"Getting More Satisfaction From Your Fiber" podcast episode

     You can hear TJ King interview me on her podcast The Peahen's Pondererings in episode six, "Getting More Satisfaction from Your Fiber" available on iTunes and Google or on her site here, https://thepeahenspod.com/2019/05/26/getting-more-from-your-fiber/.
     We talk about stuff including the way I keep track of my works-in-progress and to-do list with the Kanban method.
     After the podcast was recorded, I asked David J. Anderson exactly what commitment to a work-in-progress (WIP) means in Kanban.  He defined commitment to a WIP as a commitment to deliver goods or a service to a customer.  Similarly, regarding the book The Goal, I said in the podcast that the goal in the book was for the factory to finish its work, but actually the goal for the factory was to get paid for the products they produced.  I hope that you get my point in the podcast that we do things for a payoff, and that with yarn, usually we are our own customers.  For a fiber artist the payoff can come from having a finished product or from enjoying the experience of the production process.
     When preparing for the podcast, I came up with 31 different common problems I have seen keep people from being satisfied with their projects and finishing them.  TJ and I were only able to cover a handful on the podcast.  But there's nothing stopping me from giving you the list here, along with the solutions I propose.

1. Beginner problems, where you lack equipment, supplies, and know-how.  TJ points out the problem of buying too much and buying the wrong things because you don't understand what you need.  Solution: get the stuff, get the skills, and above all get support and feedback as you go along.  
2. Intermediate problems, where you make larger items or take on more stages (like fiber prep or dyeing), and as a consequence you run into more problems that block progress or you get discouraged because it takes longer to finish.  Solution: expect these problems, maybe limit your focus, and get any technical help you need.  I was talking to someone about this and she said that doing larger projects and doing more crafts is not actually a problem.  And it's true, it can be one of the joys of a fiber artist's life.  Assuming you don't get lost in the weeds.  
3. You modify a pattern and thereby cause problems you don't get from a tested published pattern, or you don't start a project because you are daunted by the difficulty of making the modifications you want.  Solution: get help, get more skill at making mods, be brave, or search harder for an existing pattern that is close to what you want.  
4. You are bored to tears at spinning two pounds of white wool or knitting miles of stockinette.  Solution: don't do it, or break up the work so you don't do it all at once, or get an e-spinner or a knitting machine so the work goes faster.  
5. Your project is a poor match for the context you work in.  For example, you are trying to knit something that demands all your concentration but you are out in public with friends who want to talk to you.  Solution: keep the complicated project for a time when you are alone, and keep a simple portable project in a pretty bag to take to parties.  My evening knitting bag is black hemp/silk and contains a Granny's Favourite dish cloth.  Also, schedule a block of time for the complicated knitting.  
6. You use modern patterns not traditional production patterns (or modern methods not production methods of spinning, knitting, and weaving).  Again, not necessarily a problem.  I've just observed that modern charts for lace and colourwork start with an image and go from there, and take a lot of concentration.  In contrast, charts from a hundred and twenty years ago have a rhythm to them.  So if you want to forge ahead, consider production patterns and methods.  I haven't knitted any stranded colourwork myself but I have done metal stamping in a Fair Isle pattern. I found stamping down the columns awkward.  Then I started stamping from right to left, bottom row to top row the way a knitter approaches the pattern, and it went extremely smoothly.  Similarly, traditional construction, such as knitting stockinette in the round and steeking, can be faster than knitting stockinette flat and seaming pieces because there's no purling.  As for methods, there are teachers like Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, Abby Franquemont, and Sara Lamb who teach production methods of knitting and spinning.  There is a possible downside to this solution: the look and fit you get with traditional patterns has been around for a very long time and some people may consider them unpleasantly dated-looking.  Not to mention that a stranded sweater can be too hot to wear in a place with central heating.  
7. You keep poor records and so you cannot easily knit a pattern again or you cannot spin an identical skein.  Solution: either accept this about yourself, or keep records with the details you need about modifications, yarn type, tools used, and so on.  
