Addendum!

Here are the sources of the current batch of fiber I'm turning into yarn: Ajo and Vuelker. Both are German Shepherds. Ajo is younger and lighter, source of both washed and unwashed fiber, and Vueller is older, darker one, source of the darker "batt" that is next to be spun.

Their photos and fur are thanks to @jnye, coming from the wilds of northern Michigan. Those long dark guard hairs do a great job of covering up the lighter undercoat hidden below!

@maru Note the availability of clean water for splashing in! This might help explain the lack of doggy smell to the fur that you asked about. 😂

I neglected to take photos of the space before the shelving and reorganization, but you might have seen hints of the chaos in the background of previous photos I've posted. Here are a couple more that give an idea for what an improvement the current space is over the old!

End 🧵 (for now)

Part of what kept me busy this last month was reorganizing my crafting space in our basement living space where we spend most of our evenings.

I found some Ikea shelving that perfectly fit the space AND the bins I've been using, which allowed me to organize all the clutter I've collected over the last few years into a vertical space. After a bit of sorting, I freed up some extra bins for temporary storage during the skirting process. (One last mental blocker for getting back into spinning.)

It's a nice space for working in, but I still need to work out a setup I can use for recording videos (if I ever get to that goal).

There's also that awkward protrusion from the ceiling above the TV that holds ductwork for the rooms upstairs, which makes the space a bit awkward, but I'm happy simply to have a dedicated work space now!

🧵 3/x

#Crafting

I have to admit that going back to spinning short, slippery fur was a bit of a re-learning process! It definitely needs plenty of twist to hold together. I started out with very slow inchworm worsted spinning, which got a bit tedious! I wasn't sure if I'd get through a significant amount of 100% yarn before deciding to switch to wool blends.

But! I eventually got into the swing of things and managed to hit a stride where I was going semi-long draw that I was happy with: the fur fibers had just enough grip on each other that I could let twist travel up into the fiber & come out in a surprisingly consistent diameter single!

The photos here show the results of spinning the 52g of clean/groomed fur from the lighter dog, which I'd carded into rolags. There were a couple of darker bits that I tried to keep together for variation, as you can see in the first photo, but the bulk was a basic creamy beige. I completed the lot in a couple evenings' sittings.

The last photo shows the skirted unwashed lighter dog's fur on the left, clean darker dog's fur as it came to me, compacted for shipping on the right, & the spun rolags in the middle.

I'm not sure if the carding actually helped all that much, so next I'm going to spin the darker dog's fur straight from the "batt" & see how it goes. Might save some time! This next batch is ~1/2 the weight as the first, so I figure I can make a 3-ply with 1 strand dark & 2 light. I'm curious if the contrast will show!

🧵 2/x

#Chiengora #HandSpun

Hi folks, long time no me!

October was another busy month, and I fell behind on social media while trying to keep up with everything else. I feel bad about falling out of touch, but I hope to catch up on what you all have been up to eventually!

Most recently, I've (finally) gotten back into spinning dog fur! A generous and patient owner of a couple of German Shepherds in MI sent me fur a while back and I'm now processing their fur. While their coats are mostly black, the undercoat is a creamy beige, with some browner bits.

The length is pretty short, as you can see here: 1.5-2" / 4-5cm, on par with the husky fur I started learning to spin with. It came in three batches, 2 from one dog and 1 from the other. 1 from each dog is post-grooming clean, while the third was from a de-shedding session without cleaning beforehand. That one required some extensive skirting to remove leaves, pine needles and other VM! And you can't visit Michigan without bringing back a bunch of sand. 😆 Fortunately most of that fell out in the process.

The last photo shows 1 of the clean batches, which I'd rolled into rolags. I tried to twist them down into tighter punis, but the fur was just too slippery! This was the best I could achieve, which thankfully was good enough...

🧵 1/x

#Chiengora #HandSpinning

A question for sock knitters:

If you're knitting top-down with ribbing at the top, and your pattern doesn't specify a cast-on method, do you cast on in pattern (i.e. matching knit and purl)? Or do you just cast on straight knit stitches (or purl) and start the ribbing in the next round?

