Mi Contra Fa

Nalbound hat complete

Ta-da!

• Mammen stitch, with just one linking stitch picked up instead of two.
• Brown wool is blended Icelandic wool I handspun on my Hershey Fiber Arts drop spindle, using a grasped spinning technique
• Brown portion took about 50 yards of yarn (if I measured it correctly on the niddy-noddy)
• Blue yarn is commercial Merino (I think; I have the card for it around somewhere). I remember the card said it was hand dyed, and it may be handspun as well.  From South America.
• Could maybe have been another row longer.
• I used my thumb for a gauge.
• Lighter colored yarns are so much easier to work with.  There are a double handful of mistakes in the brown, I think because it was so hard to see which loops I was picking up. With the blue, everything was very easy to see.
• These singles were also much nicer to work with than the plied yarn I tried.  No tails to weave in, since you can spin the yarns together.
• Photo is somewhat washed out (tried to adjust for too-dark background).  The brown is a deep chocolate brown. The blue isn't much darker than shown, though.

This will probably become a normal hat come winter time.  It's nice to have an SCA-appropriate warm hat, but honestly I find few occasions to wear cloaks, mittens, etc.  In the outdoor season, it's usually too warm, and for the indoor season, I'm indoors.  Well, if I ever make Tournament of Ymir, I'll be all set.

Any plan where you lose your hat...

...is a bad plan.

Per the last post, I have turned 50 yards of handspun dark brown wool into most of a hat.  It is not quite enough. I think 75 yards would have done it; 100 yards would have done it easily.  I will make up the rest with the light blue yarn I have left from the socks.  I think that was also sold as handspun, but by a person in South America, not by me.

Not knowing anything about knit (or nalbound) hats, I made a flat disc with the intention of tapering the sides out into a bowl-shape.  Well, I let the disc get too big, so the taper became a right-angle turn.  It's looking like a pillbox hat.  I think when it's long enough to pull snugly onto my head, it won't matter too much - the odd bumps should smooth out.  Wetting and blocking it (I have to find out how to do that) may also help me reshape it into more of a sock-hat.

I did this much of the hat over the weekend.  It went relatively quickly.  I have no good reason to be working on a wool hat right now, when we're in the middle of a July heatwave.  It just seemed rather urgent that I get the hat made.

In related news, the first attempted hat got a drawstring run through it, and now it's a little pouch-thing.  Full of holes, so not good for carrying small items.  Trying to decide if giving it away as largess would be insulting to the recipient.  XD

Recent wool work

When I re-did my blog categories, I didn't include spinning. Really wish I had!

I bought a gallon Ziplock bag of Icelandic "black" (chocolate brown, but in sheep-speak this is black?) roving at Sheep and Wool this year.  It was blended fiber, tog (long hairs) and thel (soft wool) together.  Also bonus bits of straw in places for extra authenticity! (I kid.)  I actually spun it all!  I did about 33 yards of a thin yarn (maybe laceweight-ish? still trying to figure out what's what) then decided to do the rest thicker, for nalbinding.  Thicker is hard!  For one, it feels wasteful to put so much of the fluff into the yarn at once.  For the other, I have a harder time controlling the consistency. 

The thinner skein is on the left, with the other two being the thicker ones.  Each of those is about 25 yards.  Is that enough for a hat?  We will see.

Speaking of hats. The one I started with my first two-ply yarn had an unfortunate issue.  I put it down for a while, and when I came back to it, I could not remember what I was doing.  I put in a piece of two of yarn, took them out, put them in again, and then put it all down in frustration.  I haven't thrown it out or anything, but I'm not sure what to do with it next.

I got to play with my new combs:

On the left is the red-brown (moret? More sheep-speak) tog, some of it spun into thread.  It needs a lot of twist to stay together - the tog has very little crimp, so it's like spinning hair.  The chunk of fluff next to the tog is an intermediary bit of wool, the last stuff to draft off of the combs.  This sheep had red-brown topcoat, a light grey undercoat, and some dark black/brown hairs in between.  That bit of the wool had a lot of those hairs in it.  I don't know if it's worth it to separate from the thel in general or not, but I pulled it off as an experiment.  The little coils are the ....slivers? of thel drafted off of the combs. The coil on the bottom-left is the one that had the middle coat section removed.  The one on the top-right did not, and you can see that it's darker.

Way, way up in the top-right corner is what was left on the combs after drafting.  This did not seem like bad wool!  It definitely has more junk in it than the stuff that came off the combs, but it's not total crap.  I finger-spun a bit of it, and it seems like it will make an okay woolen yarn for... something.  Or maybe it becomes felt.  Dunno yet.

This was all done with the unwashed fleece.  This is the last that will be done with the unwashed fleece.  I learned at Stierbach's birthday that the strong smell comes from the ram urinating on himself so his scent is stronger for the ewes to detect.  Sexy.  Falen of Bright Hills recommended I get some Eucalan, which is an enzyme-based gentle cleansing agent, which should leave most of of the lanolin intact, while de-stinking it.  I will also try washing the yarn there on the spindle.  Not sure what will happen to the slivers there.  I suppose I may as well try washing them, although I suspect they'll need to be combed again afterwards.

Wisigarde vitta planning

1. In the picture of the vitta, the gold wire looks almost knitted. I'm thinking it's a chain stitch.
2. I believe for my 2013 Pentathalon, I [Google] translated a bit of a book I have on royal female Merovingian burials, and it said the gold was drawn wire, rather than flat plate (like the Kentish ones) or foil-wrapped silk (like every other precious metal thread ever).  I have some Japan gold for the task, not wanting to use brass wire and gold wire being way out of my price range.
3. The ground is shown as white linen.  That almost certainly did not survive, and is the museum's most conservative version of what the ground may have been. Or it is just a mounting to display the finds.
4. Also, how wide the ground was is not a given.  The reconstruction/mounting of the artifacts ends just at the end of the goldwork.  I would expect at least a small border, for comfort if nothing else.

Questions for me:

Silk or linen ground?  What color? What width?

I have some dark blue and dark red linen, either of which would look great.  Not sure what silk I have left.  My exhibition catalogue with this item in it doesn't give any dimensions, but the artist's sketch of it on the deceased show it around the same width as her eye, maybe a bit wider. And inch isn't a bad estimate.The goldwork decoration I have is about 1/2". How should I place it to get the same proportions as the original?  I measured the on-screen image (which is photographed at a slight slant) not because an image is the same size, but because the proportions should come out the same:

• Gold and garnet ornament approx 7/16" diameter
• Approx 3/16" space between top of ornament and top of band
• Approx 1/4" space between bottom of ornament and edge of goldwork under it
• Approx 1/8" goldwork to bottom of band.

That adds up to 16/16, or 1" wide. Serendipitous! When I measure the band on the screen, I get 7/8".  All things considered (band at an angle, hard to get ruler right up against monitor, inaccuracies in measurement), I'll accept that.  Given that my ornament is about the same size, I guess I'm looking at a 1" wide strip of embroidery.  I may make the band just slightly wider, but not much - I don't have all that much forehead to play with.

I did some quick sampling.  The japan gold I bought doesn't chain stitch worth a darn.  It can be couched down, although turning the rows gives either a bumpy edge, or one in which the gold wrap in stretched and the core fiber peeks out.  Then I remembered that the Sulky metallic silver thread I used for the brocaded Birka headband had a gold sibling.  A double strand of that chain stitches fine, although managing the threads is a bit of work.

Either the couching or the chain stitch will look okay, I think, and I'm leaning toward the chain stitch.  (Which means I didn't have to buy the japan gold, but whatever.  I'll decorate something with it some day, I'm sure.)