I promised Sheep. I do not Disappoint.

Wandering around the cliffs and bluffs near Omaha beach, we decided to try and find the airstrip that the allies put down. As soon as they were able to get heavy equipment on the beach, they used it to plow flat a rudimentary airstrip on a plateau on the cliff top so they wouldn't have to fly all the way back to England to land. A huge advantage on the allied front, especially for wounded planes that wouldn't make it back across the channel.

Up the hill we went, through much brambles and thorns and overgrowth. We didn't find out until we got there that there was an easier path up...a road. How did we miss that?

We got to the top, to spectacular views, and we found a plaque that let us know this verdant farmland was indeed the place we were looking for.

And suddenly, Sheep!

The airstrip is now a sheep pasture. Really!

The little ones are Cheviots. I'm not sure what the black faced sheep were. Bleu du Maine maybe? They had gorgeous, crimpy thick fleece that made me swoon a little.

I don't know, I couldn't hear what the farmer was saying over the roar of the diesel generator that they were using to power the clippers.

I just happened to show up for shearing day. How lucky was that? They had a huge bale of wool filled with the mornings' work.

My French isn't rich enough to ask details without resorting to profanity, but they seem to not dock the tails here. It was kind of funny to see long-tailed sheep, as it's common (and somewhat controversial) in the States to snip the tails off when they are lambs. Cleaner, easier to deal with, and none of the dreaded flystrike issues.

They were nervously eyeing the shearing process, but seemed like the kind of happy sheep that get lots of open pasture and an ocean view.

The Shetland Who Wants to Be Pretty Returns...

And this time it's in yarn form.

My wee Shetland fleece has been all spun up.



It started out as a fleece that had tons of cross-fibering. It was clean and didn't have any other terrible flaws aside from the fact that it looked like it had been carded already. It was hard to pull out individual locks, but they weren't so stuck together where I was getting tears and breaking the fleece. I didn't pay a whole lot for it and I washed it up in the bathtub with no issues. It was taking the leap from fleece in a bag under my bed to usable product that was hanging me up.

I had the brilliant idea to turn it into roving at the Loop spin-in, and blended it with a good deal of tussah silk that I had dyed up. It gave it a rich, slightly metallic sheen. I threw in some angora I had lying around for good measure.





I spun it up as thick as I can and now I have an Aran-weight 2ply.


It didn't take me that long- I whipped through the almost 2 lbs of roving an just a couple weeks- but I've been lazy about plying. Having time to sit down in front of the wheel to finish everything has been a huge challenge.



It's lovely- I really enjoyed spinning this and I was a little melancholic when the last bit of it got sucked onto the bobbin. The staple on the shetland was very long, and the silk reinforced that, so I didn't been much twist in the singles. I plied it tightly though because I love the way a tightly plied yarn looks- so neat and orderly. I have 5 skeins plied up so far, all with 110-160 yards a piece (yeah, I know. I have to work on my consistency). In the end, I'll have enough for a small sweater. I love the fact that it's not so blended that the silk didn't get lost here.

So aside from resolving to get more spinning done (and knitting and cooking and organizing and weaving and dyeing and jewelry-making and blogging and learning new languages and doing yoga and everything else that I feel like my skills are constantly withering away) I will have to eventually pick a project for this yarn.

Meanwhile, as my spinning stash gets spun up and the knitting stash gets knitted, I keep getting my AVFKW club in the mail. Luckily, they are small bumps.



This is "Cherry Blossom", a blend of Alpaca/Silk and Merino/Silk.



This one is "Ambrosial", which is a nice soft chunk of Targhee. I love how dark and saturated with color it is. I should probably discontinue this club for a bit. I now have 11 little bumps of fiber in need of being spun up. It's starting to add up and I'm just not spinning fast enough. The colors and fibers are so gorgeous though. I don't think there has been one month where I wasn't thrilled with the colors.

