FO: Snail Hat and a Hill Country Hat

Surprise! I made another bunch of freaky little handspun hats. These ones started out as fleece; this was actually the very first raw fleece that I processed myself.



It's a CVM from a farm in California, and just like every time I'm in sunny California, it had a bit of sunburn on the tips. I washed and carded into rolags, and then spun it up into a lofty bulky-weight 2-ply yarn.







It was fuzzy and soft and a bit rustic looking. I promptly threw it in a bin and forgot about it for a few years, until this weird hat craze got me pawing through my stash for good odd skeins of handspun to hattify.

First up is a smaller hat- I made this for a gift for a child. It's not toddler-small, but it's big enough for a bruiser of a 3 year old.



It's the Snail Hat from Elizabeth Zimmerman. I already made one of these with some core-spun yarn, and I like it in a good fuzzy 2-ply much better. It's a very easy, rhythmic quick hat.



The second hat is the Hill Country Hat from the Knitter's Book of Wool. Love that book.



I'm a little meh on this hat. It has some interesting corrugated rib patterns that you really can't see because the yarn is too fuzzy. I will try this hat again, but with a worsted-spun yarn that will show stitch definition better.



The pattern is just completely lost in the yarn. Ah well. It's warm though.

I haven't been spinning too much, but I did sample my next big spinning project:



It's Muriel, the Merino fleece that got sent away to a Zellinger's. It's going to be something beautiful if I ever get around to spinning it.

I'm also finishing up Another Sweater. This one is the Coraline pattern.



It's very fine gauge and it's taking me a while, but it's an easy pattern. I feel like I could do the smocking in my sleep at this point. It's pretty much done, but I completely lost my head when it came to measuring and the sleeves ended up about two inches shorter than where they needed to be. I'm fixing that quick like a bunny and it will be done. I guess I won't have to go naked at Rhinebeck this year.

Rhinebeck, part trios: Sunday recap

A bunch of us crazies got up early Sunday morning to take the Down Fibers Spinning class.



Cashmere and other tricky [read: expensive] fibers were something I had been wanting to learn, but I was too afraid to waste good fiber on learning. The class booted my ass into getting that cashmere and qiviut and buffalo and angora bunny fiber that has been in my stash out of my stash and onto a bobbin.

Here's KnitHoundBrooklyn and her fabulous yellow socks with a bobbin full of baby camel and cashmere and cashmere silk blend:


Stellina took the whole "high fiber diet" thing literally:


I'm sure Shansays has a picture of me taking a picture of her


After class, I decided to make myself feel like a total slouch and I went to watch the Sheep to Shawl excitement:




Then I had a pretty good internal argument with the philosophy behind my vegetarianism:


Of course, there were more sheep and goats to pet. This Romney from Anchorage Farm in Saugerties was just begging to be shorn. I had to bargain with him: I would take his fleece, but he would have to stay on the farm. No deal.


This blue-eyed cashmere kid wanted a home as well:

He was unhappy living at Black Locust Farm in Maine (!) and wanted to try city life. Adventurous, isn't he?

I had no idea how big in size Rambouillets were. They all seemed really docile, but that's a lot of wool! The rams looked so regal with their curly-q horns.




I encountered a rather friendly Romedale/CVM:




He kept nosing my camera and fogging up my lens!




More pretty Leicester Longwools:


Have I failed to mention that there was shopping to be done? All I have to say is THANK YOU to KnitHound for having the foresight to buy a Volvo!


We were all pretty pleased with ourselves, but I feel as though I missed enough of the vendors so that I'll have to go back next year in order to feel like I've had the full-on Rhinebeck experience.



Back to the big bad city to wash a mountain of wool.

Espresso- FIN!

I had a rather productive weekend. This little monster got the finishing attention it needed:



It's the Espresso sweater from "A Fine Fleece".

This started out its life as this:



Several pounds of raw CVM fleece. I bought a pound of this from a very nice woman named Joy at Arbor Meadows Farm in Washington State. Crimpy, soft, sproingy mutant sheep.

