Paws 2 SpindleSome people claim that garments knit with dog-fur yarn are too warm.
I have no complaints!
I have a new FO! (nearly)
Yesterday, I was making good progress on my Harlow Worsted brioche hat, so I just kept going (even though I had other things I SHOULD have been working on). With the basic decrease pattern for the crown now well understood, the main thing slowing me down was working in ever-smaller circles. 4.0 mm DPNs would probably have worked best, but I didn't have any. BUT I did have fauxlexis in 4.0 mm and while not great, they did the job.
As you can see, I was also playing yarn chicken with the Oni 1.1 ball that I'd started with. I had 1.2 ready to go, but fortunately it wasn't needed!
It is so fuzzy! And I really like how the contrasting brim works with brioche in either orientation.
Quick progress update!
After a couple more false starts, I finally got the Harlow Worsted hat past the cast on stage, all the way through the 3" brim, added a lifeline at this point, and then continued on to the body of the hat. All the previous practice was painful and frustrating, but was ultimately worth it.
As you can see, I have NOT switched to the Wheat orange yarn as the contrast color. I really love the effect of the rustic wool against the fuzzy Tibetan Mastiff fur, both inside and out. I'm going to do the whole hat in these yarns! I think the two sides will work well together when you turn the brim back.
I've got quite a few more simple rounds to do before my next adventure: brioche cable decreases!
Final photo: I tried to get Tonttu in one of the photos, but he was not amused...
This may actually turn into a hat!
Third time's a charm, I hope! Practice makes perfect and all that.
If you recall, I have leftover orange Wheat and abundant gray Smoke yarn that I want to combine with this hat's use of brioche stitch.
At first (1st photo), I thought I'd do the brim in just gray, saving orange for the crown. Probably a good design choice, but bad for first-time brioche! It's difficult to read the pattern in the chunky, fuzzy, speckled yarn, and I made many mistakes. So I frogged back.
What could I do to add in some contrast? Oni the Tibetan Mastiff to the rescue! My first yarn from her fur is close to worsted weight, and sufficiently different in color. But again, I made mistakes, including one round of P that should have been K! Tinking with all the YOs was not going to work, so frog #2 happened.
Now, on try #3, and I think this just might work! I like how the gray ribs stand out amid the fuzzy brown on the side with gray as main color, while on the reverse, it's just a brown fuzzy soft surface with a touch of texture.
Swatch time! I finally got around to knitting a swatch of the Oni 3.0/merino 50:50 blend.
The word I keep using to describe this yarn is "sturdy". It is not fluffy or soft or very elastic, but it is dense (despite being woolen drafted) and makes a nice solid fabric. I'm thinking maybe fingerless gloves where you're more interested in blocking wind than insulation.
While not soft and squishy, it is also not scratchy, but has a nice smooth feel against the skin, with a bit of a tickle from the light furry halo.
As with the 100% Oni 2.x series, this is 30sts wide, with 4x sts/row seed stitch border & divider between stockinette on 3.0 and 2.5 mm needles.
However, while the 2.x series was 2-ply and ranged 20-25 wpi, this 3.0 yarn is 3-ply, and yet also in the 20-22 wpi range. So the singles were definitely finer overall this time around.
The 2.x swatches were getting really curly, so I re-blocked them along with the 3.0 swatch for better comparison. Of the two, the slightly lighter colored one with the extra-thin tails is woolen-drafted, while the other is worsted.
The visit was, in part, to deliver Berner fur for my spinning experiments! This isn't actually Freya's fur, but her packmate Y'shtola's, who had stayed home for the evening.
Y'shtola has gifted us with ~10 oz / 280 g of soft, fluffy and very black undercoat. It's slightly longer than our huskies' fur, but still much shorter than the Tibetan mastiff fur. I'll give it a try with the combs just for the sake of completeness, but I suspect that carding is going to be the better prep method here.
Freya made herself quite at home on our sofa while her humans got an introduction to all the collected fiber prep tools that I've collected in a short amount of time!
More photos of the yarn in various preparations for visual comparison/appreciation.
The 100% fur yarn is much fuzzier, and based on g per yd, much less dense too, which is interesting! The Oni 1 batch was drum carded and spun semi worsted. Both are 3-ply.
Oni/merino blend #3 came out at 22 wpi when wrapped around the frame for washing and setting. That seems pretty much in "fingering" territory to me.
This yarn doesn't have much squish or stretch, so I'm not sure what it would be best suited for. Weaving? I could knit a pair of socks to see how hard-wearing and insulating the fur/wool combo is.
I still need to knit a swatch from this to see how it behaves on the needles, so this experiment isn't quite done, but for now the 🧵 is!
Finally finished the Oni (Tibetan Mastiff) x merino (50:50) blend!
I did each of the 4 rolags in an evening: 1-1.5 hours per. As I went along, I got more confident and consistent at the long draw, though the results were still much more uneven than my worsted style. (Re-watching some long-draw videos online, I seem to be well within the margin of variability for the technique.)
The singles remained quite thin. I'm not sure if this kind of fiber can be spun long-draw any thicker, with practice, or if every fiber has a thickness that it "wants" to be given the physics involved. I split them into 3 "equal" cones, and then triple-plied them, washed and let it set.
The color is clearly darker than the original slightly-variable mastiff fur: it seems that the dark espresso brown of the merino dominates...
🧵 ...
A request for dog owners and the canine-adjacent: do you have medium/long dog fur I can test fiber prep on?
I've been talking with Baruch of Bam Fiber Works, where I got my double-row extra-fine combs for working with Oni's long Tibetan Mastiff fur, and we're both interested in testing out single-row combs instead. I got the double-row combs to work, but there was more effort and waste than desired. Baruch made me an offer I couldn't refuse: if I purchased a set of single-row extra-fine combs, he'd toss in a set of single-row fine combs for free -- as long as I provided feedback on how they compared.
The problem: I don't have any more of Oni's fur left to test on until next spring!
Sure, I could go back and re-comb the finished top, but I would like to truly start fresh with un-prepared fur.
ALSO, while I'm at it, I'd like to try OTHER dog breeds and fur lengths. Baruch is interested in getting more information he can share with other customers curious about working with their own dogs' fur. This is just the kind of research project I love to do!
So, please share this post and/or contact me if you are interested in providing test samples.
More in 🧵 ...
Finally got ALL the huskies, past and present, out for a walk in the winter! That's the husky fur scarf I finished last spring, made with fur from Rio, Wizard, Gypsy, Zeena and Tonttu. Zeena (R) and Tonttu (L) are the only ones still around to generate fiber for future projects. (I have plenty left from the others in bins waiting to be spun!) It's nice that I can bring the whole pack with me now on snowy adventures!
The scarf was warm, but not overly so. Some people say husky/dog yarn is too warm, but maybe that's just for around-the-house wear.
It was slightly prickly around the neck. There are occasional guard hairs in the yarn: during prep/spinning I removed some as I go, but I wasn't not super diligent. I think it might be worth spinning up some more carefully (and tediously) processed undercoat for comparison, specifically for future cowls & collars.