I promise an etsy update soon- I have a huge stack of freshly dyed yarn and roving that I need to get listed. Also, a giveaway of sorts, but it's going to take some thought and some organizing on my part and I really do want to go on vacation sometime this summer, so it might be a little while until that happens.

Muriel

Last October at Rhinebeck, I fell in love with a fleece. This fleece was very large and very greasy, but the color and the crimp and the softness combined got me to throw my wallet down anyway.



I love the fact that they included a picture of the sheep with the fleece. She's pretty.

There are plenty of really good merino for spinning available commercially, but it's rare to find such a beautiful moorit color anywhere. Merinos, along with other breeds, have been selectively bred to be white. That way, they can get consistent dye lots in the textile industry. It's hard to find naturally colored sheep fleeces unless you really seek them out, and I do. This is my white whale of a fleece. Except it is creamy brown.



It took a ton of washing to get this clean, and I lost about 30% of the weight once the grease was gone. She was wearing a coat, so it was remarkably clean and free of dirt and bits of plants that sheep pick up as they graze.

She had the most perfectly gorgeous fleece I've ever seen.

A fleece this size was going to take me weeks to process and months to spin. I was looking forward to it wholeheartedly- I love processing my own fleece and enjoy the project from start to finish if it's a nice fleece. This was the plan until I got wind of a sale at Zellinger's. It was too good of a deal to pass up, so I packed the fleece in a big box, included my order instructions and sent it off for someone else to deal with.

Wool processing mills are notoriously slow at turnaround time (many of my friends are just getting their processed fleeces in the mail that they had sent off when they were at Rhinebeck) so I had this really large window before this would make its way back to me. Five months sounded reasonable- I'm in no hurry and it's not like I'm running out of fleece in the meantime.

Imagine my surprise that a mere 5 weeks later, an absolutely enormous box arrived with the UPS man. What? I'm not expecting anything. This can't be right- what would show up my door in a box that comes up past my hip? I am tall, by the way.

Oh. It's You. I wasn't expecting You so soon.



Didn't I just get a Shetland fleece processed at Loop a couple days ago? Once you turn a fleece into roving or batts, you can no longer pack it down solid and shove it into space bags and vacuum out all the air and hide it. Once it gets nice and fluffed up, you are stuck with it in that bloated state. Unless you want to ruin it. Which you don't.

Anyway. I will sing the praises of Zellinger's. Not only were they super fast and extremely affordable- I paid $43 for 8lbs, which came back to me about 6lbs- but they also did a wonderful job. They washed it one more time for me and the roving is perfect, with hardly a nep to be found. I couldn't have done a better job if I painstakingly combed it lock by lock.





Someone has some spinning to do.

Loop Spin-In and the Shetland Who Wants to Be Pretty

A couple weekends ago, a bunch of us headed up to the Loop studio for her monthly spin-in. It's always nice to have a chatty afternoon spinning with friends.



I brought along a Shetland fleece that I had bought at Rhinebeck a couple years ago to have processed.



It was a nice fleece from Longfield Farm, but I wasn't so inspired by it to really get into it. I've been finding that if I feel a fleece is just okay and nothing special, I tend to be unenthusiastic about doing anything with it and it just sits there. It's mostly gray with some brown spots and had a lot of cross-fibering- there were no real clean locks coming out and the fiber had the appearance that it had already been carded while the sheep was still wearing it. It's been hiding packed down in a space bag for over a year now and I've been dreaming of either making it beautiful or giving it away the next chance I got. So I dug around in my stash and pulled up a lot of silk that I had dyed in peaches and blues- both bombyx and tussah. A little more digging found something else I wasn't so enthusiastic about spinning- Angora rabbit fiber. This drastically reduced the amount of fiber I had in my big bag of carding scraps- bits of leftovers or dye jobs that I'm not happy with that I incorporate into batts when I am carding.



