Progress, at last!

The white's been spun.

The brown's been spun.

There's a light at the end of the tunnel for this project, and it's not a train coming towards me.

Unfortunately, I got turned down on the residency application, so I took matters into my own hands and set a goal: join Ravelry's Tour de Fleece (where one spins every day the riders ride in the Tour de France bike race) and finish off the chessboard yarn component of this project.

And I have, with a week to go, no less.

That's the good news: the bad news is that I have a lot less yardage than I probably need to execute the chessboard as I had originally conceived it, with four-inch squares, and use some silk noil from my stash for the chess pieces. I opted to three-ply both the white and the brown instead of keeping it two-ply (like the sample several messages below): easier and faster to knit were my main reasons.

Thus, the squares will need to be made smaller, and the silk noil is going to be just too bulky to work with. What to do? Dig out a 100 gm bag of 50/50 tussah silk/camel, spin it up in the remaining week of the Tour, and use that for the chess pieces.

So tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday, when the boys are grunting up HC climbs in the Alps or recovering from them, I'll be whirring away on my lace flyer with the fat hollow-core bobbins and spinning from the fold. After filling three bobbins (one a day), I'll two-ply it on Friday and start swatching all over again.

Now, where did I put those 1.25 mm Inox needles?

Let's try this one more time

It's still a project I want to do -- it's just something that I need time, space, technology, and knowledge to execute properly.

So I'm recasting and repitching it for a residency application that's due April 1. They provide everything I need (including travel, housing, materials, equipment, and education): I just hope they want me.

Change of plan, sort of

The sculptural part of this project isn't going to happen according to my schedule: I've just not had enough time or energy to do all the spinning I need to, although sampling the silk noil I will use for the chess pieces has been going as well as can be expected.

(Which means I haven't had time to do much!)

I really wanted to get some different silk to work with (from The Silk Tree), and made a special trip to the Silk Weaving Studio on Granville Island in Vancouver when I was there three weeks ago. Despite a sign saying they were open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., the door was locked and the place was dark (and we were there at 12:30 p.m.). hrumph.

Work on the book progresses, however: I've been doing a fair bit of reading about the history of the area where they were found, and have an outline done of what I want to write and draw. The actual process of doing the book itself isn't what's going to take the time, it's all the other prep work.

Onward.

I'm Rooked

Well, technically, the name of this piece is The Warder....

I finally took the plunge to teach myself how to make monotypes for this project. Using watercolour pencils dry on a detergent-coated frosted mylar sheet, I did a rough sketch of a rook (although not my favourite berserker) from the Lewis Chessman publication put out by the British Museum.

No, it really isn't this colour -- it is, after all, a piece of carved walrus tusk -- but I wanted to see how the pencils would work to make a print, and I'm rather pleased with how it worked, particularly the gentle fuzziness of the image, as I wanted to avoid a photographic look.

The Spinning Begins

The sample in the picture is my two-ply reference string, wrapped around my measuring gauge. The notch where it's resting is an inch long, for perspective.

I spent more than three hours on Friday spinning up a full bobbin like this -- I think I used a little more than a quarter of the wool that I've got, and I hope I've got enough to knit the chessboard the way I want.

But like most projects, I suspect this one will go through some tinkering.

This yarn, for example. There's a trade-off between spinning heavy and spinning thin: you get way more yardage from thin (for a given weight of spinning material), but you put in more time spinning and knitting fine. I need to balance the time I've got with the limited amount of wool, and that's going to require a lot of ongoing evaluation.

October 2007

The brown locks had been combed years ago, when I first bought this wool.

Here's how I processed the white:

My favourite two-row dog comb and its pouch/protective covering

Several locks after washing and drying

Two locks, ready for combing. Tips right, butts (the end closest to the sheep, when the fleece has been sheared) left

Tips combed out

Locks turned around, with butts ready to be combed

Lock ready for spinning

The short ends, neps (tangled bits), and what spinners generally refer to as junk remaining on the comb. I'm saving this material and will use it to stuff the chess pieces.

Fish leather for the book cover.

By the end of November, I hope to have most of the wool spun, will have purchased sufficient yardage of fine spun silk (or perhaps tussah silk and camel down, I'm still trying to decide), and will have started the knitting.

Check back soon, as I will be posting updates on a regular basis of my progress!