What method do you use?

#knitting #SockKnitting @knitting

Thus ends the story so far as we have posted it over on @Paws2Trail . Now we can pick up the story here at @Paws2Spindle

Now that I have workable yarn, I need to do something with it! That means learning to knit or crochet. I have chosen knitting! I also chose some commercial yarn to learn on, instead of the hard-earned husky yarn.

Learning to knit has been my main summer project, but I've continued to spin, and also experiment with a blending board for fiber prep. More on both topics in future threads, coming soon!

In the meantime, you can get the full details of the last year over at Paws2Trail, and follow us there if you like to hear about our outdoor husky adventures!

...end 🧵

https://mountains.social/@Paws2Trail/111352472236311074

#Huskies #Spinning #FiberArts #Chiengora

A couple of surprises along the way:

First, the bottom of one bin of fur held a grayer undercoat from our first husky, Rio, who was more black-and-white than the gray-and-white dogs we've had since. Rather than blend it in, I decided to card and spin it separately. It made a wonderful heather gray yarn!

Second, I returned to the Turkish spindle for Rio's fur because it was special and I wanted to go slow, and I discovered that sometimes it was somewhat meditative: nice to slow down and hand-spin, rather than try to keep up with the pace the e-spinner set.

Husky fur is not always consistent, even after carding, so you often need to adjust your drafting to keep it from falling apart as you go.

But the Turkish spindle was SLOOOOW and tried my patience. I looked at spinning wheels, and found that the most economical were the Dreaming Robots Electric Eel Wheel machines. Only the small Nano model was in stock, so I picked up one of those.

It was finicky to work with, especially with husky fur, which is shorter than the animal fibers I think most spinners are used to working with, but I got it to work! Soon enough I had several spools of single-play ready to be plied into something usable for knitting.

But therein lay a problem: how to ply if my spools were already full? I had more of the Nano's 2oz spools, but that would mean breaking the long strands into multiples. The EEW 6.1 was coming in a month or so, and sported 6oz spools: perfect for a triple-ply of my three 2oz spools! I decided it was worth it to wait.

And worth it it was! The EEW 6.1 is not just larger, but also smoother and easier to spin husky fur with! I'm glad I waited. And so I created triple ply from my first e-spun single-ply white husky fur.

And then I built a PVC niddy noddy so that after washing and setting the yarn I could wind it into proper skeins...

[Apologies for any edit notices: it was bugging me that I forgot alt text on two of the photos.]

To the internet, then!

I watched YouTube videos and read blogs about spinning, especially husky/Samoyed fur. It looked doable!

I liked the look of yarn spun on a Turkish spindle, and I found one with variable weights, which Was perfect for experimenting. I took a guess that fine husky fur would be more like cotton than sheep wool, so I got cotton style carders. (Wider, narrower, and more teeth-per-inch).

With practice, I got it to work! I made mistakes, but learned from them and figured out to make some pretty decent, consistent yarn!...

OK, time to recap our yarn-spinning journey so far! A thread 🧵 ...

We've lived with huskies for over two decades, which means many shedding seasons of soft fluffy fur to collect around the house. Surely it could make a soft yarn, we reasoned! So we collected it with plans to learn to spin it "some day." Over the years, our collection grew. It moved with us between houses. It got compressed into bales as we added more and more on top.

In 2023 we got Tonttu, our first non-Siberian husky, and despite his lankier build, the first time he blew his coat, it came out in gloriously dense and fluffy hunks, and we quickly filled up another trash bag full of fur to be used "some day."

The realization quickly settled in: some day would be now or never. (Otherwise we'd soon fill the house with collected but disused fur.)...

Our original thread about learning to spin wool can be found over here:

@Paws2Trail
https://mountains.social/@Paws2Trail/111352472236311074

Hi! We're a couple of guys and their huskies who enjoy outdoor adventures. We've collected enough fur over the years that we finally decided to do something about it! After initially posting about spinning husky yarn at @Paws2Trail, we've decided to spin off a separate account for fiber-related posts here.