8. Your project does not fit your taste in processes.  For example, you are knitting lace because you want to have a lace scarf but you dislike knitting yarnovers and decreases.  You buy a fleece because it is beautiful but you dislike fiber prep.  Solution: practice self-awareness and acceptance.  Only do the process you like, or do the process you dislike in a way that you can take, like in small doses or in the company of a friend.  Or, get minions, or commission someone to do the work.  I know most fiber artists don't consider this an option because they buy yarn intending to use it themselves.  We tend to think of clothes as either homemade or bought ready-to-wear.  But if you really don't like a process and you really want the product, you can commission the work.  There are people who knit for money and take custom orders.  
9. Your taste in processes gives you nothing near your taste in products.  You like to knit garter stitch flat but hate the look of it, that sort of thing.  Solution: stick with your taste in processes and give the result away.  Or, see if you can tweak the process to get a product you like more.  For instance, instead of plying your laceweight singles into laceweight 2 ply yarn and then knitting lace, try cabling those singles into a thicker yarn or making a 5 ply yarn (again, thicker) or holding a couple of 2 ply strands together when knitting something substantial.   
10. You produce products that do not fit your lifestyle.  For example, you love to buy chunky mustard yellow yarn and knit boxy mustard yellow sweaters but you need a lace shawl to wear to a wedding and all those cocktail parties you attend.  Solution: knit what you love, keep it in a drawer, take it out to admire it, but buy ready-to-wear clothes.  Or, go against your instincts, grit your teeth, and knit products that fit your lifestyle.  Whichever makes you happy.  You may need to get extra technical help to be able to finish making wearable items, if something is holding you up and keeping you from wanting to produce wearable things.  
11. You make technical mistakes.  Solution: learn the technical solutions, like how to drop stitches and redo them, how to swatch and block to get gauge so your items fit, how to use a life line in lace knitting so you can undo your knitting easily, how to fix a slub when spinning, and how to choose a flattering pattern.  For that last one, the most flattering results I've seen are from people using Amy Herzog's Custom Fit patterns.  
12. You have trouble meeting deadlines.  Solution: set a reminder in your calendar and start way ahead.  Or, do what you love, whenever you fancy.  
13. You have little time to spend on the fiber arts because you have a demanding job or demanding family responsibilities.  Solution One: choose a project you can pick up and put down so you can integrate yarn into your daily life.  Solution Two: make yarn part of your vacation and leisure time by taking a class, going to a meetup, and so on.  Keep duplicate sets of tools and project bags you can take with you.  Solution Three: make sure you get out of your yarn time what you are looking for, and what you need to counterbalance your job or family.  Examples are a sense of completion, time among women (or whatever demographic your meetup group is), time spent on math and science, and the experience of touching beautiful fiber.  Solution Four: do not take on a volunteer task for a guild or festival until after you retire or your family no longer needs you, because if you have seriously demanding day job you have no spare time to spare.  You need your yarn time.  Defend it.  It does you good.  Solution Five: Practice selfish knitting, and keep what you make rather than giving it away so that you have a tangible record of your yarn accomplishments.  
14. You can't make what you want because you can't get the right materials.  For example, you need one more ball of yarn, and it's discontinued.  Solution One: find the yarn; do a Ravelry search for yarn in people's stash that's for sale, post an ISO (in search of) message on a Ravelry discussion board, or look up the company's distributors and call them about old stock.  To use a ball of yarn from a different dye lot and make a less noticeable transition, in between the old and new dye lots you can knit a section that alternates rows of either dye lot.  Solution Two: work around the problem; use different yarn for the cuffs or shorten the sleeves. 
15. You take on a commission, paid or not, and it goes badly.  Solution: have an out clause and agree in advance on how you will handle change requests.  Or, refuse commissions.  
16. You wind up working with materials or tools you never planned for, because they were given to you, or you picked them up in a destash sale, or your friend left them to you in her will.  Not necessarily a problem, as you may luck out and get something you like.  Solution: do not look needy.  Casually say things around friends and family like, "I get so much fun out of selecting just the right fiber," and "I have so much wool, my stash is awesome."  When you're around non-fiber friends, be their friend, not the person in their life who is all about yarn.  Be careful around destash sales: the seller cast off that stuff for a reason.  And, check for moths.  
17. You spend $1000+ on fancy equipment but forget to budget money for lessons, time to learn to use the stuff, and space to set it up.  Solution: either budget for this, or don't saddle yourself with an obligation to live up to the equipment.  