After a bath and a carding, I spun it into very fine woolen singles:


and eventually ended up with about 1400 yards of 3-ply:


I then modified the pattern like crazy, and then ended up with this:







Here is a picture of the original (rav link).

Specs: I used about 1350 yards of dk weight 3-ply. Knitted on US size 2.5 and 4 needles. I tried my best to mix up the plies when I was spinning- since CVM has so many colors in it, I wanted to get the most uniformity in the 3-ply as possible. I got stripes anyway. Ah well.

Not a whole lot of shaping in that pattern, which seems to be the theme throughout the "A Fine Fleece" book. Lack of waist shaping is the kiss of death for me- a sweater will make its way to the back of my closet faster then a rabbit can make rabbits if it lacks shape. I am curvy, and very easily curves will appear to be flab if I am not careful about garment shaping. So my first step was to write in more drastic shaping- I decreased every 8 rows instead of the recommended 14.

The second big modification i did were the sleeves. The way they were written, I would have been done with all the increasing by the time I hit the elbow, making the sleeves huge and awkward. So I put more rows in between the increase rows- i placed increased every 8 rows instead of 6. The sleeve is much more fitted this way. Also, because this was a woolen spun yarn, i did not get really crisply defined cables that I wanted, so I skipped the cabled bands on the sleeves.

The last mod I made was the neckline. I thought the photos of the collar looked stiff and awkward. It's hard to give knitted material structure without making it hugely bulky, and having a collar that stands up on its own made me nervous. I picked up stitches around the collar and did 4 rows of garter stitch before binding off.

Seaming up this beast took quite some time. I decided to use a dark brown sock yarn leftover from the Bettie's Lace Stockings for the task since woolen yarn isn't very strong and the fuzziness was getting to me when I was trying to pick through stitches.

I still need to buy buttons to finish this up and I'm hoping I will be able to find the perfect set at Rhinebeck this weekend. Also, blocking would help the lumpy bumpys I have going on the sleeve caps. But it's warm and cozy and just fitted enough.

Seven bucks later...

Sunday a carload of Brooklynites piled into a car and drove out to the Garden State Sheep & Fiber festival. It was a pretty sweet little event. It was very small but it had some quality vendors- lots of small farms from Jersey and PA that don't make it to the big festivals. Attendance wasn't really high so it was nice to be able to stop and chat and not feel rushed.

There were lots of sheep:



Icelandic and Shetlands made up the majority of the breeds, but there were also some BFL, Cheviot, Romneys and CVMs. This moorit CVM caught my eye:



And there were alpacas:



That's a Huacaya on the left and a Suri on the right.

And there were bunnies. Fabulously soft angora buns:





These are like human babies, but softer and cuter. Added bonus that you can spin from them. I'd like to see you try and do that with a human baby.

There were also mini-donks, which made me think they could flap their ears and fly away:



I can not resist the power of cute.

They did have fleeces for sale. The one that spoke to me was an 11 lb white cormo. Long staple, super crimpy, free of VM. I kept going back to it trying to justify it, but I still have a whole lot of my MDSW cormo fleece at home needing a good spinning, so I walked away. They had a few nice Shetland fleeces, and I do have a weakness for Shetland. It's the opposite of cormo- straight and silky, and the colors in each fleece are pretty amazing.

What was surprising was the amount of crap fleeces I saw. The majority of fleeces up for sale there were dirty, full of second cuts, matted and felted, not skirted (!), sunburt or worse. Granted, most of these fleeces were priced accordingly, I found the fleece auction to be underwhelming.

My sole purchase for the day was some angora fiber, which set me back $7. I have never been able to get to a fiber festival and come home just seven dollars poorer. Also, instead of spending my Sunday night washing fleece in the bathtub, I went for a walk, knitted in the park for a bit, made dinner, spun, caught up with a friend.

Maybe I'm just atoning for future purchases.

Progress, Updates, etc.

