Shetland textiles

So here's a book we all must have: Shetland Textiles. 

Dreaming of Shetland

The fundraising e-book for Deb Robson's Shetland research will be published very soon: Dreaming of Shetland. I have pre-ordered mine! Deb's blog post about the project: Dreaming of Shetland.

I'm so looking forward to see what Deb will come up with once the research and writing has resulted in a book or longer article. Shetland sheep and their wool are so fascinating!

Here's a flock I saw on the grounds of Shetland Croft Trail in 2010. I hope Deb may see lots and lots of sheep during her stay in Shetland, that island of my dreams (also)!

St Kilda shawl

My little shawl is finished. I think I like it.

I used an Old Shell pattern from Sharon Miller's Shetland Hap Shawl, and a Celtic Knot from A Gathering of Lace. I added a few rows of a dark brown and a light brown handspun North Ronaldsay yarn I found in my stash, and also a few rows of a handspun dark brownish gray Shetland yarn.

After publishing the first version of this post I found I need to add: the yarns I used are the two St Kilda from Blacker Yarns that I showed in an earlier post: Roots.

Some Boreray sheep at Woolfest 2011:

Roots

A couple of years ago I spun a few locks of Boreray wool. I wrote about it here: Boreray. Jane sent me the wool, and later she wrote an article about Boreray in Yarnmaker. I added my own experience and my photos to the article. The wool was fascinating. I felt something touch me when I handled it. Jane experienced the same, and she went on working with Boreray wool. You can read about it in her blog: mrs woolsack's blog.

I now have four balls of this precious yarn, two balls of the Boreray/Soay Blend and two of the Soay/Boreray/Shetland Blend. Both are lovely yarns. They are spun into high quality lace yarns by Blacker Yarns, that amazing mill that spins miracles. I am knitting a shawl/scarf I'll show you later.

Isn't it wonderful that there are people who won't let the threads to our history break? Ancient wools, new yarns.

Spinning Shetland again

The gorgeous fleece I bought at Jamieson & Smith in Shetland last year, I wonder if I'll ever get it spun? I have combed it on my finest dog comb, spun a few sample skeins, I've tried a light spindle and my wheel... Now I've started again. This time I comb the already combed locks on Gammeldags' mini two pitch wool combs, and the result is amazing.

This is Oliver Henry showing Shetland fleece at J&S:

This is what I did last year: my fleece last year

And this is what I'm doing to my fleece now, combing the once combed fibers again:

Spinning suddenly became very easy :)

Swap yarns

I like swaps, you never know what your partner will send you. Two days ago I spun two singles and yesterday I plied, skeined and washed the yarn. I'm so pleased with this yarn! I spun the hand dizzed tops with merino, alpaca and silk uneven, and the commercial merino top even, and got a yarn with character and structure.

The merino-alpaca-silk tops to the left, sorry I don't have a better picture

Merino top

Singles

The finished yarn shows the different fibers in a nice way

I also spun the pink Shetland-Merino-Nylon batt in the photo above:

Now I'm thinking of what to spin to ply it with. Gray would be nice, but I can also imagine other pink shades in a 3-ply and another gray 3-ply for a warm Fair Isle hat.

The swans have been grazing in the fields for a couple of weeks. Soon they will be gone.

In the garden the plants show colors you didn't know they had:

This is a cactus I got from a friend a couple of years ago. She sent it to me in a milk package, I put it in a pot, it grew roots and started growing bigger and bigger. Last summer it was hanging in a rowan for a couple of months. A few weeks ago I got the sad news that my friend had passed away. I call my cactus "Marie" in remembrance of her. Marie has four flowers now.

This is where I want to live when I get rich

Brown Shetland. My Fiber Studies 2

Tess the border collie is keeping the sheep in order on a croft in Shetland. At least she's trying, we, the tourists, didn't give her much chance. She was more interested in playing with things she found on the ground because she had an audience :)

I take part in the SpinDoctor Wool Breed Challenge on Ravelry. My blog posts are tagged "SpinDoctor". The Challenge ends June 30th 2011.

