Sometimes I think Earth Day (or Month or Hour) is silly…shouldn’t we be working on these things everyday? But I’m starting to think that setting aside one day draws more attention to the issue and gives a reason to reflect or research on changes we may already know we need to make!

I write about these things pretty much all the time, so in celebration of Earth Day, let’s go over a few way to make your crafting decisions a bit more green:

1. Be a locavore! (I know it’s not technically crafty, but I think of cooking and baking as crafting!)

2. Spin with recyled fiber!

3. Use organic cotton. Why? Here’s your answer!

4. Work with local, small-farm materials!

5. Rethink bamboo

What are your ideas for creating “geen”? Any topics I haven’t covered that you’d like me to research?

Last week we talked about fiber studios and today we’ll talk about when and where they actually sit at their wheel.

(me at the wheel)

These are our spinners:

Liz of Hobbledehoy
Esther of JazzyTurtle
Velma of ColorBOMB Creations
Rachel-Marie of KnittyDirtyGirl
Lacey of In A Circle of Fog
Erin of Wooly Hands
Mia of Knit and Play with Fire

When do you usually spin?

Liz:

I can card for about 5 hours straight at a time- that’s about 16-20 sets of batts.  When I spin, I usually start in the morning and end around dinner time (6pm).  I can usually spin 6-8 yarns during that time if I’ve already carded the fiber or picked out colors for self-stripers.

I spin on my couch most of the time.  I rarely spin in my studio space, because it’s really shut-off feeling.  My husband and I splurged on a 56″ tv a couple of years ago so that we could work from home in a “theater” like space- it’s pretty cool!  We’ve got a Pat Green triple-drum supercard on its way mid-march to early april, and he’ll take over a shift of batt work each day with it.

Esther:

I will spin for hours at a time. If I’m not at the spa doing massage, or carding in my studio- I’m spinning. At least 20- 30 hours a week, depending on my client schedule. If I have a long break between clients, I bring my wheel to the spa and spin there-I had a joy and I just got a new lendrum this weekend.

Velma:

Spinning generally takes place in this main room; during the day I spin next to a window for natural light, and in the evenings I spin in front of the TV. On days when we have nice weather, though, I generally spin outside, on the small deck in our backyard. I love doing that! That’s where I’ve filmed my 2 spinning videos, too.

As for spinning time, since I’m trying to make this a viable biz, I spend all day doing *something* related to COLORBOMB. It astounds me how many non-spinning skill-sets are required to have a spinning business. I usually get going between 8 and 10am, with email, convos, PMs, DMs, & every other possible form of online communication in the morning. When I blog, I usually do that in the morning, too. Shipping is next, if there is any, and I often take packages to the PO myself, riding my bike the 2 miles into town (we live in an auto-free household). When I do go into town, I take some time to ‘forage’ for materials for my Greenish(tm) products that use repurposed items, so I visit thrift stores, the recycling center, etc.

Spinning generally gets underway around lunchtime, continuing for a few hours & peppered with breaks to look stuff up, check messages on Etsy, Ravelry, Twitter, Flickr, email, etc. I tend to do fiber prep in the afternoons, for some reason. Oh, and photography; that takes an inordinate amount of time, and I prefer to do it in dribs and drabs as I get a yarn done. I try to list items in the evenings, as soon as I get decent photos. At night, I generally spin a few more hours. Most days are 10-12 hours, but I often take weekends off, or mostly off.
This is life at COLORBOMB Creations!

Rachel-Marie:

I spin in the studio, use my laptop everywhere… My studio is right next to my baby’s room so I just gate off the steps and he can play in my studio and his room while I work.

I used to do everything in the living room with my hubby (spin full time) but this works much better for me. He has his desk downstairs and I have my workspace upstairs, when we do spend time together it much better “quality”.

Anyway, I am sooo in love with all of our new space. All I can say is really take your time when planning a set up and system that works because once you get into your daily routine it’s hard to get out of. That’s why I am not letting myself spin in the living room at all here.

(I also get to spin at my part time yarn shop job http://lancasteryarnshop.com! So that’s really cool too!)

