Distaff Delusions: Gwen Powell Workshops

In mid-June, the Saturday Spinners hosted a two-day workshop with Gwen Powell. Gwen has earned a certificate of excellence in handspinning from the HGA (there are only twelve people who have reached this level), and she's become well known for having worked with Clemes & Clemes to develop their very popular blending board.

On Saturday, we had a class on using the blending board and spinning woolens from the rollags. Gwen showed so many techniques I couldn't keep up! I still have a pile of rollags to spin up one of these days. But I think I have made better friends with my board and now I know what to do with all those little orts of yarns and threads I've been stashing away.

Rollag

Spun singles

I think the first thing we did was some simple striping -- just laying out rows of different colors in varying widths on the board.

Gwen gave some instruction on woolen spinning -- something I've avoided. I did very poorly at first. I'd like to say I was getting the hang of it by the end of the day, but all I can say is that I was doing less poorly. A few thousand hours of practice and I might get a handle on it.

Another technique we tried was color blocking - overlapping colors slightly, while keeping the fibers all going in the same direction. I got a little carried away.

We also played with loading the board in different directions. I started to do just a little cross-hatching but it got away from me and I ended up with a bizarre plaid. But I like the way the rollags turned out. Wonder how they'll spin up?

Laying down cross-hatched pieces

Added thin layer of dark brown over all to give stability

The 'plaid' rollags

Garneted singles

Then we tried some garneting. I remember garneting boards from my first incarnation as a wannabe spinner. They were terribly expensive and I wasn't skilled enough (ok, at all) to really consider getting one. In garneting, you basically tangle little bits of interesting stuff into your base. If all goes well, most of the stuff stays in when you spin it. I chopped up small pieces of a filmy purple chiffon and an opaque gold fabric into tiny pieces, along with some little bits of chopped up gold thread, and cross-hatched those bits here and there on the board that was already loaded with my base material. Seemed simple, but it was challenging to get the little bits to stick without pulling up the base. This technique is going to take a lot more practice but I really liked the results. Most of the bits actually stayed in the yarn when I spun my singles, and I lost just a few when I plyed them.

Just part of the unspun rollags from class

Saturday's class

Check out Gwen's videos about the blending board on YouTube.

Sunday featured a rope making workshop. Seriously fun!

Gwen has a rope jack -- a twisting machine made by Alden Amos, and we used it to twist all kinds of random fibers into ropes. And it's awesome. I hate that word, but it really is awesome!


The Alden Amos rope jack


Back of the rope jack

Using this machine, we ran groups of strands of different fibers -- yarn, fabric, even unspun roving, between two, three, or four hooks on the machine and a single hook attached to a hand drill at the opposite end of the room. Pretty much the only rules on this part were to keep even tension on all the strands and to make the groups on each hook as equal in weight as possible (if using different fibers on different hooks).

One or two people monitored the groups of strands to make sure they did not come into contact, while one person at the machine turned the handle, and another person held the hand drill. This caused the hooks to turn individually, putting twist into each group of strands. Once we felt there was enough twist (depends on how firm or soft the final product should be), one of the two "monitors" arranged each of the now twisted groups of strands around a special tool that she inserted near the hand drill. It looks like a wooden mallet with semicircular indentations around it and has a special name, which, along with the names for each of the ropemaking jobs, I can't remember. Then as she walked the tool along the strands toward the rope jack, the person with the hand drill twisted, while the person at the rope jack kept it (mostly) still. This twisted the groups into a single rope.

After there was enough twist in the rope, we tied off the ends to prevent them from unraveling, and gave the rope a good stretch to set the twist. This turned out to be the most hazardous part of the process. One of my ropes was made of strips of quilt fabric joined with slit and loop joints. I did add in some yarn for stability but apparently not enough. Because when we tugged on the rope, one of the joints gave way. And some of us ended up in, shall we say, some undignified postures. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and we kept right on making more ropes.

More on what to do with all these ropes in a later post. In the meantime, if you look carefully at the lower left-hand corner of one of the photos, you will see a lovely rug in the form of a knot that Gwen brought along.