Measuring 402 ends of 8/2 cotton on my shiny new warping board? 7 hours.

Sleying 402 ends of cotton through ~250 dents? 3 hours.

Threading 402 ends of cotton through 402 heddles? 5 hours.

The fact that I’m the type of person who can get excited about threading 402 ends of string through approximately 650 tiny holes? Makes me very happy.

Woo used 36″ 4-harness floor loom!

From Spinning

These are Lumpy Fingerless Mitts, knitted from two fraternal chunky bumpy thick-n-thin skeins spun from this:

From Stash

2 oz of chunky All Hallow’s Eve spin-along goodness, from Bohoknitterchic.

From Spinning

“Oh hello! No pictures for you!”

From Spinning

The green and orange, short color repeats:

From Spinning

Black and purple, with longer color repeats. Both are singles candy-striped with coordinating holographic thread.

The batts were full of coordinating-colored nepps, in hopes that some would stay in the finished yarn. Some did – but still, during the *thwack* period after the wash, there was a short multicolored rain.

This is actually the first of my handspun I’ve ever knit with – it’s always been more fun to go on and spin the next skein, than to pause and knit with the past one. Thank you for the motivation, O SAL Small Chance of Winning Prizes!

I am featured in a Spinterview on the Spin in Public website!

I hope you find it somewhat humorous!

From Spinning

These singles were so much fun to spin from a gloriously soft, sparkly merino batt from Jazzturtle.  This was one of my “motivational” batts stashed almost a year ago, back when I was trying to make sense of spindling.

I spun them in the nightly spinning circle at the NCFF (and incidentally was thrilled to find out that my normal drafting method is the preferred woolen drafting method for a double-drive wheel. No wonder long draw didn’t seem to work right! Thanks, Patsy!)  While I tried out a few different plying techniques in my novelty-yarn class on Sunday, I think I want to leave these as singles – they’re a nice medium weight themselves, and due to the woolen draw, softly spun. Also, as the singles go from sandy beach to ocean blue, this way I don’t have to worry about messing up the color transition by plying with uneven lengths.  I plan to start knitting at one beach end, join on the second skein at ocean, and end with beach again for a scarf. Or perhaps two Baktus? I’ll be skeining later tonight to check yardage.

From Spinning

From Fruits

Mutant trilobal raspberry?!?

It looks like I am not the only one in my house to appreciate a good fiber prep.

This is the Colonel kitten enjoying a nap in a pound of carded Romney web from SD Naturally Colored Wools / Kelly Knispel.

Teasel

This, my friends, is a Teasel.  In its spiky form you can see the ancestor of cards and combs and all of the other horrifically-clawed, tetanus-shot-requiring modern tools of fiber processing. It is the origin of the verb “tease”, as in “to tease out the ends of a knot.” Don’t teased bangs look a lot like a fluffy rolag? I found this growing wild in the Willows outdoor learning center at the Chatfield School in MI – another thing I have never seen before! At this point the spines are soft and flexible, but as the head dried they became stiff and perfect for combing out the tips of locks.

Basswood inner bark fiber

This, also from the willows, is the inner bark of the basswood tree – closely related to one of my favorite trees, the linden. This is one of the strongest fibers to be found in nature – it makes amazing rope. Like many natural plant fibers it’s a bit hard to extract into this form – Peter of the Willows center said these branches had fallen into a street, so the cars driving over them did most of the work of cracking the bark off. This is something I’d definitely like to try myself.

From Spinning

I spun this with my new Golding  in the airport and at the PDC talent show, from the first roving I ever bought – a bicolor wool I got at the NCFF last year. I’ve completely forgotten the breeds but I plan to get some more in a couple weeks – the color is lovely.

From Spinning

From Spinning

4oz of bamboo from Fiberlady.com, in colorway “Orange Fizz.” It’s fuzzier than I expected, mitigated by going back to true worsted draw and sliding my fingers down the single to let in the twist. Shiny, shiny, shiny. It did try to flyaway badly if it was disturbed – I tried to split it where the top naturally compacted itself into sections, and worked with only short lengths just in case I managed to brush it or breathe on it or otherwise disarrange the end.

It used to be this:

From Stash

And will be three-plyed with 6.8 oz of this unknown wool from Theresa Levite Studios:

From Stash

I am now Certified in Permaculture Design. I’m still working through on what exactly that means for me (8 days in one place with likeminded people will do that to you.) That link has a class picture – I’m bottom left. I think I need a haircut.

Pictures will come slowly as I reconstruct a narrative around them. First, lodging.

We camped at the Tibbets Land Stewardship Center in Columbiaville, MI.

