This post is about the hat that I made for my nephew for his birthday. He wanted a beanie and he wanted one that looked hand made. This is the result. It was an interesting process, because I decided to try not to spin too finely and to let any naturally occurring lumps and bumps stay that way. It was harder than I thought, I kept wanting to smooth bits!
The wool is from a coated fleece I bought at the Victorian Sheep and Wool Show, 4 years ago. It is a brown Corriedale fleece which is naturally light and lofty and I wanted the spinning process to enhance those characteristics. I choose a random selection of pieces from the fleece going for softness rather than a similiar size. Here is a comparision of two of one of the longest and shortest pieces of fleece. The longer piece is approximately 15 cms (six ins) long, with the shorter piece only 9 cms (3 ins).
I don't know that I'd recommend it as a regular practice. I think I should have stuck to just one area of the fleece. But the drum carder sorted it out. I fluffed up each lock of fleece on the carder before I fed it through. The final batts were a light fluffy mass I couldn't wait to play with. I split each batt into two pieces and rolled them into giant rolags to spin from.
I decided to spin the wool using a woolen spin with a medium draw to preserve the lofty feel of the wool. I also decided to card the wool in the grease and hopefully keep a small amount of lanolin in the final product to make it waterproof for my uni student nephew. He catches public transport a lot and I thought it might be it might be a bit more useful that way.I spun the singles "z" twist and slightly over-plyed two singles "s" twist as I had decided to crochet the beanie. The over-plying helps compensate for the untwisting the crochet causes and to stop the stitches from slanting too much. This is a close up of the stitching, as you can see there is not a lot of slant and there is a natural variation in the colour which I think worked well for the handmade look I was going for.
I used the toque pattern from "Not your mama's crochet" and fiddled with it to do what I wanted. My nephew was very pleased with the final result and so was I but I wasn't that thrilled with the colour so I decided to so some dyeing! More in my next post.
This is the only bit of wool left. Not a bad estimation, huh?
