Dyeing Wool with Red Wine

My sister used to be a wine rep.  She would be the lady offering you a small sample in supermarkets.  She has quite a stockpile of half bottles that have gone a bit vinegary.

During our conversations over lockdown, she suggested using it to dye wool and offered it to me.  I jumped online to do some research.

Most blogs and videos showed people putting wool directly into red wine and boiling it.  The resulting colour was so faint it was barely pink.  Some mentioned using a mordant. I'd heard of mordants with natural dyes and always been a little afraid of it.  I didn't really understand the process or exactly what I should use or where to get it. Google is my friend.

I learned that the word mordant comes from the Latin mordere meaning 'to bite'. The use of a mordant allows the colour to 'bite' into the fabric or fibre being dyed.  Often, what we use as a natural dye is more of a stain than a dye.  The resulting colour is unlikely to be colourfast or lightfast.  It is usually faint and will fade. Mordanting opens up the fibre and allows it to grab more of the colour.
For more on the process, including step by step instructions for different fibres, I recommend this site.

Alum (Aluminium potassium sulfate) is the best mordant for wool.  Adding citric acid or cream of tartar to the mordant bath keeps the wool soft and may deepen some dyes. I found some quite reasonably priced at Hands Ashford and ordered online.

Meanwhile I was spinning madly.  I had been given some Romney fleece and it was spinning up beautifully.  My alum arrived. I weighed two skeins and started them soaking before mordanting. I measured out my alum and citric acid and started my dye bath in an old aluminium stockpot that I have used for dyeing before.

I'm always a bit iffy about boiling wool.  I'm afraid it will make my wool brittle.  I heated it to a simmer and turned it off.  After an hour or so, I heated it some more and left it to cool overnight. I had read in a couple of places that I could wrap it wet in a towel, roll it up and leave it for 2-5 days.  But I wasn't sure if I should rinse it first.  At first I couldn't find the original instructions I'd read.  They were all telling me to rinse and dry and then dye.  My rough instructions from Hands mentioned rolling it damp in a towel, but didn't mention rinsing.

I found the instructions I'd been looking at originally, don't rinse.  The point is to allow the mordant to soak more thoroughly into the wool and 'curing' it this way makes for a better dye job.

I got some gloves on and squeezed most of it out of the wool and laid it out on a towel.

By the time we dropped to level 3 and I was able to go and visit my sister (still keeping distance of course), I had three towels or six skeins curing. I reused my mordant five times, just adding 10% more alum and citric acid each time.

I worried a little about what I would use for a dye bath.  My usual dye pot was still in daily use for mordanting.  But since wine is effectively a foodstuff, I decided it would be safe to use my cooking stockpot.  I put two skeins in and covered them in wine.

It rather looks like minced beef though.

I heated this to a simmer and let it cool a little and repeated the process.  Pretty much like the mordant.  I checked it every now and then to see how much the wine colour had soaked in.  Pouring a little water over some exposed wool shows how much washes off.

I left it overnight before washing and rinsing.  I used a very small amount of laundry powder and washed and rinsed until the water was coming out clear.

I wrung it out and laid it out on a clotheshorse to dry.

The big bonus I noticed in dyeing with wine is that it can be reused for the next batch.  When I've used acid exhaust dyes, you know when the dye is done because all the colour is in the wool and the bath has almost clear water.  This doesn't happen with wine.

I am quite pleased with the colour.  It has come out darker than I expected, but not as bright as I'd hoped.  Still it's quite pretty. Coming up next is coffee dyeing.

Free Grass Seed

Most of our paddocks have rather poor grass.  Most of it is browntop, a thin, fairly short grass that the seems to sustain the cattle and sheep, but doesn't fatten them much. 

We've been wanting to improve the types of grass we have, but there are a number of issues around what types are best for our livestock, what will grow easily here, how much it will cost and when can we leave a paddock empty for long enough for new grass to grow.

We had a look at grass seed at the local farm supplies store.  $100 a 25kg bag. And that would do maybe our bigger paddock only.

Over the last two years, we've been getting hay from a local woman.  She has ten acres and three spoiled horses.  Most of the hay we get is her old horse hay.  Any sign of mildew at all and the horses don't like it, or it's potentially bad for them.  So she puts it aside for us.  She gives us all the opened and loose stuff for free. Every year she likes to clear out whatever of the previous year's hay is left before she gets the new lot cut.  Her horses might be fussy about the hay, but my cows love it.