Most Shetland sheep are white, but there are also colored sheep in grey to black and light brown to dark brown and moorit. The sheep belongs to the Northern European short tailed group, and it'd dual coated, i.e. it has a short soft undercoat and a longer outercoat. The white Shetland has recovered after being near to disappear, but the colored are threatened. It's getting more and more difficult to buy good colored fleece.

The quality of Shetland fleece is graded into five grades from finest to damaged. You can read more in an article written by Elizabeth Lovick in the magazine YarnMaker, October 2010. The sheep is dual coated, but the "improved" Shetland has less differencies between undercoat and outercoat than the more primitive individuals. Colored Shetland usually has a very distinct double coat.

Colored Shetland is an adventure! You can work in so many ways with a colored fleece. There are no two fleeces exactly the same. The color and quality variation is vast. Today I show a few basic ways to work with a colored fleece except one: I did not cut off the bleached tips as I had so little fibers. If you want a deep brown even color and the wool is long enough, you cut off the tips. Colored Shetland is used in Hap shawls, Fair Isle and Aran knits.

I had only about 35 grams of brown 1st grade Shetland wool, which I grabbed from a fleece given by Oliver Henry to people take with them at Spin Night in Stirling, Scotland, in August 2010. Now I deeply  regret I didn't take the whole fleece, but at that time I couldn't see how I would get it home to Finland. I could have mailed it, silly me! At home I gently scoured the handful I had. I didn't want to wash out all of the lanolin, because that would be needed in my worsted spinning sample.

Oliver Henry is the world's greatest authority on Shetland wool. He is the director of Shetland Woolbrokers/Jamieson and Smith in Lerwick, Shetland. He has been working with wool for 50 years. Here he shows a fleece in the wool shed, where the work with the fleeces is intense i August 2010:

I had some scoured brown Finn Wool for comparison. Shetland and Finnsheep are both North European short tailed breeds. Their wool can be very similar, as you can see in the photo below. Finnsheep to the left, Shetland to the right. I think the wool in both samples come from young animals, maybe lambs. The Shetland has been shorn in August, the Finn in the autumn.

The lock structure is triangular, which is typical to double coated fleece. The undercoat fills up close to the skin, and keeps the sheep warm in rough weather. The outer coat leads the water away, and also helps to keep the fleece open so it won't felt on the sheep. In the Finn to the left you see a more open crimp than in the Shetland to the right. The crimp in this Shetland lock is even, but in the Finn fleece there were locks with similar crimp. The staple length of my Shetland was 6-10 cm, in the lock below about 6 cm.

OK, let's leave the Finn and concentrate on Shetland:

It's difficult to describe the hand of 1st grade Shetland. I think I can feel the structure of the fiber, but that sounds ridiculous as the fiber is so fine: 12-20 microns in the undercoat, 30-40 in the outercoat, but that's an average that does not count for the fine 1st grade outercoat. Anyway, you have to feel it to understand.

First preparation: separating the double coat by combing. I combed each lock separately with a tight dog comb. This is the way to prepare Shetland 1st grade wool for spinning the super fine yarn used in Shetland lace shawls. You don't want the undercoat in the yarn for the finest shawls. I learned to comb from master spinner Margaret Peterson in Shetland in August 2010. You take a firm grip of the lock and start combing from one end, then turn it over and comb the other end. I find it easier to start with the cut end, which I comb until there is no underwool left. OT: I need a new comb, do you know where I can buy one? This is a flee i.e. fleece...;) dog comb.

In the picture below you can see a lock that is rather typical to primitive sheep breeds: the sheep has shed some of it's wool at some point, and new has started growing. The breaking point is about one third from the cut end. These short, shed fibers can be carded into a woolen yarn. To the left the combed fibers, in the middle the lock, to the right what's combed off. I store the combed fibers with all tip ends pointing in the same direction.