I've been a busy knitter lately, but a lousy photographer, so I have no pictures to share yet. I've recently finished a couple pairs of socks. I cast on for the Espresso sweater. Ooh, wait, I did take a picture of that:



This is my big fleece-to-sweater project. It started out as a big, stinky CVM fleece. I spun it up and ended up with a 3-ply dk weight yarn.



I'm almost done the back (thanks to my rather awful commute this morning, so I feel like I win the traffic war) and I'm loving the variegations in the yarn.

I'm knitting it up on size 4 needles, so it is taking quite a while. Because I carded it and spun it up woolen, the yarn is very rustic and fuzzy. It also means that the cable will not be as well defined. Details, details.

I made real progress while on vacation on the Aeolian. I'm on the final edge chart, and I predictably ran out of yarn. I'm back to the wheel this weekend to spin up some more and finish it off.

The boy is still on his motorcycle, zooming around Nova Scotia. This makes for an insane amount of productivity time I normally don't have. I'm hoping to have a huge number of new spindles done and ready to list on my Etsy store by the end of the month.

This weekend is the Garden State Fiber Festival. If I make it out there, I will have much to report on Monday. It supposed to be beautiful and sunny on Sunday.

CVM Fleece

I just posted the CVM fleece on my Etsy site. It is washed, gorgeous and in very manageable 4oz portions.



If combing and carding is not your thing, I will soon have some CVM batts up in the coming weeks.

More Fleece on the Way

It's been raining. And raining. And raining. Since I take my photos outside, I haven't had a chance to post some rather amazing gray CVM fleece on the Etsy site. Hopefully this weekend will allow for some sunnier weather.

Mutant Yarns

One of my favorite breeds of sheep to get fleece to work with is the California Variegated Mutant (CVM). These are a rare breed of American sheep that are crosses between Romeldale and Romney sheep.


Most sheep bred for their wool are white. The textile industries wants white wool so that there will be consistent dye lots- it's hard to get bright colors overdyed on brown and gray fleece. Over the years, sheep with colored fleeces have been considered unwanted and culled out. Instead of thinking about the odd family outsider as a "black sheep" at your next family reunion, think of them as being colorful. Then sit down and enjoy the lamb kebabs on the grill that were probably from a lamb with a recessive gene.

The CVMs are special because they have been almost exclusively developed for fleece for handspinners. Their fleece is wonderful to spin and knit. It's got great crimp and sproing, it's soft, dense, a fairly long staple length and it has a ton of character. Each fleece might have multiple colors and shades in it since these sheep can have spots or peidbald patches.


Above is a gray fleece from a CVM sheep named Rose from the White Barn Farm in Michigan. She is a varigated gray ewe with some brown and black and tan thrown in there, just for interest. I can't wait to start spinning this! All 5lbs of it is washed and packed into a space bag, waiting for some space on my project queue to free up. I should be able to get at least 2 sweaters out of her.

Rose as a lamb- from the WBF website

If you love working with fleece, you will love this breed and learn to seek them out! There are only 2,000 CVMs registered worldwide. When you buy their fleece, you are helping to support the flock. This is what I tell myself when I squeeze another bag of fleece under my bed.

Here is a dark brown varigated fleece that I purchased from Joy at Arbor Meadows Farm in California.


I couldn't help myself and bought enough of the variegated brown to spin for a sweater, which is one of my current WIPs. It started out about 2.5 lbs raw. I washed it and carded it on a drum carder.


I am spinning lace weight singles and then 3-plying them into a DK weight yarn on my Kromski Minstrel. I think it will make a fabulous cabled sweater. I usually try to spin with at least a foggy idea of a specific project, but sometimes when it's time to swatch, the yarn just wants to be something else.

finished CVM yarn

I've spun up and plied about 700 yards so far, with another 3 bobbins of singles needing to be plied. I've knitted some swatches, and the varigations of colors make it seem heathery. I can't wait to really start knitting this. I'm thinking one of the sweaters from a Fine Fleece; perhaps Espresso (ravelry link)?