A couple of years ago, we had a lot of rain all through December and so by the time they could cut and bale the hay, it was very seedy.  I noticed that where I fed out to the cows, we got much better grass growing. 

We started to shake out a lot of the seed into a wool fadge. Obviously there was a lot of small bits of hay with it. We got to about half full.

Mixed seed and small bits of hay

With the Autumn rains starting recently, we thought it might be time to sow some of the seed.  After a few conversations with the neighbour, we'd decided to just spread it out where there were thin patches in the paddock.  The small hay mixed up with it should act as a mulch.

We started in the front paddock, but didn't get any further.  While there are some pretty good patches of healthy grass, there are quite a lot of bare patches and spots where there is a lot of flat weed and no grass. 

Seed and hay spread out over thin patches 

Hopefully, this will lead to a much better paddock.

Lockdown Weeks 2 & 3

Days are blurring together and Easter Weekend has been and gone.

Lockdown has become our new normal, although to be fair, it hasn't been that far different from times when I haven't been working anyway. I've become a hermit by nature over the last few years, avoiding people is fairly normal for me.

I only leave the house to do a weekly grocery shop.  The first week or so, I found it quite stressful.  While on the whole, I'm not overly worried about the current situation, not personally anyway, I found that I procrastinated badly about leaving and was very tense when I actually got into my car.  We don't get a lot of traffic up our way.  There are only seven houses on our five km road.  So I'm used to seeing almost no cars for at least half of my journey into town.  I didn't see another person for at least three quarters of the trip.  I saw two cars on the road between home and the supermarket.

There was a queue outside the supermarket and a security guard at the door.  People were lined up with well more than the recommended two metres between them.  Compared to photos and videos I've seen of supermarket queues around the country, this was quite a small line.  It didn't snake around the car park like many I've seen.  It consisted of maybe ten people.  Since then, I've found one queue that was easily twice the length.  Even then, it only took about 20 minutes before I was in the store.

People are mostly the same but different at the same time when they shop.  Many will stand back and wait rather than brush past each other. I haven't seen anyone lose their rag or behave in an irrational or impatient manner.  But there aren't many conversations in the aisles.  When I see a friend or workmate, our total interaction seems to consist of a simple nod, "How are you going?" with little to no slowing of pace.

Only one shopping trip left me really wound up and tense by the time I got home.  It was a combination of a lot of little things and I think it was a reflection of where my head was, rather than anything in particular that happened during the trip.

I've finished my youngest granddaughter's blanket.  I'm still spinning flat out.

I've been knitting during my daily video calls with my family.  This time it's a jersey for the oldest, I've finished a pair of socks in between this and the blanket.  This has led to a list of requests for future projects from my sister.

This sister used to be a wine rep to supermarkets and she has boxes filled with open bottles of red wine that have gone a little vinegary.  She suggested using it to dye some wool.  I've done some research and found that a mordant is needed.  I've ordered some Alum online and I think I'll have to wait until after lockdown before it's sent out, but I will post how it all turns out.

Update: I've done this now - read about it.

Miss 14 has been getting used to (and sleeping through some) calls online.  Most of her classwork is online these days anyway so getting the work isn't too far different for her anyway.

Hubby has been doing a mix of working from home and going in to work.  He has been busy in his time at home.  He's attacking the gully.  He has decided to do all of one side before starting the other side.  He set himself a goal of clearing to at least one fence post on the fence above each day.

The sides of the gully before cutting

This has been challenging on a number of levels.  Firstly there's the slope.  In places it's almost completely vertical.  Cutting at the top and at the bottom isn't too bad, the bits in the middle are not quite so easy.

The slope with a some of a pile at the bottom.

Then there's the honeysuckle.  In some spots, there's such a tangle of it, tying up the gorse and blackberry.  Where there are trees, there is often so much of it, strangling and smothering that it can be hard to find the tree underneath.

Trees buried under honeysuckle

Hubby has gotten very good at identifying which is which when cutting and pulling it down.

I've spent several hours out there helping him, by pulling on what becomes a big dense ball of honeysuckle tangled gorse, broom and blackberry, exposing the vines that are still connected so Hubby can cut them from above.