As I had very little of the brown Shetland, I combed only about ten locks to get a mini sample skein. I spun them from the cut end on a 16 grams Michael Williams spindle. I ordered the spindle from Mike on Elizabeth Lovick's recommendation, and I have not regretted that I bought it. It's perfect for spinning Shetland lace yarn, and as Mike has made many spindles for that purpose you can rely on getting a good one. This yarn need much twist and careful drafting, which requires a spindle that spins fast and long. The yarn has to take the stress of extreme blocking of the shawl. It's often used as a singles. I plied the tiny sample on the same spindle, but I would use a heavier spindle or a wheel for plying a bigger amount of yarn. If you have a wheel suitable for this kind of yarn feel free to use it. In Shetland they have small, sturdy wheels with big ratios. Mary Kay is one of the skillful lace knitters of the island, here she is with her wheel in Jamieson & Smith's shop in Lerwick:

The best way to spin the super thin Shetland worsted lace yarn is in the grease. The fleece has very little lanolin, and the sheep are often quite clean. They graze in the vast Shetland mores and they are frequently washed by rain. As you can see from the combing picture above, most of the vegetable matter falls out in the preparation.

 

Second preparation: carding the undercoat. I carded the undercoat and other short fibers I combed out from the longer fibers and spun them on my Russian supported spindle from IST Crafts. Some of the bleached tips came out in the combing, and I added them to this yarn. I navajo plied it into a few meters of 3-ply just to show what kind of yarn you can spin from "waste". With larger amounts of waste you can spin a nice yarn with neps and an uneven structure. The yarn is very soft, quite comparable to cashmere, so feel free to use it for babies if the mother likes to do her laundry by hand...

Third preparation: carding undercoat and outercoat together. I wanted to have one woolen Shetland yarn with both undercoat and outercoat. I opened the locks by teasing. This time I plucked out weak tips and double cuts. I used Louet's fine carders, on which I can card a rolag very suitable for long draw. I spun with English long draw on Louet Victoria, standard flyer and bobbin, ratio 1:13.

Here you can see all three yarns together. The worsted small skein feels very silky, and it has quite a good luster. There is 13 meters in the skein which weighs less than 1 gram. The woolen mini skein with about 2 meters of yarn was spun from combing waste is soft with less luster and would probably felt good. The woolen double coat skein is very soft, 166 meters, 24 grams.

Find out more about Shetland wool:
Internet: there is much knowledge about Shetland sheep, I suggest you search internet, but here is one link: Shetland sheep on Wikipedia
Literature: M.L. Ryder, Sheep and Man. Clara Parkes, The Knitter's Book of Wool. Nola and Jane Fournier, In Sheep's Clothing. Deborah Robson & Carol Ekarius, The Fleece & Fiber Source Book (to be released in May 2011). The magazines Spin Off and YarnMaker.
Spinning instruction: Watch out for Liz Lovick's CD on spinning Shetland, it's coming in the spring 2011!
Shetland textiles: Northern Lace Liz Lovick Shetland Museum Unst Heritage Centre Heirloom Knitting
Spindles shown here: Michael Williams IST Crafts

Att spinna Shetland - Spinning Shetland

Det är väl bara att slå sig till ro med insikten att jag älskar att spinna tunt. Riktigt tunt. Fina, fina trådar som jag knappt ser. En vägg i mitt arbetsrum måste inredas så att ena halvan är mörk och andra ljus. Då ser jag ljusa trådar mot den mörka delen och mörka trådar mot den ljusa när jag sitter i min älskade länstol och sländspinner.

Det här är kammad Shetlandsull:

På Shetland lärde jag mig av Margaret Peterson att ullen skall vara otvättad när man spinner det superfina garnet för Shetlands spetssjalar. Bara den bästa ullen används till det här garnet. Ullen kammas t.ex. med en tät hundkam. Alla kammade ulltottar förvaras med rotändan åt samma håll. Ullen blir mycket renare av det noggranna kammandet. Shetlandsullen har väldigt litet lanolin, så den känns inte så tung och fet som en del andra ullsorter kan göra. Den lilla mängden fett gör spinnandet mycket lätt.