18. You wander into interesting but odd things to do with yarn, such as nalbinding and språng, for which there are few teachers and few patterns.  Solution: keep to the mainstream and focus on that.  Or, dive in.  Contact the teachers for advice, watch online videos, travel for classes to places like the John C. Campbell Folk School or Scandinavian cultural centers, or get together a bunch of students and invite a teacher to come to you.  
19. You suffer from second sock syndrome or get stuck on sleeve island, or you change gauge mid-project and can't get identical pieces.  In other words, you have trouble finishing a whole project.  Solution: get two identical sets of sock needles and knit two socks, switching back and forth between them, or do the magic loop technique, or knit one sock inside the other (if you dare).  Try to knit always under the same conditions, with no fast music or tense TV shows.  
20. You hate sewing up, or you create an overwhelming number of ends to sew up by using up scraps or doing involved colourwork.  Solution: sew in your ends anyway.  Or minimize the amount of sewing up by buying large balls of yarn, doing little colourwork, knitting raglan or yoke sweaters, and knitting toe-up socks.  Also, me, I like to take the sting out of sewing up by using a really nice needle that TJ's husband Mike made for me as a custom order, out of bone.  (Sorry, vegans.)  It is shaped like his Spanish Peacock single-point nalbinding needles but a little slimmer.  The regular nalbinding needle will work for worsted yarn. 
21. You like to spin but not to ply.  Solution One: don't.  Spin singles and set them, or spin energized singles to knit or weave with like Katherine Alexander.  Solution Two: get better equipment, such as a lazy Kate that holds bobbins at a 45 degree angle.  Solution Three: improve your form, by taking a class or watching a DVD by teachers like Judith MacKenzie, Sara Lamb, or Rita Buchanan.  
22. You need to spin and ply 3 ply yarn for your knitting to drape well but you hate to make 3 ply.  Solution: do 2 ply and knit lace or weave, because 2 ply is great for this.  Or, cable your yarn.  Or pass the singles through a spice jar top to ply 3 ply.  Or, n-ply, also called Navajo plying.  
23. You use self-striping yarn but get fraternal socks not identical socks.  Solution: start at the same place in the colour progression when you cast on, which may mean discarding some yardage and settling for shorter socks.  Or, use solids, semisolids, speckled yarn, or chromatic yarn to avoid the problem.  
24. You buy space-dyed braids because you love the way they look but you dislike the resulting barber pole yarn you spin, and the rest of the braids sit unused in your stash so they will be beautiful forever.  Solution: split the braid in half lengthwise, spin two bobbins, and ply a 2 ply yarn.  Or, spin the whole braid and n-ply it.  Or, divide up the braid following directions for fractal spinning and 2 ply the yarn.  Or, combo blend and combo spin.  Or, spin and ply each colour separately by tearing out sections of colour.  Or, commission the dyer to make you a coordinating solid braid.  
25. You are too intimidated to use yarn or fiber that is frankly too good for you.  Solution: if you have the skills to use it, use it anyway.  If you don't, get the skills.  
26. Your stash contains a little of this and a little of that, but not enough to make something.  Solution One: going forward, focus more when you buy, and buy enough.  Solution Two: use what you have by searching for low-yardage patterns on Ravelry, reading one-skein wonder pattern books, doing colourwork if the yarn is all the same weight, holding yarns together for bulky projects, and doing combo spinning and combo blending.  
27. You find you made a mistake warping the loom, after you've sleyed 200 more threads through 200 more heddles.  Solution: dig deep and consider why you're doing this and whether you really want to be doing this.  Then either fix the threads or live with the mistake.  
28. You want to wind a warp onto a loom but don't have a buddy to put tension on the warp while you crank.  Solution: make new friends.  Or, weave at a studio with an instructor and other students.  Or, get a gadget from Harrisville Designs to tension the warp.  Or, warp front to back.  Or use a rigid heddle loom with a weight.  
29. You try to weave with knitting yarn and it goes badly.  Solution: use a narrow rigid heddle loom and a short warp.  Or, wet your skeins of yarn and dry them under tension, maybe.  Or, switch and use proper weaving yarn.  Spend the money, and treat it as a new stash.  
30. You lose yarn to marauding moths or destructive kittens, or you lose your project.  Solution: use a Gamma seal lid on a 5 gallon bucket, use a Gripstic closure on a bag, and be cautious about bringing secondhand wool into your stash.  And just generally be careful.  In the podcast, TJ asked me about my general level of satisfaction with my fiber arts productivity.  I forgot to say that my one regret was leaving a couple of skeins of handspun Wensleydale out where the moths ate them.  Also I forgot to say that if someone announced to me, "That's it, you're done, no more yarn for you," I would be upset because there are things I still want to make.  
31. You like to knit but hate to purl.  Solution: knit continental.  Or knit with the Irish Cottage Knitting method.  Or, knit sweaters in the round.  Or, knit the patterns in Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knit One, Knit All, which have no purling.

