Fleece & Harmony Knitting Podcast Ep 78 - Rowan Fall Preview, Waist Shaping!

[Music] hi everyone it's kim from fleece and harmony this is our knitting podcast recorded in on our sheep farm in belfast prince of rhode island canada this is episode 78. if you're joining us for the first time this is a podcast about our farm life and my knitting life and we own wool and mill so are my spinning wool making life as well if you've been here before then you know what to expect this could go anywhere in any direction any direction but we'll try to keep to the agenda today so today we're going to talk about the farm update as usual um i have some whip same whip that i've been showing for a couple weeks now or a couple podcasts no rips so that's great that's good news nothing that has been ripped out and i'm also showing an fo again it's a little bit of a cheat because it's not my own fo it's jennifer hicks fo and she's working here in the mill with us so i'm going to show her her project that she worked on with one of our yarns we also have quite a we have an update on the kate davies knittalong that we're doing so we'll talk about that my whip is actually my project for the kate davies knit along and we have quite a long shop update because there's a lot going on right now everything's gearing up for sweater weather coming sometime even though today is just a beautiful beautiful summer day here so but it's not too early to start talking about what we're going to knit for winter and i also have a in the mill segment closer to the end of the podcast and today we're going to be talking about another preparation step and it's the last step before we get to spinning and we are going to do part two of the harmony part that we started in the last episode and this is the walk down poetry road so um we'll get started with the farm update so if you've been following along we've been talking about the weather and this with the weather that we would have dreamed of having been the last three years we got this year but it came a little bit at the wrong time because it came right when people should have been making hay so the irony of the weather on prince edward in the eastern part of canada right now is that we're having a few days of sunshine a few days of rain which is perfect growing conditions for most things but if you're trying to make hay it's a little bit of a nightmare because it you need at least three days without any rain to allow your hay to dry out properly so it cures properly in the barn so everybody is behind cutting their hay people that cut the first cut of hay so if they were early enough in june to cut their hay they've got lots of hay and right now there's lots of hay around but what they're cutting now is not really that great quality it's better than having no hay but it does have a tendency to be a bit dusty if it hasn't dried out enough so now people are a little bit worried about that depending on what kind of animals they're feeding for us we are worried about what sheep like to eat and we had a 26 acre field that is planted in forage for our sheep and as you know if you've been following the farmer that cuts our hay for us wasn't able to get to the field to cut it so he finally got there last week and took a look at the hay and it's not really going to be good it's not going to be really good for sheep sheep need a high protein hay and this is overgrown obviously because it should have been cut really really early in july and it's way overgrown so it's too tough and not enough protein for the sheep so we could sell it to farmers that are have beef cattle but there there's enough hay around for them this year so there's a little bit of a glut of that kind of hay so it's not worth it for us to cut it and wrap it and bale it and try to try to store it so what we decided to do is that the hay was cut in the field it's left on the field to dry and then the farmer that makes our hay is going to come back and turn it over again to make sure it really dries out and basically we've got compost for the field so it'll just stay in the field like that and go back into the soil and it's not um obviously not the best case scenario but these are the kind of decisions that farmers have to make it's actually less expensive for us to do that and buy the hay that we're going to need this year than to go to the trouble and wrap that hay and do all the preparation and that's the most expensive part of what we we do in hay making we have you can make hailage so it doesn't need to be as dry as dry hay but there's a plastic wrap that goes around that and it actually ferments the hay it over the the fall and into the winter and that wrap that goes around is really expensive so the most economical thing to do weighing everything in the balance is just to leave the hay on the field just making sure that it's turned over and dried and not staying in the same place and then the new hay will grow up and the the plants will grow up underneath it and next year we'll have a field that's been has a little bit of mulch on it and it's the best the best case scenario so the good news is is that the farmer that makes our hay has enough hay for us to buy to feed our animals the horses and the sheep and we're just gonna rest our field for a year so that's what's happened