No more excuses and a disappearing cat

Ok, so I found a way to get some photos. Before the cat comes and goes here's a quick peak at a rug I have been making sow but steady progress with.

 I have a friend who is teaching a class to his guild on fractal spinning. He wanted some specifically dyed yarn to help see the stripes a bit easier. I'm still a pretty new dyer, so I did a bit of practicing. I went to my fiber stash and grabbed some Dorset and Whitefaced Woodland and began to dye. So then I have 8 or so ounces of this very oddly dyed wool (some sections came out better than others, and I used different colors on some parts because I got bored and wanted to see what all the colors I got for Christmas looked like).
Well, I am also in the process of using all of my long wool to make a rug to go in my slab basement with ceramic tiles set directly onto the concrete. I figured that this was as good a place as any to use all my test wools.
Over the course of about 4 hours I spun and plied the 8 ounces (it's not even close to fair quality and a bit thicker than normal). Then I joined it to the rug. Pacman was quite pleased.
I'm actually quite happy with the overall look of the yarn. Especially that fact that I paid absolutely no attention to any of the colors while I was spinning. 

A few days later, I decided I needed to comb some more of my friend's wool. I'm getting a new puppy soon (yeah, there might be another pause in the posts) and decided that the wastes from my combing would make a good bed, so I stuck them in an old pillow case. My cats felt it very important to test this new bed. They approved. This one liked it so much, she didn't even care that I had more that could go into the pillow case/bed.

 This was the final result of my combing. I know you're supposed to draft the fibers off the comb, but I wanted to see what would happen if I didn't. And yes, my cat is still under the wool in that last picture.

Fleece Time Again

I have these great friends who have a small family farm with small breeding herds of beef cattle and meat sheep. The thing about sheep is that even if you aren't going to do anything with the wool, try still need to be sheered. Lucky me!

 

These are the same friends I got the Bella wool from last year, but this year, I got 7 fleeces, so... sorry, I don't know the names for each fleece. But above we have a great close up of the locks on one of the fleeces. I think this one was the ram.

 

I'm not going to try to wash them all myself this year, maybe in the future, but not now. A spinning friend is going to pitch in on mill fees in exchange for some of the processed wool. Because I seriously don't need 7 fleeces, but maybe it'll be a head start for inventory for my Easy store.

 

I have decided to skirt them myself.  It has been raining lately, so I've only been able to get one done, but in the process I was able to try some of the wool. I grabbed a bit of left over fluff, washed it, and spun it from locks- just kind of fluffing it as I went- I think they call it hand carding, and got some interesting, and certainly thicker yarn out of it. I'll have to try some more of that and see if I can get some decent results.

 

Before skirting

 

 

Fiber Processing

In May we went up to New York where I visited a friend who has a farm. It was sheering season, and as she is just getting into the wool side of raising sheep, she still isn't too concerned with selling her wool directly, which meant that she gave me an entire fleece for free!  It was dirty, there were second cuts, it was matted and full of vegetation, but it was free. So I brought it home and started working on it, though I didn't really know what I was doing.

 This is what the wool did when I dumped it out of the bag I had brought it home in. Clearly I had my work cut out for me.

 I started to spread it out and  see what I had to work with.

  I put a few ounces in a bathtub full of cold water and let it soak for about a half hour or so. Wow, I knew the wool was dirty when she gave it to me, but seeing all the dirt in the water...Yikes.

 Eventually the water began to clear and I could see how white the wool really was, instead of the light cream it first appeared to be.

After I pulled it out of the tub, I let it soak in the washing machine, with dish detergent to cut the sheep grease, hot water, and NO agitation. Things looked good, so I repeated the whole process with the rest of the wool...in one batch, not a good plan, but it came out fine, even if it did take a long time.

Now I am working on learning to comb so I can spin up this great wool from a lovely Cotswold/Border Leicester mix named Bella.

 I've made it through a very rough ounce, and other than it being pretty slippery, hard to combine, and hard to draft as the fibers measure about 9 inches, it spins very nicely and makes some good soft yarn.