Everything gets loaded up onto the belt of the carding machine and fluffed up. The fleece is on the bottom, the silk and angora on top. I actually did this in 3 batches, so this is just the first third of what we did.



A touch of a button sets the machine in motion. All the different sized drums pull the fiber in, blend it all together, and then spit it out as roving.






It's magic. What comes out is airy, so much softer and gorgeous. Steph the Loop Lady is really a glitter girl, so as an additional bonus, it picked up quite a bit of glitter leftover from previous carding sessions on the machine. Let's call it a patina and go with it.



I brought this in to the studio packed into a space bag with all the air sucked out, but I left with it in a huge 20-gallon trash bag. It's so fluffed and airy, and it's really quite fun to spin as soon as the machine spits it out. In fact, I'm getting a little bit nostalgic thinking of spinning it right now while I'm stuck in the office.

The addition of silk really did me some favors here. Shetland can be very silky in texture, but if it's not a fine, soft fleece then it can be kind of "grabby" when you are spinning it. The silk added a subtle pop of color throughout the fleece and it now drafts like butter. I spun up a tiny sample and I'm in love. The total weight came out just under 2 lbs. Depending on my spinning, I could possibly squeeze a sweater out of this. The angora will give the final yarn a slight bloom. I'm suspicious of using any at all...did I ever tell you my purple angora sweater story? I will soon, promise....but just that tiny bit of it doesn't seem so bad at all.

It will have to wait though- I have much plying to do before I start another big spinning project. I have to free up some bobbins from both my wheels and finish a few other projects. I'm currently plying my gorgeous cormo from Foxhill Farm. That should take no time at all...I just need to sit down at home, throw a movie on the projector and get it done. Except I'm almost never home during the week, so plying time is a rarity. I also need to ply the final two bobbins of singles from my BFL fleece.



I already have 3 skeins of it spun up and plied, all of them over 240 yards a piece. It's very rustic- lots of beautiful lumps and bumps with this yarn no matter how hard I tried. So I stopped trying and let it be, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's worsted weight, and once I have the final bobbins finished up, I will have enough for a sweater. I have a pattern in my head that I am in the process of getting down on graph paper. It's going to be warm and cozy, with a small amount of Noro worked in to give it just a small pop of color.

I also got something that UPS brought me last week that is slightly traumatizing me, but that is a story for another day...

Deep Winter is a Cure for Stashbusting of All Sorts

Waking up to less than ideal weather conditions makes me happy to kick around the house in yoga pants and knock things off my to-do list. Every day has been a new craftadventure and I've started so many new projects. It's been fabulous, but I had to rein it in as I was taking over the house in a big way.

I made granola.



Huge batches of it. Ya know, the granola plant might catch fire tomorrow and there will be no more granola in the world for ages but I'll be happily munching away at my own granola stash because I have jars of it. It's easy to make, fun to modify to your liking, and it's much less sweet than commercial brands.

I made pickles.



A trip to the Foodshed Market in Boerum Hill led to the acquisition of some winter treasures. It's an indoor farmer's market that happens every Sunday. There are quite a few food vendors (like Luke's Lobster Rolls, be still my heart) and a few good veggie vendors. Most of the produce consisted of things that loved the cold or could be stored- lots of onions and kale and root veggies. We did find some hothouse cukes and I went to work right away on turning them into spicy pickles. I've made pickled cauliflower a couple of times, but here in New York, they worship the almighty cucumber pickle. I think there are a little sweet, but I added a couple jalapeno peppers in there so they have a pretty hefty kick to them as well.

Despite my constant striving towards vegetarianism, I'm debating signing up for a pork CSA this spring from the Piggery. We do a fruit and vegetable CSA every summer into the fall and we only have to run out to the grocery store for eggs, flour and sugar all summer long. I don't even really cook meat at home, but this is really appealing to me.

Oh, speaking of pigs...I got my AVFKW January club. It's a lovely BFL/silk blend in the most delicate pale pink. And the color is called...Wilbur. I take this as a sign.