The other major challenge has been the fire ban.  While we're officially okay to burn, there has been a request from the fire service that we don't while lockdown is going on.  So we have several very large piles waiting for the opportunity to burn it all.  And we urgently want to burn it.  Previously, we've cut paths through the gully, leaving piles in places.  These piles have ended up being new mounds of thick blackberry. Obviously, we'd like to avoid a repeat of this.

More of the piles waiting for burning

We've found an old fence.  At first it looked as though a couple of half rotten old posts had been dumped in the gully at the top of the slope.  Then the partially buried barbed wire emerged.  Some has pulled up easily enough, some has had to be cut for digging out at a later date.  Several strands of straight fencing wire have been exposed down the hillside today.  One strand came out, the others will require more work first. It's hard to be certain whether it was old fencing dumped, or still in place from where it was previously before time, weather, erosion and plant pests had their way.

The goal of one fence post per day has been mostly achieved each time he goes out.  He usually manages more than one.  At this rate, we should be finished this side soon enough.  Hopefully, we'll be able to follow up with the odd spraying and that should be sufficient.

Lockdown Days 5, 6 and 7

We seem to be settling into a bit of a lockdown routine. Hubby goes off to work, apparently it's temporary but that changes daily. I make plans for my day. Morning video call with family and then I achieve nothing more. I beat myself up about what I haven't done and tell myself I've got a month and promise myself I'll do better tomorrow.

In all fairness to myself, today is the first day in nearly a week that it hasn't been raining so it hasn't been practical to sit outside plucking roosters or moving firewood from the pile where it's been weathering into the woodshed.  I know this, but the part of my brain that tells me off doesn't really care.

I've still been spinning and knitting. The Romney fleece I was given is working up to some lovely balls and the blanket for my youngest granddaughter is about three quarters done.

I  still keep thinking, here's the opportunity I wanted, I have the time to get some things done.

An online friend recently made a list of different garden beds that work in small spaces. She's a talented gardener and passionate about growing food. One of the styles she mentioned was hugelkultur.

I'd heard of it before, it was one of the many things I found in our early days on our block. Back when I seemed to learn about something new that sounded useful for us each week. I would start to research it and start making plans to put it into practice and the next disaster would happen.

We spent so much time firefighting and dealing with a new emergency constantly that improvements were few and far between for quite a long time.

Reminded of it, I started reading up about it again.

It literally means 'mound culture'. It's a system where you create mounds that require little to no watering. They retain plenty of moisture and are perfect for growing things in dry areas like ours.

You start with a base of branches. In the examples they started with whole trees, any wood that size would be going for firewood, but branches, I have them.

We've been slowly working on bringing down some of our macrocarpa hedge. It grows up into the power lines. We got a professional in to trim and top it a few years ago but that turned into more drama than it was worth, a lot of money and they missed the branches that were the most problematic anyway.

We decided to take the trees out that were around the lines and replace them with natives that are easily grown and don't get as tall. The problem is that macrocarpa branches go sideways and through the branches of the trees on either side. It's not as simple as just dropping a tree. In my job, trees or branches that can twist as they fall are referred to as 'widowmakers'. For good reason.

We've started by trimming off the side branches. Many are still mostly where they were, enmeshed in and held up by the neighbouring tree. We've pulled down what we can, trimming some of them as we go. There's a good pile of firewood for next year forming already.

We tried mulching the smaller branches. Macrocarpa is a very hard wood which has meant we've had to put a lot of work into resharpening blades and we've had to do it often.

Hugelkultur is an opportunity to use those smaller branches without killing the mulcher.

So since we have some fine weather today and I'm feeling a need to achieve something (anything!) I started piling the branches to begin my first mound.

My initial mound of branches 

 It isn't as big as the article recommended starting with. Two meters high seems impractical in my vege patch and frankly, I don't have the energy for that. This is also somewhat of an experiment, so I don't want to commit to something on that scale until I have more confidence in the project.

The next layer is recommended to be almost any organic waste. Compost, kitchen scraps, leaves or manure. The idea is to create a nitrogen rich layer.

I have a pile of mulch with what came out of the roof gutters when they were last cleaned sitting not far from my pile. I also have a compost bin that has been working for more than a year. It's mostly filled with sawdust and sweepings out of the chookhouses with a few dead birds and offal, bones etc from my home kill. There's at least a cubic metre there. I also have a mound of fairly well rotted cow and horse manure. I think I can use all three on this bed.

