Final meet-up of the season just ahead!

Dear Guild members;
Our final guild meeting is coming up April 15. The session will be about spinning with fibres other than sheep wool.
So bring your samples of cashmere, angora, linen, etc. The more samples we have on hand to touch, smell, look at.... the better.
If you have a surplus of said fibres and would like to swap with someone else, I will have a scale available for measuring out amounts. Bring some extra plastic baggies and a marker.

I hope to see all you spinners. And the knitters are welcome to come and enjoy the fibres too!

 In this photo the three clear containers house angora ( bunny ) hair. Also the white fibre at top centre has some linen in it.

This is alpaca fibre from a friend's (also a guild member) animal. It is lovely to work with.

And this is a shot of my two Kromski spinning wheels. They no longer reside together. The upright went up to Canada and the big Norwegian stayed here. It's not that they didn't get along, I just wanted to have one excellent wheel at each home.

Getting Loopy

 Yesterday a few daring souls got loopy at the Guild meeting and we were learning how to make a basic boucle. I need to remember to take along my camera in the future. The resultant boucles were wonderful and we had fun making them.
In the series of photos below I will show some of the stuff I was practising with before the class.

In the first shot is a pile of mohair I purchased just like this. Clean, dyed, ready for the creative hand.This glowing fibre is beautiful Texas angora mohair from Kai Ranch. 

The first step was to take each lock and flick open both ends. This was done just to loosen up the hairs. It also gave an opportunity to look for straw and burrs, of which there was very little. 

Off to the wheel I went. A moderate twist Z single was created. I did not worry about colour selection much, just doing a foot or two of each colour at a time. 

I've switched over to a natural grey mohair from a previous spin. (I do not know the source of this mohair). In the first ply the core of a pastel toned cotton thread was added to the mohair single (S). And in this photo the binder thread is already plied in too. I used a thin black sewing thread in polyester. (Z twisted black then plied in Z) 

A general view of the loopiness. The resulting elasticity of this grey yarn is wonderful. 

ooo la la

A couple of parting shots of the yellow-gold-orange-aqua and green boucle. Now, wasn't that fun?

The Mason Knitting and Spinning Guild

Hello and Welcome to the blog of the Mason Knitting and Spinning Guild. This is a free association created by Jurate Gertzbein in November 2012. We began meeting right away, every two weeks, and have educational sessions each time we get together. So far I have been doing all the teaching and my hope is to pass on some of this to others. The topics have been alternating between a knitting topic and a spinning topic. We have over thirty members and are steadily growing. 

As of the winter of 2013-2014, the guild only meets November through to April. 

The guild is free to join and people who attend receive free instruction, free membership and free notes. I provide a loaner spinning wheel for a dollar a day to anyone who wants to rent it out and take it home. 

In the future I would like to be able to introduce weaving instruction as well, but first I need to find the space for this and some equipment.


The cotton dishcloth is an example of the project we did in the intarsia knitting class. And because today is Valentine's Day, how fitting that I declare how much I love our guild group!