Around the farm tonight...

Sock, Shawl, Spinning

...in that order. Hey, Mom! Look at all the COLORS!

The shawl is blocking now...it's going to look way different in a few days. Stand by!

Black, white, gray

Today I sampled some of my spinning from yesterday. I plied together the colored roving with three different undyed fibers - black, white and gray.

The grey is my favorite in a yarn, but the white isn't too bad either.

The only way to really know how I'd like these as a sweater is to knit them up!

I think I'm going with the white:

Sampling is awesome.

Tour de Fleece - Day One

So, there's a bunch of dudes racing bikes in France right now? Did you know there are also thousands of spinners making yarn right now too???

This year marks the sixth Tour de Fleece in which spinners celebrate the wonder of making yarn all around the world. The general idea is that folks set individual goals and then spin every day the Tour de France guys ride. (Ok - it's really weird to type "Tour de France." It just looks wrong. Don't they mean "Fleece?".) There are even prizes - prizes beyond spending time spinning and creating lovely yarn.

The whole event takes place on Ravelry where there are 4,000 spinners participating on over 200 teams. As I write this, 350 people have already checked in and posted photos of what they spun today. Here's what I did:

It's a BFL roving from Dancing Leaf Farm. I have 8 oz and am hoping to ply it with a naturally colored roving and love it enough to make a sweater quantity...maybe a short sleeved sweater? I don't have enough experience to know how much yarn I'm going to get.

Vive la Fleece!

Fleece Wash - part II

So, I've been practicing my fleece washing...because I did a really crappy job the first time. Two things: 1) Soap is different than Detergent. 2) Our hot water heater isn't set hot enough to wash lanolin out of wool.

I fixed these two issues during my remedial fleece washing. I purchased detergent. And I heated up water on the stove to add to the stuff that comes out of the tap. Much better!

The next step in turning raw wool into something wearable is to card it. There are lots of videos if you are fascinated by this sort of thing (Google "hand carding"), but here I present photos of White Wool on Red Picnic Table. This is mostly because I just painted the picnic table and want it to get some blog time.

Part, the first: Load hand cards with some raw wool:



Brush the wool back and forth between the two cards until it's all smooth and fluffy. This is what it looks like after the first transfer:


See the hay? We call that VM (vegetable matter). When you're satisfied, roll the wool off the card. Here is the carded rolag next to some raw fleece.


(Can you believe that Firefox's spell check doesn't recognize the word "rolag?")

When you have a bunch of rolags, head to the wheel and start spinning! I sampled a bunch of different ways of spinning the fleece. To the left is fluffy long draw (woolen), and to the right is a smooth, squishy short draw which is chain plied. Chain plying is a crazy Escher-like technique that boggles Bill's brain, and results in a single strand of wool becoming three-ply.


Spinning has taught me that a fiber can change so much from it's initial form to yarn and then again to a knitted fabric. So, before I decided what I liked best, I knitted up my samples. Look at all the wooly goodness here...fiber, yarn and swatch:



All the samples. Labeled, natch: (really, Firefox? You recognize "natch" is a word, but not "rolag?!?")


I'm adding to yarn for my sweater vest too. Just one more yarn to go and then I'll start knitting.




Finally...I've been stockpiling fiber for the Tour de Fleece. More on that soon!

Workin at the fleece wash...yeah!

Ok...that makes very little sense. But, whatever.

I started washing my fleece!! I'm totally faking it, by the way. So, don't try this at home. I have no idea what I'm doing.

The first step, apparently, is to lay the fleece out and inspect it. I'm supposed to remove all the unsuitable parts. Thing is, I'm rather new at this and don't really know what is unsuitable. There was no poo, so that's good! I imagine with time, I'll start to recognize the second cuts (which aren't so great for spinning) and the parts that are too dirty to wash. Right now, I'm just washing it all and hope to learn some stuff as I'm spinning it.

This is two pounds of a fleece from a fine wool mutt sheep:

It smells fantastic! Like sticky, sweet, dusty sheep. It is perhaps odd that I love the scent of wool. I take this to mean I should own lots of sheep.

Step one...scour fleece to remove lanolin and dirt. After three to four soaks in really hot water + soap, I think my wool is clean. Washed stuff on the left, raw stuff on the right:

I don't know that it's clean. Totally faking it. It still smells a little, and still has a bit of slipperiness to it, so I suspect it's still got some lanolin in it.

I let it dry on a baking cooling rack overnight and then hung it on the line this morning. I love that it's still in the strips the shearer took it off in.

Tonight I'm going to card it. More on that later!

I've also been spinning the colored rovings I got at Hoosier Hills. I experimented with some color blending and decided to stick with solids:

More on that later too.

Blurry baby chickens, handspun yarn

That about sums it up...