with our hay now in the west of canada if you're not uh if you're not um watching from canada the situation is pretty dire it's they're having a drought in the western part of canada and then even further west like in alberta and bc the forest fires are just it's completely horrendous what everybody's dealing with there and i'm watching the news every night people are having to move their um animals out of uh evacuation zones so you can imagine the logistics of that it's it's a really kind of a really rough situation but because we have so much hay here the department of um or the federation of agriculture here is actually organizing a shipment of hay to go out west so those farmers will get some of our hay not our personally our hay but pay from pei in nova scotia and other places in more eastern and canada uh they will ship it out to the west for the farmers out there that will need to feed their their animals so we're really thinking about those folks every day and um you know the problems that we have here with cutting hay and leaving it on the field eve is really small potatoes next to what uh what those farmers are dealing with in the in the western part of north america actually because i think it's extending down to the states the same kind of conditions so that's uh you know life on the farm as we said you know has you if you've been following for a long time you know that it's not always easy um but it's still uh you know still a very satisfying life but you have problems that you have to solve all the time it's a problem solving type of job being a farmer everything else on the farm though is great i mean our animals are all really healthy the one good thing about the weather situation here this year is that if you're feeding on grass live grass then there's so much grass that it's crazy the sheep are like i said before very happy and we're hardly having to move them at all because the they can't eat the grass fast enough so they graze over one part of the field and by the time we uh they shift around and go to another part of the field and they come back to where they were before it's already grown up again so it's really good for if you're doing grass fed animals that you're not having to give them dry hay so that's what's happening and the same in the horse pasture as well they can't they can't eat it fast enough so it's that's the positive and the other positive is that it will um also allow us to graze the animals outside on the field well into the fall which will take the pressure off of our hay and we talked about that last last podcast so it's uh you know there's pros and cons of everything in life and that's that's what we're dealing with this year today however is such a beautiful perfect sunny day it's so um you just have to be grateful for these kind of days if the sky is blue there's a little bit of a breeze the human there's not too much humidity and it's just beautiful and just a day to be thankful that you're that you're living in a place where you're where you're safe and and um you know relatively comfortable so we give we're really grateful for that so we'll get to the knitting part now and uh the only whip that i'm gonna show again is my even dune my even dune sweater that i'm knitting for the kate davies cowl uh or knit along the paisley is still hibernating because i really want to be working on this this sweater that i love so i'm just going to reach over here and get it so i've i was away for three days it was my father's uh 80th birthday last week so i did take three days to go spend time with my parents so i was there and i didn't get much knitting done so i've been working furiously on the last couple days to to get some more progress on my sweater so the last time i showed it it was really um it was uh it was up to here this this spot more or less i'm just gonna try to the second uh blue stripe is where where it was so i'm continuing on down and i'll just stretch this out so as i'm knitting this i'm getting a little worried about the yarn quantity that i have so i thought i might actually be able to knit the sweater with one full skein of each of the colors and have enough yarn to do to do what i the length of the sweater that i want but i don't think i'm going to have enough with just one skein now so some of you bought full skeins and one of the gradient kits to make this there's a few customers that did that i think you're going to be fine but i just weighed the balls of yarn that i have what i have left and counted the number of stripes that i have and then i also have the sleeves to do so this pattern is knit or is um written to be a shorter sweater so not i wouldn't say exactly cropped but it is a little bit shorter like just below the waist and i want to do a sweater that's longer than that so i think i'm going to have to break out a second skein of um of the yarns and because i do want to make it make it a little bit longer because i also have to still knit the you pick up stitches around the neck and knit the neck separately and that's going to be in the pink stripe i think uh yeah i think it's the pink stripe and if i do that and then do the sleeves i'm not going to have enough enough yarn in just one full skein of the selkirk wursted for each of the stripes so each stripe around is taking