Lacey:

My daily routine is this:

• Wake up, brew coffee- haha!
• Dye about 8 ounces of fiber in a pot (one color a day). When all the dye has been absorbed, I turn off the stove and let it sit overnight to cool. Each morning I dump it into the sink for a cold rinse then hang to dry.
• My drum carder is now permanently set up on the back half of my large table (back to back desks- not perfect but wonderfully spacious). Depending on my mood I card one or two hanks worth of fiber. This is usually 6 little batts per finished hank, equaling ~4 ounces.
• Skein the yarn from the day before and soak to set the twist. -My least favorite part!
• Then, around noon or one, I finally start spinning! This usually lasts anywhere from 2 to 5 hours. Usually spinning one or two hanks of yarn a day (about 400-ish yards). I get the most wonderful natural light in my new studio and I love having a place for everything. That room just calls to me!
• I also try to find time to photograph and list finished yarns, usually around 5 o’clock, but this doesn’t always happen…

Oh, when I’m finished carding I put my batts on a flour sack towel (I pick up the towel from the 4 corners hobo style). This makes it really easy to move them around the studio or into the living room if I have a netflix movie to watch. It’s really important for me to keep all of my batts laying in the same direction because I need to spin each of them from the same end. Here is an example of what they look like:

I can also set the towel with the batts right in my light box to photograph without leaving fuzzies behind!

Erin:

This week’s question was spurred by Laila of Rawfish.
She wondered:

Is there a name for yarn bigger than 8 WPIs?

But wait, what is WPI?

WPI stands for Wraps Per Inch. It’s a way of measuring the thickness of yarn.

Well, let’s back up a little more.

What we’re talking about is the diameter of a strand of yarn, but the industry standard way to describe this “weight”. I find that’s confused with the actual weight (like, 4 oz.), so for our purposes, we’re going to call it the “thickness”.

Commercially spun yarns are not measured in WPIs, but in stitches per inch. This is the measurement of how many stitches fit in an inch of St st knitting. It’s usually given as a range of numbers, as knitting styles cause variation in tension.  Commercial yarns also contain “suggested needle size” and that can give you some insight into the thickness of a yarn.

Have you no standards?

The Craft Yarn Council of America has created an industry standard for measuring yarn: Numbers and Words! You can see in this chart how the numbers represent the weights (thicknesses) of yarn (0 is smallest, 6 is biggest) with corresponding “official” words (Lace through Super Bulky)

These measurement systems are all well and good if you’re looking at a ball band, but what about the yarn you just created? Do you need to knit a swatch to know if it’s worsted or super bulky?

Honestly, once you’ve knit with a wide range of yarns, you can usually figure it out by sight and touch. But relying on intuition for yarn I’m selling isn’t a reliable policy, so I use WPIs.

The reason so many spinners use WPI and many knitters haven’t?

• Spinners need to know the thickness without knitting it up
• Knitters want to know what it will be like after they knit up!

How to measure WPI

So simple! Get out a ruler, gently wrap your yarn around the ruler for one inch (from 1″-2″ or 5″-6″). Make sure the yarn isn’t being pulled too tight or overlapping or leaving gaps. You want to fill in that entire inch without stretching your yarn.
Now count how many times your yarn wrapped around – that’s your “wraps per inch”!

So what does it mean for knitters?

Well, WPIs can be translated (roughly) into an idea of what how many stitches/inch the yarn will produce.  At the very least it will land you within the right number label.

Or at least, it should. While researching this issue, I came across quite a few WPI charts and all of them seemed slightly different. Some charts label a yarn with 7 WPIs Super Bulky and some just call it Bulky.

What do I do if a yarn is on the edge? Take a good look at the yarn, check this chart and use my common sense! If the yarn is very dense, I round it up to the bigger size (because the knitter/crocheter is going to get a bigger gauge). If the yarn is soft and fluffy, I’ll round down, knowing the yarn will smoosh into a smaller gauge.

But what to do with that “off the chart” yarn?

Well, friends, that’s where you come in! What do you think we should call the ginormous, bigger-than-super-bulky yarn? I asked that question on Twitter today and got some responses including “Jumbo”, “Gigantor” and “CrazySuperBulky”.

What do you think? What should be the industry standard in mega-yarn?

Resources:

Spindlicity article about measuring WPIs
WPI chart
Another WPI chart
Craft Yarn Council’s Yarn weight standards