From PDC Aug 09

From PDC Aug 09

The swans hung out around the tents most mornings, to eliminate the need for an alarm clock.

From PDC Aug 09

The greenhouse was lovely, the solar shower was lovely in the afternoons and early evenings, and the composting toilet (5-gallon bucket + sawdust version) was drop-dead amazing. It was so nice to see one of those in action – it really, truly did not smell. You walk in the room they’ve built for it and all you can smell is the sweet wood in the sawdust bin. Infinitely nicer than any campground toilet I’ve ever seen.

Ok, what’s hanging out under my tent’s rainfly THIS morning?

From PDC Aug 09

Only two daddylonglegs today?

From PDC Aug 09

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT IT’S THREE INCHES LONG

From PDC Aug 09

Oh! I pulled up the towel I had hanging on the outside of the tent to try, and I found a cicada shell. The adult must have climbed up under the rain fly to allow its wings to fill out. It was still there at noon on the last day when I had to strike the tent. I had never seen an adult cicada before.

This whole trip was full of “I’ve never seen that before”s.

An edit – the first and last nights I stayed with a previous course graduate in Flint, to make travel easier. You can tell it’s a permaculturist’s house by the candy on the pillow:

From PDC Aug 09

You don’t need a dedicated sterile climate-controlled room to propagate mushrooms at home - they’ve been growing themselves in decidedly un-sterile conditions outdoors since the beginning of time, so you can do it too. Just like sourdough cultures and counter-top yogurt, mycelium is easy to keep alive indefinitely by transferring it to new food sources.

Adventitious Mycelium is adventitious

You can’t see this too well here, but I must have left this Grey Dove oyster kit in its dark incubation area for too long because the mycelium tried to make a break for it. Looking for light and air, it grew a tower of material all the way up to the air patch in the top of the bag (twice, as I accidentally broke a column off its shaky moorings to the plastic bag once.) The corally stuff to the left is the remnants of the dash to freedom – the chunk at the top right is the part that actually attached to the air flow.

From Mushrooms

This is that chunk – see its structure? It wasn’t spongy either, as this suggests – it was wood-solid. Cooooool!

From Mushrooms

Here’s a closer look at that adventitious mycelium, branching off in search of light, air and more nutrients. This chunk of mycelium is actively growing, so it is a perfect candidate to transfer to a new food source a la yogurt starter. If you have an active mushroom bed that hasn’t exhibited this particular behavior, you can use any bit of fully colonized wood chip; if you have a mushroom you picked with a sort of “root cluster” coming off its base, cut off this “stem butt” with the growing area at the base still attached and it will be perfect for this sort of thing. The mycelial chunk at the base is definitely actively growing – it just grew a fruit, after all!

This is the Quick and Easy Corrugated Cardboard spawn method.  Corrugated cardboard is great because it holds moisture and provides shade to the developing spawn, but the corrugations also ensure an air supply and growing space that can’t get cut off by water gluing the layers shut.

From Mushrooms

Cut a piece of clean corrugated cardboard to a workable size – no tape or glue – then soak it in water until you can peel one of the plies off.

From Mushrooms

Layer your actively growing mycelium pieces onto the corrugated portion of the cardboard part. Break them into smaller chunks if necessary – you want the cardboard to lie relatively flat when you close it back up, while still getting maximum surface contact with the pieces.

From Mushrooms

Close up the layers and stack them in some sort of suitable humidity retainer. This is one of those closeable plastic container dealies that isn’t airtight; I could also have used a plastic bag closed 90% of the way if I put it someplace dark where it wouldn’t collect heat, or a cardboard box buried halfway out in the garden, etc etc. The beauty of this technique is that it works with whatever you’ve got on hand and acclimates the mycelium to your local conditions – making it stronger than lab-grown mycelium straight out of a shipping container. 

I closed this container and put it on a shady countertop, opening it daily to spritz with water and letting any excess water drain out before I put it back.

From Mushrooms

One week later you can see a beautiful mycelial ring spreading outwards from a coral piece’s contact point with the top ply.

From Mushrooms

And the whole ply visible. This is great growth – a few more days and I can use this to inoculate any substrate where a layer of spawn is best suited – a lasagna-style box of woodchips or straw suitable for basement growth of fresh mushrooms in winter; layered inside refrigerator-cookie-dough slices of logs otherwise too heavy or unsuited for shiitake cultivation;  wood chip beds outside; or, rolled up or cut into strips, potentially even more tp rolls or mason jars full of pasteurized grain. I just got a pack of hard foam air filter disks optimized for the mouth of narrow mason jars, so I might go with some grain spawn next (as this year’s straw crop is not quite ready.)