about 14 grams and after i complete this series of stripes here that i'm that i'm doing now starting with the purple um here i'd probably want to do a full other repeat um after i finish the repeat on this this uh this section i'll have about 36 grams left of my 80 gram ball and then i still have to do i want to do another another whole section so that would be down to what it's 22 grams and i still have to do the sleeves so it's going to be i don't think i'm going to make it so i'm going to have to get another ball and some of these some of these colors come in the gradient kit so i'll use one of the the 50-yard balls from there but uh just so you know and i'm knitting uh size for bust size 41. so if you're trying to judge if any of you uh want to knit the sweater that'll give you a good indication of what kind of yo how much yarn you're going going to need and i wanted to talk about the raglan on the sweater a little bit because i had a question from the last podcast so in the last podcast i talked about the fact that i completed the raglan increases so you're in you're increasing down the raglan line and when i finished the increases for the raglan shaping i had eight inches of sleeve like the raglan depth was eight inches so normally for me an eight inch raglan depth would be okay and i'm wearing i'm wearing the ramya sweater today this is a pattern by jennifer beale and it's knit in our lace yarn so the main color is mayflower and then you've got some color work with vineyard amethyst brooch and autumn birch here but i wore this sweater because the raglan depth on this sweater is eight inches so you can see on me that an eight inch raglan depth fits me pretty perfectly if it's a sweater that's made to be fitted so this is um it's uh it comes to there the raglan depth for this sweater i want it a little bit looser and a little bit more casual looking so i wanted my raglan depth to be around eight and a half inches so once i finished all of the increases i had eight inches so then i knit this pink stripe i knit it uh straight without doing any more increases either on the sleeve or the body and somebody asked the question about why did i do that so it's really just to give me that extra little half inch or so under the arm but i'm doing it without doing any increases because i don't want extra bulk of fabric on my arms or on the body because the body is fitting me perfectly with the number of stitches that i had after i completed the regular shaping from the pattern and the sleeves are also per the perfect circumference so i knit straight without doing any increases either on the body or the sleeve just to give me that little bit of extra length so now my my underarm raglan depth if you want is going to be a half an inch longer than this sweater so it'll just give me a little bit of extra room if i want to wear a top like a light top underneath this sweater because it's not it's not necessarily except in the middle of winter a sweater that you would wear just as as a top if you want so that's why i did that the other modification that i'm making on this sweater it's really super easy to do is i'm adding a little bit of waist shaping so this sweater is just you knit stockinette straight down and i've decided that i want to do a little bit of waist shaping so i've done three sets of decreases under the arm so i can you can't really see it there because trying to make it look as invisible as possible but this is where i did it so under the arm you cast on your 12 stitches to make the underarm which you'll pick up later and in the middle of those 12 stitches i did a knit two together and a slip slip knit so beside the middle the middle stitch so the very middle stitch of these 12 stitches which i know it's it's an even number so it's not really exactly in the middle but um every time i'm two stitches away from from that that middle row that i chose for the column that i chose i do a decrease on either side of it and then continue to knit so i did that three times and on both sides obviously in both underarms so i decreased the six stitches on one side and six stitches on the other so that's a decrease of 12 stitches and that actually removes about two to three inches of fabric from uh from the waist area by the time i got down to the bottom so and i'll just tell you how i knew when and where to do those decreases i have a sweater that i use as my my sweater as far as my perfect fit sweater so it's a sweater that i purchased and it just fits me really well the length of it hits me right on the hips where i like it the um the sleeves are nice the the bust line fits perfectly and it has a little bit of weight waist shaping in it and that waist shaping seems to hit me in the right place so if you have a sweater like that in your wardrobe i would pull that out and use that as kind of a template for any of the adjustments you want to make on the sweaters that you're knitting for yourself the i'm it did the measurements so the measurements on that sweater are it's a top so it's not an outdoor sweater it is like an indoor sweater a top so again on that one the raglan depth is eight inches so i know that i'm making my regular depth a little bit a little bit longer than that on this sweater but from the underarm to the where their waist shaping in that