Jag spann garnet för provlappen på spinnrock, men jag var inte nöjd med resultatet. Jag bytte därför till Michael Williams lätta slända (16 gram). Du kan se att garnet är ojämnt, jag har problem med snodden i det entrådiga garnet och med att kontrollera diametern. Det sländspunna garnet blir bättre. Den första sländspunna tråden är i nystanet ovanför lappen. Jag spinner ett tvåtrådigt garn, för jag litar inte på mitt entrådiga än så länge. Men nästa fäll blir spindeltråd, kanske :) Du kan också se att garnet faktiskt blir snövitt när det tvättats.

I suppose I have to settle down with the understanding that I like to spin thin threads. Really thin. Fine, fine threads that I can barely see. One wall in my studio has to be arranged so that one half is dark and the other light. Then I can see light threads against the dark part and dark threads against the light part when I sit and spindle in my beloved arm chair.

In the box you can see combed Shetland wool. In Shetland I was taught by Margaret Peterson that the wool has to be unwashed when you spin the superfine yarn for Shetland's lace shawls. Only the best wool is used for this yarn.You can use a dog comb for combing the fleece. All combed locks are stored with the cut ends pointing in the same direction. The wool gets much cleaner by the thorough combing. Shetland wool has very little lanolin, so it doesn't feel so fat and heavy that some other wools do. The small amount of fat makes spinning thin worsted yarn very easy.

I spun the yarn for the swatch on a spinning wheel. I wasn't satisfied with it, so I changed to the light Michael Williams spindle (16 grams). You can see that the yarn is uneven, I have problems with the diameter control and with the twist in the singles. The spindled yarn will be better. The first thread is spun and in the ball. I spin a 2-ply, because I don't think my singles is good enough yet. Maybe the next fleece will become a cob web yarn :) Here you can see the difference between washed and unwashed yarn. The yarn really becomes snow white when washed.

Djur på Shetland

Vallhunden

De nyklippta ståtliga bässarna, Shetlandsfår

Kalven och turisterna

Lantras ankor och höns, och en vacker tröja

Shetlandsponny, föl

Sälarnas åldringshem i Lerwicks hamn

Gamlingen

Aj vad starka de är!

 

 

Fair Isle

Unst Heritage Center

På väg till ön Noss i en liten båt

Mårten har fixat datorn, så nu kommer jag åt mina foton igen!

Fair Isle kallas mönsterstickningen i den speciella stil man kan hitta på Fair Isle, Shetland och några öar till där långt uppe i Nordsjön. Det underbara landskapet, där fåren betar på varje gräsfläck, har varit och är en skattkammare när man söker inspiration till färger i sin stickning. Jo, prickarna på fotot ovan är får! Där syns också stenmurar som har hållit dem borta från en del av betesmarken. Det finns mycket mer färger än man först skulle tro i den shetländska naturen. Jord och torv, lavar, stenar. Vatten och himmel. Dimma. Alla de färger som finns i stickningarna hittar man också i landskapet.

Det finns mycket skrivet om Fair Isle stickning. Mönstren har bearbetats, tecknats ner, och analyserats av många. Det finns oändligt många plagg i museerna. Varför flerfärgsstickningen kom att se ut just som den gör på Shetland är fortfarande något av ett mysterium. Det finns liknande mönster i Norge och Baltikum. Stickningen på Shetland tog fart på 1800-talet. Maskinstickningen fick fort fäste, men än i dag räknas den handstickade tröjan som den enda riktiga. Stickerskorna är oerhört snabba, så snabba att det kan vara svårt att uppfatta deras rörelser.

Det mest typiska för Shetland är oxo mönstren, där kryss och o-formade mönster upprepas i mönsterränder. Man kan se dem i alla plagg på mina foton. Variationsrikedomen är oändlig. Och traditionen går vidare. Var man än rör sig på Shetland kan man se stickningens betydelse.

Shetland Designer

Provlappar kan bli en kofta. Unst Heritage Center

Shetland Museum

Vad vill jag ha i garnet? - What do I want to have in my yarn?

