevensie

there's actually a secret eighth deadly sin and it's exactly like gluttony except for textile projects

stitchposts

#my sister sent this to me lol #i mean shes not wrong

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