sweater is the um the smallest it's seven inches from the underarm so what i did was i started my i want to evenly space these decreases that i that i did and i started it at the on a row where if i space them out evenly the length of my sweater that i will have knitted is seven inches so i'm just about there i've just done the last decrease and i'm going to have a couple rounds that are going to be straight and i'll be at 7 inches so i know that this sweater will be the way shaping will be a bit uh will be right i also took into account that i increased the raglan depth here so this this cast on part of the underarm is a little bit lower than it is in this this sweater or the sweater that i use as my template so i've cut made all that um and i mean it sounds like i'm doing a calculation but i'm just looking at it as i go and i'm measuring as i go because it's top down i'm able to do that so what i'm planning on doing now is the decreases are done i'm going to knit one or two stripes i'll just see how how it looks and then i'm going to start to do the increases and i'll evenly space three sets of increases on either side at the same number of rows that i spaced them out here on when i did the decreases so then by the time i get down to where i want to um start knitting straight again i should be it should be at the top of my hips and i'm taking all this these measurements from that template sweater and i know my end measurement from the underarm is 14 inches because that's what my template sweater is so i know how to do that so it's just a you know arithmetic and figuring it out and because it's top down i can try it on as i go and i should have the sweater with the fit that i that i want that's the plan anyway so that's uh so that's that so um i'm just going to continue going with this it's it goes fast it's very relaxing there's a lot going on here uh lately so i'm really enjoying kind of this uh more or less mindless knitting i don't have to look at the pattern because it's just a straight shot other than what the modifications that i did myself in my head so i know what i'm doing and i'm going to keep going with that and and after i think i'll probably finish this before i pick up the paisley again so that's that so um i will talk a little bit about kate davey's knit along now because i'm talking about my kate davey sweater because there's a couple things that i don't want to forget to mention and then we'll go to the fo that i said i would show so i had a couple people write to me and we're asking if they knit one of the hats from the milirocki head heeds book if they that qualifies for the kate davies then along because kate didn't design all of the patterns that are in that book so for example the roman hat that i knit i'll show a picture is um by lynette meek and but it's in that miller rocky heed book from kate davies so i am saying that you can knit a hat from that pattern uh book as well and enter it into the the kate davies knit along because it's from a book that she published so you're okay to do that the other thing that i wanted to mention is that not to forget to post your finished objects in the thread on ravelry or on our community form that says finished objects i'm not going to go into the the chat um that's happening on the progress there's lots of stuff happening in those posts i'm not going to go into that that thread to pick the winner for the prizes that we have i'm going to go into the finished object thread so make sure that you're posting your finished objects in in the finished object thread after you finish and just to remind in case somebody is not aware of the knit along that we're doing we're doing a knit along celebrating kate's book 10 years in the making but you can knit any kate davies pattern that you want to join and you can knit as many patterns as you can get done the end date is november 30th and you can use any yarn and as long as it's a kate davies pattern out of one of her her books or a kate davies self-published pattern then that's that's good you can you can enter with that and to re um remind everybody about the prizes that we have we have a set of chiago shorty needles it's the blue set so that's the set i think it goes from 2.75 millimeters to 5 millimeters they generously donated that prize from estelle yarns and kieran canada and we have a kate davies cowl she has some knitwear that's been is pre-made like pre-finished knitwear that she sells on her website and she's generously sent us one of those cows or sorry cowls and we have that as a prize and we also have a knitting journal from kate davies that has her knitting knitting season logo on it so we're really excited about those three prizes that we have so you still have plenty of time it doesn't end until november 30th and you can start your projects and get them in there and if you there's some people that have already done a couple small projects as well so that's that's absolutely fine just make sure you're posting them in the finished object threads on either rivalry or in the community group that's on hosted on our website so there is a community forum there with a lot of different subjects that we've talked about so if you haven't joined that you can you can join that by entering in through the uh our website you can join that