Shetland Superior

Jag köpte en underbar fäll på Shetland. Oliver Henry på Shetland Woolbrokers hade klassificerat den som superior. Jag valde fällen själv ur bingen som innehöll superior fällar, och bar den till Oliver som tog bort ungefär 1/3 förrän han gick med på att sälja den.

Och varför valde jag just den här fällen?

OK, jag medger att det var ett ögonblicks övertygelse om att den var just det jag ville ha. Stapellängden och vågigheten och mjukheten kombinerad med en övertygande studs (det går inte att trycka ihop den här fällen) fick mig att bära iväg med den.

Den ser väldigt glansig ut, visst. Men det är en av de saker man inte kan lita på när man bedömer en fäll. Det är lanolin, och det säger ingenting om fibern. Men om man tar en lock mellan fingrarna, håller den intill örat och knycker i den, låter den som en gitarrsträng. Faktiskt. Det finns inga brott på fibrerna, de är starka och friska.

Titta nu på det här:

Ny päls på väg - New hair growing

Här och var i fällen finns sådana rotändor. Det ser ut som om fibern gått av, och det har den. En del Shetlandsfår fäller helt naturligt pälsen på våren. Det är vad som hänt här. En del av pälsen har fallit av, och ny har vuxit ut förrän pälsen klipptes. Det är inget att hänga upp sig på. Man kammar bara bort de korta nyutväxta topparna.

Det är alltså inte en svaghet i fibern som skulle bero på sjukdom eller brist på foder, utan en naturlig del av fårets liv. Jag känner igen fenomenet från angorakaninen. Vi födde upp angorakaniner på 90-talet. Om man missade klippningen med ett par veckor, hände just det som händer Shetlandsfåret. Pälsen fälls när den nått full längd, ny växer ut. Den nya pälsen är de kort hår som finns i rotänden på den klippta pälsen.

Alden Amos, en kille jag beundrar mycket, säger att allt du inte vill ha i garnet tar du bort före du börjar spinna. Så det är vad jag gör.

Nästan färdigkammad lock - Almost finished combing

I förgrunden det som kammats bort - At the front fibers I have removed

Det som jag tar bort blir nuppar i garn, eller en filt åt katterna, eller gödsel för tomaterna.

I bought a wonderful fleece in Shetland. Oliver Henry from Shetland Woolbrokers, the man who knows more about Shetland wool than anyone else, had graded it as a superior fleece. I chose the fleece myself from the crib that contained superior fleeces, and carried it to Oliver who sorted out about one third before he agreed to sell it to me.

And why did I choose this fleece?

OK, I admit that it was a moment's conviction that this is just what I want. The staple length and crimp and the softness combined with a convincing bounce (you can't press this fleece down) made me pick it up and and carry it away.

It looks very glassy, but that's one thing you can't trust in a fleece. It's lanolin, and it doesn't tell you anything about the fiber. But if you take a staple between your fingers, hold it close to your ear and pick it, it sounds like a guitar string. Yes, really! No breaks in the fibers, they are strong and healthy.

Now look at the photo above where it seems like the fibers have broken near the cut end. There are spots like this in the fleece. And yes, the fibers have broken. Some of  the Shetland sheep shed their fleece in spring, and that is what's happened here. Part of the fleece has fallen off, and new has grown before sheering. It's nothing to hang your lip about. Just comb off the new grown tips, and that's it.

It's not a weakness in the fiber caused by sickness or lack of feeding. It's a natural ?? of the sheep's life. I know the phenomenon from the angora rabbit. We bred angora rabbits in the '90s. If we missed the shearing by a couple of weeks, the hairs that had reached full length fell off and new fur started to grow and could be seen as short fibers in the clip.

Alden Amos, a person I admire much, says that anything you don't want in your yarn you remove before you start spinning. So that's what I do.

What I remove might become neps. Or a blanket for the cats. Or fertilizer for the tomatoes.

Klart att spinna - Ready to spin