Lab Goddess Fibre Club July 2016

This month's Lab Goddess Fibre Club offering is a more semi-solid colourway than usual. Meet Far End of the Spectrum:

This colourway, dyed on British Suffolk wool, was inspired by Anna Jane Harrison, an organic chemist who focused her work on the structure of organic chemicals and their interactions with ultraviolet (UV) light, the waves lengths of light that are beyond the detectable range for human eyes. A professor of chemistry at Mount Holyoke College for many years, she was elected the first woman president of the American Chemical Society in 1978.

In addition to her research, Dr. Harrison was renowned as an educator; as a professor at an all women's small liberal arts college, she was a role model and inspiration for following generations of female scientists.

The colourway, though a variety of a semi-solid, actually took multiple dye baths to create. I wanted to capture the violet part of UV light but also include the fact that UV light is largely invisible or hidden from normal human sight. Purples and blues were first applied to the fibre and set, before adding black to the dyebath to hide the brilliance of the initial colours.

The Suffolk base is a serious wool: crunchy and sturdy, perfect for hardwearing items. Fairly rough in top form, the fibre softens with spinning to create a strong, durable yarn that I'm planning to use for some textured socks.

Come over to the Porpoise Fur Ravelry group to see how this fibre spins up, and share your own spinning photos!

Holiday time!

The last few days have been an absolute whirlwind. There's been the end of school:

Dev's first day and last days of primary school.

There's been dyeing and packing of this month's Spinning Box contribution,

Under the Big Top on Suffolk

And this month's Lab Goddess Fibre Club.

And there's been finishing up a whopping load of Tour de Fleece spinning.

Now we're off to the States for some good holiday with family. I hope everyone is having a lovely summer, and see you soon!

The Tour de Fleece is here - hooray!

Last Saturday was the launch of the Tour de Fleece, as well as a little bike race in France. I went down to the wire on setting goals for myself for this year's event, but finally I put some down in writing last Thursday:

1) Spin up the May and June fibre club colourways.
2) Spin up at least 4 bundles of my Hello Yarn fibre stash into yarns for sale.
3) Spin up at least 2 bundles of HYFC into yarn for me.

Since then, I've added Goal #4: Spin up the 2016 Tour de Fleece colourways on the appropriate days. Since today is Stage 4, that means I've been spinning up Rosé d'Anjou. This is going to be a fractal 2-ply, and here's the first ~1.5 oz done.

As for the other goals? Well, I've finished 3 oz of Hello Yarn merino into singles that will need to be fulled and finished. I also finished off my Lab Goddess Fibre Club Cortus on Wensleydale, which I started spindling a looooong time ago, so I've crossed off 1 bundle from Goal #2 and one bundle from unlisted goals. Or something like that...

Here's the first three days in order:

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Day 1: Damp Earth on Merino from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club
Day 2: Cortus Wensleydale from the Lab Goddess Fibre Club
Day 3: Started Critter Falkland from HYFC

Please feel free to come join Team Porpoise Fur on Ravelry - any and all spinning projects are welcome and will be heartily cheered on, but to be eligible for prizes, you've got to spin some Porpoise Fur.

Lab Goddess Fibre Club June 2016

This month's colourway was inspired by Augusta Ada Byron King, otherwise known as Ada, Countess of Lovelace, a mathematician and computer pioneer from the nineteenth century.

Enchantress of Number on 60/40 merino/flax

Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, the man for whom the phrase "mad, bad and dangerous to know" was coined. She never really knew her father, as her parents separated when she was one month old. Her mother, in an attempt to prevent her child falling prey to the madness that haunted her father, pushed Ada toward mathematics and logic. The result was a woman who, at the age of 17, formed a life-long friendship with Charles Babbage, the father of computers. Her work with Babbage focused around his Analytical Engine, a general purpose mechanical calculator now considered to be the first computer. Countess Lovelace's notes on the Analytical Engine and its function are the first example of a computer program, making her arguably the world's first hacker.

I originally had planned to do this colourway in a variety of neutral, semi-metallic shades, to evoke COMPUTER, but instead ended up using a portrait of Ada Lovelace as the inspiration for the colour palette.

Ada, Countess of Lovelace, painted by Alfred Edward Chalon

I appropriated the purple and burgundy shades of her dress combined with black, brown and grey from the veil for this month's dyeing. The base is 60% merino/40% flax, and spins up into a very interesting and different yarn. The flax gives a crunchy feel to the top while the merino lends softness and some elasticity to what would otherwise be a quite stiff yarn. Finishing and knitting make the yarn even softer.

Quarter 2 LGFC colourways: Enchantress of Number on 60/40 merino/flax (June), Blue Lias on Merino d'Arles (May) and Cacophany on Shetland (April).

There are still slots left in the next quarter's Lab Goddess Fibre Club which will ship out in mid-July. For anyone outside of the UK or EU, the exchange rate is definitely in your favour, and I ship world-wide!

Victoria Sponge

Last month marked our seven year anniversary of moving to the UK from Houston, TX. The past year has been something of a challenge for us, as we've struggled with deciding if we are staying more-or-less permanently, or jumping ship and going back to the States with no definite jobs or plans. Some of this was driven by Himself's dissatisfaction with his job, our worries about secondary school options for Devil, and questions about whether could find a job that would contribute significantly to the household income and give us a few more options. Because, let's be realistic: I am not getting rich selling fibre or knitting patterns or tech editing. Not many people are, and its been something my other half and I have been struggling with for quite a while now.

But over the past few months a lot of things have changed. Dev got into her top choice secondary school. Himself offered to take a package in a recent round of company layoffs and ended up with a promotion instead, one which is addressing many of his concerns and giving him new opportunities, so he's a lot happier with his job. And last week I was offered a job on a new career path, one that uses my scientific training and background but is new and very exciting And last, but by no means least, we're gaining British citizenship.

All of these events coincided with a fibre challenge with my June contribution to the Spinning Box, a sampler scheme just for hand spinners. Each month there's a specific theme, and June's theme was "Natural".

Now anyone who's spent any time around here knows that I don't really do "natural" colours in the undyed sense, so this theme put me in a bit of a quandry. Finally inspiration struck: I have a pile of lovely washed brown Corriedale fleece that I've been meaning to card, along with a bag full of washed BFL locks. And since I've been thinking about adding batts to the Porpoise Fur line up for a while, so I decided to do an initial venture into carding with some natural coloured batts.

Corriedale/BFL batt in progress

While happily carding away, I had a small epiphany: instead of thoroughly blending the two fibres together as I originally intended, I tried carding them in three layers: one layer of brown Corriedale sandwiched between white BFL. As I peeled the batts off of the carder, I had sudden visions of a wild variety of such batts - semisolid outer layers with brightly coloured and unexpected insides, dark layers around colours that would peek through in the finished yarn, varied combinations that would create unexpected finished yarns.

Having spent some time playing with the carder, and working with a couple of other colour options, I'm thrilled to announce the launch of a new product at Porpoise Fur: Victoria Sponge Batts. Named for the resolutely British cake, to celebrate my new status as an official Brit, these batts will be available in small batches from the next shop update. There won't be repeated colourways as such for these, unlike the dyed tops; I'm going to use this product as an opportunity to really step outside my usual recipe-driven process and just play with colour. Lots and lots of colour. I hope you'll join me on this new adventure - I think it's going to be amazing!

Shetland Victoria Sponge Batts - Sponge: natural brown/grey, Jam: three shades of blue