community forum there's a link at the bottom of the home page to join that if you want to so now i'll go back to the finished objects because i have a really cool project to show you so this pattern is um from yellie knits so it's y-e-l-l-e-y knits on instagram her that's her handle on instagram and on ravelry she's yelly l d so yelly with the initials ld after them and this is a bandana she's calling it it could be a charlotte i would say it's probably more of a charlotte but it is a small like a small shawl this was knit by jennifer hicks who works here in the mill and she used our point prim sock yarn for that and it's really cool because you have these lace uh these little lace spots but you have the phases of the moon on the spine of the shawl i think you can probably see that pretty well and the way that jennifer hicks is wearing it is like this almost like a like a kerchief so under under a coat is how she's planning to wear it you can make the the charlotte a little bit bigger there there are instructions in the pattern that allows you to do that tells you how you do it so where do you find the pattern again it's called the blooming moon bandana by yelly ld on ravelry it was designed for an electronic an ebook called the sun and fog summer 2021 meadow collection that you can also find on ravelry or you can buy this pattern separately from yelly ld as well so it's knit with our sock yarn and the construction is really cool because what you do you start with a tab cast on like you would for many many shawls and then you start your increases and you the modeling in the color of the yarns is because you're holding two yarns together and then when you knit along from from one side to the other when you get to the middle here where you have the phases of the moon you knit with a single strand and you do the color work so you separate the two strands that you're knitting together to create this um this color works section in the middle so it's really cool and like i said you can expand it a little bit the pattern this chalet or bandanna took one uh one skein of the uh each of the sock yarns that were used so again i'm gonna skip around a little bit because uh some of you that know our sock yarn are saying well wait a second that looks like slate that dark gray and we don't have a sock yarn there's no point prim sock yarn in slate so surprise we actually have launched uh three new colors of point prim sock yarn so um the other color in this is seagull the light gray that that we've had in the catalog for quite a long time but the three new colors that we've launched are more neutral shades so we have a lot of really bright great colors in the point prim sock yarn that we make here but now we're launching slate which is one of our best selling colors in the other yarns i'm just going to give you a good look at that and again for people that don't know point prim sock yarn this is a wool mohair blend we don't do any use spin with any synthetic fibers in our mill so this is blended with twenty percent mohair for strength and uh seven or sorry eighty percent wool so for people that don't know our yarns very well yet the wool that we spin our yarns out of is all sourced from prince edward island from our own farm and three other farms here on the island where we know the farmers so we are spinning their wool into our yarns and the mohair is canadian mohair we buy it from ontario so it's all canadian source and we spin all of our yarns in the natural color and then hand dye all the skeins using using greener shade dyes which are acidized but they're they're certified organic so that's what we that's how we make the yarn and you'll see if you stay tuned for the mill sections you'll see the whole process so this is slate and so that adds another neutral so for in those darker shades like that we have um we now have slate we have a night without stars and we have rhubarb for red then we decided we wanted to add a brown so we chose chestnut which is a color that we make also in the worst and the erin but it's just a lovely soft brown pretty neutral and we've now made that in point prim sock yarn so it's just delicious that's chestnut and then we decided to do a green and we've done fur so fur is a pretty neutral green as well it's also the green that's in the green gradient kit in our in our selkirk worsted yarns it's the it's the dark one in that kit but now we've introduced it in the saw so we're really happy to have these three shades and we looked at the way that they go together and the way that they go with other with the other yarns that we have so that's something new that you can purchase from our web store so that's uh that's the part of the the shop update the next thing that i wanted to talk about we're gonna do a bit of i'm kind of jumping around between the shop update and other things we're talking about because of uh just the way that the the items are in the in the shop update um we're gonna do a rowan review on a new yarn so we're going to do a deep dive on a new yarn that rowan launched last season so the rowan review is on cotton wool cotton wool is a new yarn that rowan released last season for the spring and summer season we just received it just last week actually and there's 12 colors which are here i'm just going to give you