Mulch and gutter rubbish 

It's probably going to take me quite some time to get this all done, but I have a month, right?

Lockdown Days 2, 3 and 4

On Thurdsay and Friday, I woke up earlier than usual and was wide awake. No chance of going back to sleep. I realised I did this during the earthquakes too.

It made me wonder if it's a stress reaction or some kind of evolutionary response to a dangerous situation. There have been memes around suggesting that we're designed in such a way that there will always be someone in the tribe who is awake and able to respond to anything that might threaten the safety and wellbeing of the tribe. I have no way to fact check the meme and a Google search turned up only information on insomnia.

As Friday wore on, I noticed that I was experiencing the vertigo I also suffered from during the earthquakes. I was dizzy while sitting still. I was not going to be doing much that day.

Three different video chats to my family around the country took care of that.

I also discovered that I can't watch the daily updates as they happen. I'm quite okay with getting it in digest form on the evening news.

Saturday and Sunday saw Hubby at home. He got to join in the video chats, and had me call Dad on a video call later on to double check a renovation.

So he was clearly busy renovating all weekend.  There was a set of badly fitting French doors between the lounge and dining room. We almost never used them and they were drafty in Winter.

They are now a solid wall that just requires plaster and paint.

We always write something inside the walls when we change things. We often find things written by previous renovators, even if it's only measurements and calculations, but sometimes it's signed. It's something simple that brings a smile when found.

Today our message was dated with a note about Covid-19 lockdown. Just as we were about to seal it in, we learned about New Zealand's first Covid fatality, so I quickly added a note about that. I don't know what some future renovator will think when or if they find it.

I've been spinning plenty while video chatting. I'm just not made to sit still. This has led to a request from my sister and an offer to put my practice efforts (in most things I make) to use. So between that and plans to make jerseys for everyone this year (whether or not they end up looking like a Molly Weasley special), I think I'll have enough to keep me busy for a while.

Lockdown Day 1

So we've gone into lockdown for COVID-19.  We knew it was coming and had a couple of days notice, so we started to make plans.

On his way to work the day before, Hubby stopped into a hardware store to buy supplies for his planned projects during lockdown.  Then he discovered that his workplace is considered essential, so he's having to work.  I guess there are three rooms that won't get painted just yet, and finishing off the IBCs in the shelter belts can wait.  On the plus side, there's no contact with the public.

First day and I found I was restless fairly early on in the day.  So I thought to myself, the rose hips are coming ripe, there's still some elderberries around and I should see what blackberries the birds and drought have left.  I should go foraging.

I had it in mind to make some rose hip and thyme cough syrup.  If COVID-19 does hit us, it will be useful.

I knew Hubby had sprayed some of the gorse and blackberry, but he did it a few weeks ago.  We were well past the withholding period.  Anything that was surviving and anything nearby that might have received some overspray should be okay.

Off I went and picked a fair few rose hips, a handful of blackberries and I found maybe 6 bunches of elderberries that I could reach. It wasn't a big haul but there were enough rose hips to make syrup and I could freeze the other berries for use later.

Back at the house, I stripped the elderberries off the stalks and separated the berries into their different types. Then Hubby rang.  I told him what I'd done and he freaked out.  Unbeknownst to me, he'd been out on Sunday and sprayed again. Some of where I'd picked was where he'd sprayed and since they were all mixed up, I had to throw the lot out.

Best laid plans and all that.

Determined to at least do something that I could call productive, instead I went back to some spinning and knitting.  This was interspersed with video calls from family.  Granddaughter number two will have a blanket finished by the time she's into a big girl's bed.  Maybe by the end of this, I'll be able to walk into my craft room without clambering over piled up big rubbish bags full of washed fleece.  Maybe the two and a half fadges and four feed sacks waiting to be washed might get sorted too.

We'll see how we go.

Water for Sheep

A long dry North Canterbury summer puts a strain on water resources.  This happens every year.  Our stock water comes from the neighbour through some scheme that I don't fully understand.  I believe he pumps it from the creek and stores it in tanks.  When it was first set up, there was a bylaw requiring you to provide water to your neighbours and I believe most of the neighbours were on the scheme.  This has gradually shrunk to be only us and the guy over the road who also has tanks to store excess water in.

