Chiengora Recipe

ingredients

1 dog
1 drop spindle
1 Furminator, optional (but oh so wonderful)
1 pair cotton hand carders, optional


preparation

Collect dog fur in a breathable container, like a paper bag. Sealing dog fur in a plastic bag concentrates the funk, which results in, um, funky smelling yarn. Of course, you'll wash the yarn later, but why should you have to wash your yarn several times when once should do? My fiber producer likes this process the best, but he always wants me to brush his belly. Belly fur does not make a nice scarf.

Using the hand carders, make rologs. I stink at this part, so this is the boy's job. Carding the fur orients the fibers in the same direction and removes debris. Although you don't need to do this step, it makes the spinning go so much faster. To be honest, if I was doing this by myself, I'd skip this step because I hate it so much.



To card the fur, start by charging your stationary hand card. This is just fancy way of saying put some fur onto it. (That orange ear belongs to Fifty-Fifty, my cat. )





Repeatedly brush the working carder over the stationary carder until most of the fibers are on the working carder. The hand carders should be oriented 180 degrees to each other.







Form your rolag by putting the card full o' fiber face up on your lap (it becomes the stationary carder). Starting with the both carders tip to tip, slowly, gently coax the fibers into a log. This is where I mess up every time, but the boy is quite good at this.

A very beer-worthy performance, indeed.


Ahem, where were we? Oh, yes, now we spin! I use a Schacht Hi-Lo drop spindle. What drew me to the drop spindle was its price (retails for less than $20) and its size, especially when these two factors are compared to a spinning wheel. Since I my chiengora aspirations seemed very far fetched, I didn't want to invest that much into it. Yet, this little spindle can do it all - I'm very happy with it!

There are some very good videos out there on the web on how to use a drop spindle, so I'll spare you the details and just show you a couple of pictures.

In this picture, my spindle is parked and I'm almost at the end of the rolag. Exciting, isn't it? For those of you used to spinning wool, you'll find that as you draft the fibers in your right hand, you'll need to pre-twist your fibers as you walk the twist up with your left hand. That's as clear as mud, but hopefully it will make sense as you spin. Without the extra bit of pre-twist, my fibers wouldn't lock on to each other and I would end up with oodles of 1- to 2-inch segments of useless yarn.

And now for the money shot: the yarn. It brings tears to my eyes.

Stay tuned for details on how to wash and set the twist on your one of a kind doggy yarn.

Never say never

I was convinced that I would never knit, simply being content to spin, and eventually dye, chiengora. I reasoned that I could trade conventional handspun yarn, like wool, with someone who could knit a scarf out of the Mingus yarn. Plus, formerly repressed memories of someone forcing me to knit hundreds of jingle bells for Christmas present decorations were surfacing (my mother must have taught me how to knit at some point, but I am too traumatized by being a jingle bell slave laborer to remember any details).

However, a nagging question remained: how would I know if my end product was good if I could not knit it? How would I know if my yarn was stable? Since I don't have any knit savvy friends nearby and I wanted to know for myself if my yarn was knittable, I reluctantly purchased some size 13 Addi Turbo needles for knitting garter stitch swatches.

I now present my first nice swatch of Mingus:
As you can tell, I was learning how to both knit and spin at the same time. The resulting product wasn't pretty, but it gave me hope.

A few days after I learned to spin, I had a week long vacation. My knitting needles and the cheap acrylic yarn I picked up at the drugstore had some serious bonding time. While lounging on the beach sipping margaritas, I knit my beloved cat Greaseball a scarf. As you can tell, he was just thrilled.

Upon returning back home, I was on a scarf mission. Not even Vespa, my GSD, was spared. The top scarf is a simple garter stitch scarf made from Di.Ve. The bottom scarf is a Classic Elite La Gran mohair in lupine. The stitch pattern is from knitlist.

Now, I am hopelessly hooked on knitting since there seems to be an endless variety of things to learn that do not involve jingle bells. Knitting in the round, like hats and socks, is my latest obsession.

I like to call this picture Mingus on Mingus. That little white stripe at the top is some Mingus yarn. The rest of the yarn is Rowan Cashsoft and the pattern is halfdome.

I am slowly working on the Mingus scarf - the process of collecting, spinning, washing, and eventually knitting the yarn takes a long time. Since I am a one who craves instant gratification, my needles are always have something I'm making with store-bought yarn. However, I will finish this in time for the boy's Christmas gift. There is a slight yarn malfunction in the middle of this project, but I think I'll be able to fix it later. So here it is: The Mingus Scarf.

Meet my fiber producer

My foray into spinning, and subsequently knitting, was not normal. By not normal, I mean that my mother and grandmother did not pass down the fiber arts to me. Neither did I start knitting a few years ago when there was a renaissance among my peers to knit.

My inspiration to start spinning was my dog, Mingus.

We were cocky when we, the boy and I, adopted this 80-pound fur producing machine. We already had two cats and a German "shedder" in our family, so daily vacuuming was something to which we were accustomed. What's one more dog? Famous. Last. Words. We were like Sisyphus, except our brand of punishment involved a life sentence to vacuuming our floors over, and over, and over again during a single day. The cruel joke was that Mingus would walk into a freshly vacuumed room, and in 5 minutes, reinfect it with white, fluffy tumbleweeds.

Frustrated at the amount of Mingus fur around the house, I came to the conclusion that the only way to make peace with the Mingus fur was to turn it into yarn and to start knitting ourselves garments out of them. Seriously. So, at 7:00 AM on a Saturday morning (why I was up at this hideous hour on a Saturday is beyond me), I decided that the boy and I were going to spin Mingus yarn and I was going to make the boy a Mingus scarf. When I woke up the boy to tell him about our little adventure and his involvement in it all, he nodded his head and fell back asleep.

There were two problems with this Mingus scarf plan: I didn't know how to spin and I didn't know how to knit. A little web research unearthed a place, Deep Color Studio, that conducted drop spindle lessons. The next class was the following day, so while the rest of America was watching the Super Bowl, we were happily learning how to make something useful out of all that dog fur. Why the boy still talks to me, I do not know. Thank goodness he is a good sport, and thank goodness he hates football - he still doesn't know who won the Super Bowl. (Okay, fine. I don't either.)


Since it has been over two months since I embarked on this odd journey, I wanted to blog it all so I can keep track of my fiber art projects. I also like to experiment in the kitchen, hence the "spices" in my blog title (thanks, harleymom), and I'd like to track those experiments as well.

I'll end my first post with a picture of my first project, the finished Mingus yarn. Since I've started, I found out that there is an almost pretty name for this stuff: chiengora. That's a much more marketable name than Mingus yarn! Plus, it won't cause confusion amongst the fans of Charles Mingus.