a good close look at those the 12 colors and we're going to talk a little bit more in depth so this is a 60 cotton 40 wool yarn it's a chain at um construction so you have the the um there's a really close-up picture on our website if you want to look so um when i've listed it on the website i've listed the colors with the ball band so you can see what yarn it is and then if you roll your mouse mouse over the um the picture with the ball band then you'll get a close-up uh picture so you can look at that and it's a super super soft um yarn it's really really beautiful and the concept was from rowan is that they wanted to create a yarn that could be used for um for knitting for babies but also that the the mothers could knit themselves something uh or fathers could knit themselves something as well so the the concept is bloom so the book that came out with this yarn is called bloom and obviously making a reference to um you know having a baby or you know and the way that you you bloom when you're when you're about to have a baby as well and it's really really soft as i said it's hand still hand washable because it does have have a lot of wool in it and it's not super washed but the texture of it is really really soft next to the skin and you can really use it for anything so the concept is with uh babies and expectant moms but at the same mirror deads and but at the same time you could really knit anything with it so the gauge is 20 stitches to four inches or ten centimeters on four millimeter needles so that's a usi six uh four millimeters is equal to a usi six twenty stitches to four inches or ten centimeters and twenty eight rows so that's a pretty common gauge kind of a dk dk weight so you could substitute this yarn for other dk yarns the balls are 50 gram balls at 130 meters or 142 yards so that's specs on this wall it comes in 12 colors i'll just show them one more time all together so you've got a good variety of neutrals and soft shades and that's all up on the website right now the bloom book that features cotton wool was sold out so i'm just waiting for that to come in but you can see the patterns online as well from from that collection and like i said you could really use it to substitute for any any dk pattern if you want a really really soft yarn that has a really really soft handle so that's in the in the shop so the um another wool and in the shop update that i will show we talked about this in the last newsletter for the people that have subscribed to the newsletter they always get the first uh the first shot of purchasing these yarns is this group of colors just going to give you a close-up look at that so these yarns were part of a wild flower kind of a flower collection that we did a number of years ago one spring and you have i'm just going to take the ball bands off because it's easier to see we have four colors that were used in that collection and they were only available in a yarn that we were making called flock fingering that we don't make anymore so now we've put them on the worsted weight yarn sorry i should have done this before i sat down and the colors are forget-me-nots so you have this blue blue and purpley tones so forget me not and you have buttercup which has yellows and green tones you can see that and we have a purple one with some goldy tones which is pansy and we have the final one which is called wildflowers which has just little um not really speckles because we don't do like a dry speckle type of yarn but you've got this colors with the yellows and oranges and blues i'll mix this is called wildflowers so you can get them in erin as well we do dye this on aaron i will say that on this worst it we've done a little bit of we've done a little bit less white space so you'll see if you go online to look at these you'll see that on the erin there's a little bit more white on some of these yarns but uh the pictures that are for the selkirk worsted are these exact skeins so this is this is this is how this it looks on on the worst it so that's available in the shop right now as well the next big news for the shop is that our fall rowan order is on its way we're really excited so the magazine for rowan that's coming up is magazine number 70. and if anybody is a follower of rowan then you know that every time they come to the even number of a decade they do a special con excuse me concept for their magazine so 70 is the platinum anniversary and it's all about metallics and the designs are just fantastic there are so many patterns in this book that it's a bit crazy so i'll show the patterns over uh the course of a few episodes because there's just so many to do a slideshow that we'd just be sitting here for an hour looking looking at them so i'll break it up there's a couple stories as there is in every row and magazine like features so i'll break it up into the different features and the magazine is not for sale until september first but i they're on their way here so we'll ship them out on september 1st but i am going to put them up on the website so that you can order them as a pre-order just know that if you order yarn at the same time then your yarn won't be going out until um september first but you know it's a it's you know short time to wait 10 days and then it'll it'll go out on september 1st as i