We don't have tanks, we rely on water being available all the time.  It's been a source of many discussions and arguments and plans that have never come to anything.  We've never needed to do much, because while the water runs out every year, it's usually for a very short time and we manage to get by fine when that happens.

Until this year.

The neighbour who runs the scheme has a few health issues that have made him somewhat forgetful and confused a lot of the time. He does some odd things and forgets he's done them.  Between that, the drought conditions and the pump running when there's no water and subsequently burning out, we haven't had water in at least a month.

The layout of our paddocks and the site of our house tank makes running lines from our house water supply unrealistic. There is one trough running off our house water, because running a line from the scheme would mean expecting the water to run uphill for quite a distance - it just wouldn't happen.  That trough has caused us a few problems when it's leaked in the past.  There was another, but waking up in the morning to find we had no water because the pigs had ripped another ball cock arm off in their trough put an end to that one.

So we had to look at other solutions.  We have a big tank that we fill with rain water.  It's been there just over a year. We've argued and discussed what we're going to do with that rain water but rarely come to any kind of agreement.  It's just been there as a kind of back up.

With no water available to the troughs, I was worrying about our animals.  The cows in the front paddock were doing okay as I can fill their trough with the garden hose over the fence.  The cows in the gully would run out after a while, but they were doing okay for now with two large troughs at different ends of where they were currently running.

The sheep however were a different matter. 

Dry water trough for the sheep.

I carried several buckets of water to them.  I topped up their troughs from others in nearby paddocks since it was starting to evaporate anyway. This wasn't going to work for long.  The sheep are split into two flocks because Ramington is dead keen to fight with Ramuel and would probably kill him. Each trough takes six to eight buckets of water to fill and they will empty that in a day.  Carrying up to 20 kg at a time, walking approximately one kilometre each round trip was leaving me with no time to do anything in the evenings.  This was coming after a day of a physically active and demanding job and I was already rather shattered.

For a temporary measure, we moved an empty plastic water trough to about the halfway point.  It was in the run for the cows in the gully so also served as their water supply.  We managed to run a water line to the trough from the rain water tank and could fill our buckets from there, making it a much quicker and simpler task.

The line from the tank to the trough was cobbled together using every last little piece of irrigation hose we could find.  Plugs went into the holes where jets, risers and drippers had previously been.  Every joiner we could lay our hands on was pressed into service, when we ran out of straight inline joiners, we were using elbows.  This line kinked and bent and ran its merry way down the hill through the paddock to the trough.

We were still carrying buckets every night to water the sheep.  It was getting old very fast. 

We have several IBCs.  IBC stands for Intermediate Bulk Container.  They're caged 1000 litre tanks on pallets that are useful as movable water supply.  We have made plans to use them on several occasions but fittings from their taps to a hose of any sort have always eluded us.  Hubby has rigged up several things at different times but all have been leaky and somewhat unreliable.

I have a vision of having several of these in series in our shelter belts.  They will be both storage and able to supply our water troughs.  Our two flocks are currently in paddocks that come from the same water supply line, here was our opportunity to test my vision in part.

The first issue was fittings.

There had to be something available.  IBCs have become such a hot commodity lately and you can see them everywhere.  Someone will be making something.  I rang a friend who works in irrigation.  He gave us several options and told us where the best place to get them was.  One option is a fitting that screws onto the tap outlet at the bottom of the tank.  He mentioned that the taps can be notorious for not turning off properly and they are very stiff to work.  I agree, they take a fair bit of brute force to turn on and off.  The other option is a fitting that you poke through a drilled hole at the bottom of the tank.  It's made from rubber and will compress enough to go through the hole, and then open out and seal itself on the inside.  Unless your arms are a metre and a half long, you're not going to be able to reach inside to fit anything else to the bottom of the tank.

We rushed into the recommended store to get some before they closed.  Our rural supply stores still close at lunchtime on Saturdays and are closed on Sundays.  They had the tap fitting and other required bushes and connectors to bring it down to fit a 20mm pipe but had sold out of the others.  We left our name and number for when they have some more of the rubber type in stock because we have several more tanks to do, but took the other type to try for now.