     To sum up, don't let problems stop you from getting satisfaction from your fiber arts.
     When I receive a gift from someone that could influence me, I disclose it on the blog so you know.  Here goes: TJ gave me a Spanish Peacock spindle storage stand.  If you haven't see one, it is an affordable stand that's sold as a flat pack.

Autumn Vista Språng Shawl

The Autumn Vista shawl gets its long length from a circular warp.  You can see in the photo the last few strands are ready to be cut and fringed.  I've worked all the språng pieces I've done with a warp that is wrapped in a circle between two rods on a frame.  This is the first time I've worked only with the strands lying in front of the rod and pushed the bottom twists all the way to the bottom of the frame, over it, and all the way up the back to meet the twist at the top.  That's why I say this was worked with a circular warp.  Up until now I've incorporated the strands at the front and the strands in the back into one flat piece.

When on the frame the interlinking is about ten inches wide.  Taken off, it stretches and it drapes well.

The new owner says she is very happy with the result.  I am pleased too.  I tried a new method and accomplished my first språng project that's wearable.  Concept pieces and samples are fine but I like function.  I like that a person can use this as a walking advertisement for local wool and ancient textile techniques.

That was another great aspect of making this shawl, I contributed some skill and labour to the cause of locally-raised fibre.  The owner, who provided the handspun from her own sheep's wool, will display the shawl to promote her goods in the Leicester Longwool Ladies booth at the upcoming Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival and the Fall Fiber Festival of Virginia.

She kindly gave me some Leicester longwool of my own.

The Autumn Vista shawl would have pleased me more if I could have managed to work the initials AV into it with 1/1 interlinking on the background of allover 2/2 holes.  Letters with diagonal lines are suited to patterns in språng cloth.  You might remember I did a diamond pattern of 2/2 holes on a background of 1/1 interlinking.  My last post shows how off-track I got with the initials.  I had to give up and get on with finishing.

Sheep Beads

I bought these cute sheep pendants from Sandra, a glass bead maker and handspinner.  I got to choose from the many in her box of lampwork beads when I met her near Parksville, B.C.

It took me a while to pick the ones I liked best.  The beads are all a little different.  There are various colours, including colours never found on sheep in nature.  Each sheep has a unique expression that comes from the placement of the head, ears, and so on.  Some are round rather than flat in shape.