said so um we're going to do a little quick slide show just to give you a little bit of a teaser and then as the episodes we go do a few more episodes i'll do more on this selection because the the fall and winter uh pattern collection from rowan is just fantastic so let's take a look at a few shots as a teaser and we'll be right back so [Music] so [Music] so it's beautiful and i hope that you noticed something that i want to talk about is we've had a couple people ask have commented that in the past that rowan was maybe not as size inclusive as they could have been and sometimes the patterns were stopping they weren't graded up far enough or down far enough to encompass both ends of the spectrum so i'm sure that you'd noticed that they've made a they they made a commitment to the retailers actually a year ago that they were going to expand the range of sizes that they that they were offering in their graded patterns this is the first rowan magazine that has showed what their efforts um their efforts were so i'm pretty happy about the fact that they've they've chosen to show um a lot of the patterns in two different sizes so you'll notice the models are two different sizes in some of them and um then there's patterns that are are um just shown on slider models and then there's patterns showing at the other end of the the range but they're all so beautifully done and that that grading has really uh it for rowan so i'm really happy to be able to present present that and to show what the the work that they've done so i would expect that this will just continue this will continue as they they go through this process so i hope that you're i'm happy to see that as i was and you know it's always easier for people to imagine themselves in a pattern when they they can see themselves in in the photographs so the approach that rowan has taken i think is uh is to be commended because they're they're showing both uh both um ends of that scale so it's just it's great so we look forward to that there's so many patterns in the book as i said that it's a it's just a bit nuts it's like there's going to be lots of choices and um there is like all kinds of new books coming out as well which were we've ordered all of them so we'll get them in as they become available and then there's more surprises to come in this winter season with rowan there's a couple really special projects that they're working on that are not going to be released until a little bit later so the launch date for the magazine is september 1st but then there's uh other things that are going to be launching on october 1st which i'll tell you about as we get closer to that so it's going to be an exciting time in the shop with rowan and some other projects that we're planning as well with our yarns we have a couple new patterns coming out from designers some that you know already and some new designers that are working with our yarn so we'll look forward to a really fantastic uh knitting season coming up in the fall okay so this is going to seem a bit choppy because when we turned off the video i realized that i forgot to do an update on the fiber festival so i recorded this after i finished the podcast and i'm going to insert it wherever i found the place to insert it so just to recap the last time i told you um the last podcast i told you that we're still we're starting to talk about the fiber festival for 2022 and that we weren't sure if we were going to be able to get the venue the same venue at the pei convention center that we had which is the marriott hotel and because it's pei we all still call it the delta because it was the delta before it was the marriott so you might know by any of those names so the marriott has confirmed that we have the dates available that we wanted in the last weekend of september for the fiber festival for 2022 so those dates are september 23rd 24th and 25th so you can mark that on your calendars and the the fiber festival committee hasn't met yet but we will be meeting shortly to start planning and re-canvasing for vendors and we'll be in touch with all of the people that we're going to do workshops and see if they want to come in 2022 and fill out so we'll be able to do more updates as time goes on so now we're going to go back to the regular podcast and we'll see you see you there so i think that that's about all i wanted to talk about today so we're coming to the end as far as what we're going to do here in the shop um in the mill today we're going to do the in the mill section and it is going to be showing a process that is right before we start the spinning it's done on a machine called the draw frame and you'll see how that works so if you remember from the last episode we ended with carding and we had the strips of wool coming out of the end of the carter called slivers or roving and those were on the big can so now what we have to do is we have to take those cans and put them through another combing step on the draw frame so we're going to see how that works so if you just join me in the mill and we'll be back in a second here we are at the draw frame so what i'm doing here with this machine is i'm starting the drafting process which will help even further organize the fibers so as you recall from the other stations that we've been it was all about cleaning