We got the tank to the shelter belt where the water line runs.  Getting it actually into the shelter belt required pulling the staples out of two fence posts and lifting the deer fencing enough to squeeze the tank underneath the netting. 

Our next mission was finding the water line.  I carefully dug a trench across the whole shelter belt.  It had to be there somewhere right? I found an old irrigation line that was in very bad shape, but couldn't find the one we wanted.  Maybe it runs down the fence line on the paddock side? How much digging did we want to do?  We dug along and traced the line from the highest water trough back up towards where we wanted to put the IBC.  It snaked back and forth, it's certainly not a straight line, but I supposed time and earthquakes and all sorts of events could have caused that.  We moved where we'd planned to put the IBC to where we got fed up with digging.

Tracing the water line.

We didn't think we had enough hose to get all the way to the IBC so had placed another one partway as a staging area.  The plan was to fill it there and then use a pump to go from there to the one we were putting in place.  Hubby realised there were several old hoses in the back of the shed that were missed last time and we might be able to get all the way to the IBC.  He was setting that up while I was putting the fittings on the tank. 

There are three different fittings here.

Each time we thought we'd gotten close, the water would stop running.  We found a couple of leaks and places where the hose disconnected itself completely, but as it was getting dark, we had success.  I opened the tap and let it fill the troughs as the IBC was filling.

In place, all hooked up and ready to run.

Success!

We may have to fill the IBC this way once a week or so, but no more buckets!

A Woven Rug

I've been working to catch up on washing all the fleece I've got stashed around.  I keep trying to catch up so that I have none left to wash by the time I get my sheep shorn again.  The only time I have ever achieved that was when I had only two adult sheep.

Part of the hold up was when I was given a fadge filled with coloured fleeces.  It took me a while to get through them, then I was back onto mine and just never quite seemed to get caught up.

One fadge from years ago, went into the garden shed.  The shearer we had then, used a battery handpiece and would shear them wherever we had them penned.  He never used a carpet or even a tarp so the fleece was full of grass, seeds and thistle. He didn't separate the dags or belly wool out either.  It was awful to try and clean up.

I was away when he came that time.  He mucked us around for months, we lost a sheep to flies in that time.  He also did the lambs.

So this fadge has a mix of really long fleece lousy with bits of crap that take a lot of work to remove and short very soft fleece.

I tried spinning some of the lamb's wool a while back. It's a slow and frustrating process resulting in a weak thread that's hardly worth using.

That's why this fadge ended up in the garden shed being mostly ignored while I worked with the better fleece.  I say mostly ignored, because whenever we wanted something from the back of the shed, we'd have to move it or climb over it awkwardly and swear about it a lot.

I decided a few months ago to go hard and get this one done.  Get it sorted and out of the way.  I washed it.  It wasn't nice fleece for the most part.  Some of it is more like hair, some of it is matted to the point where I can't separate, comb or card it.  Some of it is permanently stained with sheep sweat (or to use the proper name, sanit) so it has a orange/tan tint.

I could toss it into compost.  I could ditch the lot.  It's pretty rough.  But I just can't do that.  I hate waste, surely there was still a use I could find for it.

I've been making blankets out of my coarser wool.  Everyone has a blanket, except Dad, he doesn't like the weight, the rest of us love them.  My youngest granddaughter isn't even in a bed yet and I'm already most of the way through her blanket for when she graduates to a big girl bed.

I'm running out of people to make blankets for.  I could make them to sell, but I don't think anyone is really willing to pay enough to make it worth my while and certainly not what they should be worth.

It occurred to me that we could use some rugs.  The rug we have on the tile floor in the entranceway isn't really the right size or shape.  I could make rugs.  I learned how to latch hook a rug years ago, my great-grandmother did a lot of it and while I don't think I learned from her, I picked it up somewhere.  There's also another style that I don't know what to call.  Dad used to do a lot of it, it's a series of loops poked through fabric (he always used hessian sacking).  You can either leave the loop or trim/shave it to the length of pile you want.

I presented this idea to Hubby. He didn't like the thought of any of those rugs and instead suggested a simple woven rug. I can do that.  I have a loom.

I got to thinking and planning.  I could use this awful wool and spin it big, uneven and chunky and that would make it even better for a rug.  It would give it a textural element that seems to currently be the big thing on all the home renovation shows.  Spinning chunky and uneven will also be quite quick to do.  If extremely challenging.