Sandra also had orifice hooks with sheep bead handles.

It was fun to listen to other handspinners pick over the beads and make jokes like, "This sheep is such-and-such a breed because its ears go up."  What was it, Cheviot?

As always, I need to disclose anything that might influence my opinion of an item: Sandra gave me a price break on the white sheep when she heard I was taking it back to my guild at home to put into our holiday gift swap in December.

Sandra can be contacted through her blog, sueze.wordpress.com; expect a bit of delay in reply.

Antler Whorls from Crossman Crafts

Here is my new drop spindle from Crossman Crafts in the U.K.  The whorl is small, an inch and a half, and is made from naturally-shed deer antler from Scotland.  The wood is English boxwood.

Spindles with antler are uncommon and I feel fortunate to have one.  To the left you can see another antler whorl, smaller and in conical shape.  I've worn that one as a pendant.  The exposure in the photo doesn't do justice to antler's slightly mottled surface.

The large and small whorls were stock items but the shaft and hook were made to order.  Initially I gave completely wrong specs to Peter Crossman due to a math error I made and he graciously reworked the piece when I realized.

As always, I note on the blog whenever I receive an unsolicited gift from a business so that you can know what could be influencing what I write.  Some beads and some pieces of taffy turned up in the parcel.

Hopefully it goes without saying that any complimentary parcel enclosure from anywhere is done solely at the discretion of the business owner and should not be expected as ordinary or anyone's due?

The beads are half-scale replicas of beads from the Tudor shipwreck the Mary Rose, which is in Portsmouth, England, same as Crossman Crafts.

The Dyed Wool is Here and It's Intense

My order of dyed wool arrived in the mail from Gale's Art and the colours are intense.

Left to right: undyed naturally dark Blue Face Leicester, rose red dyed on a base of natural dark BFL, rose red dyed on ecru BFL, and lapis.

Just to repeat, the middle three are all dyed with the same dye but one looks dark because the wool came from black sheep.

Love the black sheep effect.

(I disclose whenever I receive an unsolicited gift from a business so you can know if I've benefitted in any way that might influence my opinion.  Gale enclosed a complimentary art batt with this order.)

Stats, Posts Read, Referring Websites, and Your Privacy

I can now tell when someone who has me listed in their Ravelry friends clicks through to this blog from their friends' blogs activity page.  Same goes for anyone who goes from a link on their blog to mine, I see the URL of their blog.  Blogger has a new statistics function.  If you don't want me to get this information in my stats, I have suggestions for protecting your privacy.

Through the stats I get a list of referring websites and search words that lead visitors to my blog.  As I said, some of the websites have been Ravelry profiles with users' profile names on them.  To get to my blog without leaving tracks, start from your friends' blogs tab, go to the friends tab, click on my Ravatar to go to my profile, then click on the website link at the top or one of the individual post links at the bottom. Alternatively, you can bookmark the blog URL on your browser and use that to go right to my blog.  You might want to make a note of the name of my post that interested you on your Ravelry activity list so you can find it again.

There are links to my blog in other places on Ravelry such as a group, a list of projects for a pattern, or my projects.  If you click on any of these, the stats will show one of those as the referring website and show nothing about your personal profile.

For anyone who has been navigating from a link or blogroll on their own blog site and who wants to stop leaving that information, you can bookmark my blog and use that to get here.  You can also use an RSS feed reader, which is a convenient way to subscribe to content, though you lose some privacy to the company that supplies the reader.

I suppose a third party could click through from your blog or your Ravelry friends' blog activity, leaving misleading tracks.  For that, I have no solutions.

Besides referring websites, the statistics function also spits out a report of what posts and pages were viewed and how many times they were viewed.  I cannnot see who viewed what exactly.  The stats draw no correlation between the referring websites or searches and the posts viewed.  I have a hunch, though, that there's a strong link between searches for particular products and post views about those products in a particular time period.  I can see stats for a day, a week, a month, or the rather grand "all time."