the fiber and then when jen was showing you about the karting it was starting to organize the fibers so they're more or less parallel to each other and creating these rovings so now the draw frame continues that same process and we'll show you a little bit closer uh here we're combining two streams of roving that came from the carter to get consistency in the yarn that we're gonna have because there's always little bits of the difference in the in the fibers the amount of fibers that goes into each feed that jennifer showed you last time so we're combining two and it's all about getting more consistency and more organized uh fiber stream so this machine i'll turn it on in a second when i'll stop talking this fiber stream goes through these roll set of rollers and comes to a drum that has pins on it that cards it even finer than what the karting machine does and then when it comes out you have a stream that goes directly behind the spinner which we'll show you next time and this is when this right at the final set process before the spinning start okay so we're going to start up the machine i won't talk because it makes a little bit of noise and you're going to see how the fiber is traveling out of the cans and into the machine on this end it's a relatively slow process and this bar helps to ease the fiber out of the out of the cans because as it comes to this process it's getting a little bit more delicate because it's getting thinner and thinner okay so in a second i'll turn on the machine but you can see that the fiber stream now is thinner than it was when it went in because it's been stretched some of the drafting has already taken and if i break apart this roving you can see that there's hardly any disorganization at all in the fiber stream so it goes into these cans and then these cans go directly behind the spinner which you'll see next time so we'll just start the machine so you can see how it comes out so there you have it so the draw frame is the last step now we finally get to spin so on the next uh podcast we'll show you the spinning and uh you can see it's people have been commenting that it's hard to believe how many steps there are so yes all of the all of the steps we've done so far is just to prepare the wool to be spun so it's it's incredible but the the amount of different steps that have to be done but that's how you you do all the cleaning and straightening of the fibers and everything so when it comes from the draw frame it kind of organizes the fiber a little bit and we've talked about the difference between woolen and wursted yarns before not the size of the yarn but the process that goes into making them so just as a reminder worsted is spun the fiber spun without being straightened out too much it's kind of all kind of jumbled if you want which makes a very lofty and warm yarn because there's lots of air places where air can be trapped in a worsted spun yarn or sorry in a wool and spun yarn in a worsted spun yarn the fibers need to be straightened out more so that they're all kind of in a parallel with each other and then when you apply the twist to that you get a yarn that's very smooth so if you think about a harris tweed coat that's made out of a woolen spun processed yarn and you think about a fine suit coat or business suit or a fine wool fabric that's made from a worsted spun yarn so what we do in our mill is we make a semi worsted and the draw frame is a big part of that because that's kind of the final combing process that organizes um organizes the fiber that little bit extra and then it goes to the spinner so that's the inside scoop on that now we're going to talk about uh poetry road road again so we gave a little um uh history lesson if you want of the belfast area here where we live in pei and um i showed you the wildflowers that were growing in the hedgerows down beside the poetry road now we're going to show you a bit a few clips that we took as we walked down and you you can just see if everything goes by and as we approach the water on poetry road so we'll go for a walk and i hope you enjoyed the podcast when before we get to the harmony part i'm going to say goodbye and thank you so much for all of the comments that you have left uh i'm really happy that you enjoyed um enjoyed the music and the harmony part last time a lot with a lot of people commented about the the music and um if you like this video i'll ask you to give me a thumbs up or give the video a thumbs up and remind you to subscribe and if you want to know every time that we release a video for the podcast or i'm also releasing tutorials from time to time on different things that technical things that we're talking about you can click on the bell on youtube and to get the notifications so we will go to the harmony part and i hope you enjoy your next two weeks and everybody stay safe and joyful bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] then [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] me [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] and [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Fleece & Harmony

Views: 5,469

Rating: 4.9868636 out of 5

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Id: cxK6sOL3oIA

Length: 56min 39sec (3399 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021