I'm a self-taught spinner.  I've watched a YouTube video here and there and read bits in books, but most of it has come from trial and error over about 8 years of practice.  I've spent that time refining my technique and getting a lovely fine and even thread.  So to deliberately spin 'badly' did my head in for a bit.

I started spinning in preparation for a rug.  I was a few balls ahead of the blanket I'm working on for the youngest granddaughter so I had time to spin.

Hubby was working on the hallway.  I banned any new major renovation projects over these Christmas holidays.  None of the previous projects have been completely finished.  The kitchen needs another coat of paint and some finer detail finishing.  The lounge needs some major decisions made regarding a new fire, walls fixed, skirting boards and the carpet laid properly.  Miss 14's room needs some finishing details.  The hallway had the floor replaced at the same time as Miss 14's, but nothing more had happened there.  I put my foot down and said I wanted to see some stuff finished before anything new was started.

The remaining wall paper was stripped and the walls plastered and pigment sealed.  The cupboard doors have come off, been tickled up where they used to be tight (particularly the high cupboards) and the linen cupboard is finally getting a door.  It's mostly down to painting and finishing now.

I suggested the rug I was going to make as a runner for the hallway.  We've gone for very light colours in the hall because it has no natural light of its own and is often a very dark space.  A creamy coloured rug running along the length on top of the fairly dark carpet will help lighten the space.

So to Hubby, it's a race now.  Whether he finishes the hall ready for the rug before the rug is ready for the hall.

I measured the hall and started to prepare the loom for spinning.

I fell down the rabbit hole of weaving.  Heddles and reed, warp and weft.  The jargon on its own can be pretty daunting.  Never mind the actual process and my own inexperience.

I've learned that there is a lot of warp wastage when using a loom.  Warp is the long threads that run from back to front through the heddles and reed.  The warp is the starting point.  You work out the length you need, add some and work it out on the warping mill.

For a 3 metre length, I wanted to start with about 5 metres just to be safe.  I worked this out on my warping mill and started measuring and threading the warp threads through. Hubby stopped what he was doing to help.  This made it a lot easier as I was having to go back and forth for each thread.

I decided to stop before I got to the full width of the reed.  The threads were looking rather tight on the reed and I thought it would probably relax wider when it was woven.

Threading the warp is the longest part of weaving anything.  It takes hours and days.  Each individual thread needs to be untangled from the rest (because you take 30-50 odd 5.6m lengths of woolen yarn, knot it around the rod on the back drum and it tangles itself in protest), poked through a small hole in the heddles, after making sure you've got the right shaft, threaded through the reed making sure you have the right dent and pulled all the way through.  When you've done each bundle, you slip knot it into a bundle to stop it from tangling up too much.  Rinse and repeat.

Warp threads attached to the rod at the back.

Through the heddles

Through the reed and slip knotted

Once that's all done, you undo the slip knots, lay out the long warp threads and wind the back drum up to pull the threads most of the way through.  This was a long and painful process.  The yarn didn't slide through easily like it has previously.  It became uneven and bunched on the drum.  Hubby helped me fix this, one thread at a time.  You also have to keep untangling the threads as they pull through the reed, because as we found earlier, they tangle themselves up constantly.

When you have it mostly onto the drum, you can then tie the ends around the rod on the front drum.  As I learned when I first set the loom up and played with it, you need to leave it until last, as it doesn't matter how well you think you've measured it, it ends up at uneven lengths.

So we did this and tried to start weaving.  The reed didn't want to move.  The entire loom was lifting as I tried to move it forwards and backwards.  The reed was too fine for my wool. 

Luckily I got three more reeds with my loom.  All of which had wider dents (slots) than the one I'd been using.  With Hubby's help, I untied all my threads from the front drum and pulled them through the reed.  I removed the reed and tried another.  I threaded approx 75 threads through and measured the width.  This was too wide, so we tried the one sized in between the two.  We had to remove about 40 threads but at least it worked.  I was finally able to start weaving.

Fortunately, the actual weaving is quite quick.  In only a few hours I've woven 2 metres of rug.

I love how it's working up and can't wait to see it finished.  I will give it a hot wash to hopefully shrink and felt it a little.

Weaving in progress

A close up of the weave