I am impressed how many blog hits have been initiated by people looking for information on specific spinning tools, manufacturers, and handspinning suppliers.  There are about five sets of keywords that turn up regularly.  I have no feedback on whether anyone actually finds my posts helpful.  Some people use my blog as a quick directory to find a particular fiber arts supplier, and I trust they go on to use the websites and locations in the posts to get in touch with whoever they're looking for.  I don't know how strong my posts are for product reviews.  This blog is about my personal progress as a handspinner, and I write about a tool because I've come across it in my peregrinations so the mention of handspinning tools is incidental and not in any way comprehensive or systematic.  I understand, though, why visitors come for information on products.

People come to Web sites trying to get a job done or a question answered.

Philip Greenspun, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

forty-second skein

Spun this skein from one ounce of Gulf Coast Native fibre. The owner of Gem View Farm and Fiber gave this fibre to me when we were demonstrating spinning at Fireweed Farm Alpacas.

twenty-second skein

The stealth skein can finally be revealed, now that the festival skein and garment competition has happened.

Handspun division, novice class.

First place in class, needlefelting kit from Thistledown Alpacas
Leslie Woodward memorial prize, $25 gift certificate from Mangham Wool & Mohair Farm
Best of division, $25 gift certificate from Stony Mountain Fibers

Stony Mountain Fibers owner Barbara Gentry tossed in an extra dollar and tax since I selected two pre-measured bags of fibre that added up to $26. (Sorry to bore you with the details, but I promised to disclose any gifts that I get that could influence my blog content.)

For this skein, I selected colours that went against my type. I did this because I wanted to disguise the fact that I made it. I also had noticed that a lot of people in our guild favour autumnal colours and since the judges were drawn from the guild, I wanted to increase my chances of the skein's colour appealing to the people who were likely to judge it.

I have very strong colour preferences myself, and ever since I was "colour draped" as a child I have stuck very closely to winter colours for my own clothing.

However, when I select colours for other people, for gifts and such, I squelch my ideas of what's hideous and pay attention to the colours they wear. Some people are so attuned to what colours they like, they make it easy for me to discover their preferences because they mention their favourites in conversation quite a bit.

I find it delightful the enthusiasm they express over purple or hot pink or whatever has their permanent fancy. They talk about indulging cravings for their colour the way people talk about chocolate.

Back to the skein. The fibre is Ashland Bay merino top in buff, mocha, and olive. Each colour was spun separately in 40 wpi singles on a lightweight drop spindle lined with a paper quill, transferred to the lazy Kate, run over and under through a box impaled with chopsticks to add tension,* and made into 3 ply yarn on a regular drop spindle. Set with hot water and weight, then reskeined on the niddy noddy to even out the strands' tension again.


*Thanks, Annie, chopsticks worked well.

Striped Roving

This is my first use of colour-striped roving. It was either a test strip or seconds from the free bin of a trunk sale an independent dyer held, Scarlet Fleece.

Remember I said I would be upfront and disclose when I received anything from a company, so that you would know if this blog is influenced by outside considerations? This is disclosure.

Also on the theme of disclosure, you might remember the woman I've mentioned whose husband makes drop spindles (the name he uses is Leaf Squeezer spindles). She recently gave me two drop spindles made out of wood I gave her from my dad's scrap bin. I gave the wood outright thinking her husband would enjoy using it; I wasn't expecting anything back.

I doubt either of them knows that I even have a blog. I got the roving well before I started this blog.

Right, back to the roving.

Here it is the way I got it:



And here it is, from left to right, torn into sixths, torn into twelfths, spun at 40 wpi on the spindle, and wrapped by hand on a bobbin ready for the lazy Kate in order to spin the singles into three ply yarn.

The idea is to get the colour repeats in the singles to match up with each other when plied to create a self-striping yarn.