What started as a way to repair my own broken bits of jewlery has bloomed into a full-blown beading craze. I've pulled out my bead stash and strung some necklaces, just for fun.



Bry had brought me back these gorgeous stone beads from Tibet years ago. I finally got around to stringing them up and found a labradorite pendant to match. I love when that lightbulb goes off and you realize that something can be stash no more. I'm waiting for an order to come in for toggle clasps so I can make a few more. They are simple once you get the technique down, and I'm fortunate to work close by to several large bead emporiums in the fashion district.

I love glass beads.



There's so many creative possibilities here. I've got a few strands of freshwater pearls that have broken over the years that I've dug up. They are in need of a Chanel-style makeover. I've promised the beau that I wouldn't start getting into metal smithing -yet- but this is a great apartment craft as it requires minimal space and storage.

As for spinning, I've got a huge project going. Remember Cadfael the BFL ram? He's finally getting some attention.



And holy hell, what a pain in my ass he is. It's not a very big fleece, but I've spent more time on this than any other fleece that I've prepped. Not that I'm surprised- I knew this would be like this. Every single little curly lock needs to be pulled apart by hand. It's really time consuming, as there are thousands of tightly-coiled locks in this fleece. If I didn't do this, I would damage the fleece and my carder irreparably. The teeth on my carder would end up looking like Austin Power's in all his toothy glory.

Once I have each lock separated and fluffed, I feed it lock by lock into the carder. Then I card the resulting batt four times to get it smooth as possible.



And it's being spun into a fingering-weight single.



I'm aiming for a worsted-weight 2-ply. I'm clueless on a yardage estimate so far, so I'm not really spinning with a particular project in mind yet.

I've also been knitting. I started a small sock-yarn shawl-


It's the beginnings of the "In the Land of Oz" shawl by Adrienne Fong. It's BMFA Socks that Rock Mediumweight in "Luna Sea". It's very pretty, and not so busy that it will make the lace look like clown barf.

I'm more than halfway done the Spey Valley Socks:



I've also cast on for a sweater, but I don't have pictures yet. Also, I'm upset at myself at my lack of awesome pictures (maybe if I had some daylight and you could actually see things) so I'm taking a photography class just to get accustomed to the bad-ass beast with a lens.

Rhinebeck Aftermath: The Washing of the Fleeces

The bobbins on the spinning wheel have been bare lately as I've been busily washing fleeces after my annual Rhinebeck binge. Dirty fleeces tend to attract moths and moths are my mortal enemy. Even though I store my fleeces sealed up in spacebags, these can spring leaks and I'm super-paranoid about anything that might lure moths in the general direction of my stash.



My compadre over at A Dropped Stitch took this picture moments after we got out of the fleece sale. Fleece sales always reminds me of those bargain wedding-dress sales they have in the city where brides-to-be line up for hours, dash in, grab what they can and then spend the rest of the day bargaining and exchanging with other crazed shoppers to get what they want. Um, except we are fighting over dirty greasy sheep clippings. Anyway...I've seen these things get nasty with people fighting over who got there hands on one first. Getting there early, grabbing what you can and then making sure it's exactly what you want is an intense way to start your day. I found a clear table in the back of the room in good light where I could take the fleeces completely out of the bag for a better look.


Here's what I ended up going home with:

This is Fred, a 4lb dark brown Rambouillet fleece.





His fleece has very tight crimp. The staple length looks short, but if you pull on the ends of a lock, it stretches out to 3 inches. It's very soft. Rambouillets are French Merinos, but the American version has been outcrossed quite a bit to make a hardier sheep.

Here is Mable, a dark brown (almost black) Corriedale:



It's a 5lb fleece, but I split it with someone else, so I have 2.5 lbs of it. Corriedales are a cross between Lincoln, English Leicester and Merino sheep. It's got the crimp and density from merino, but the long staple and luster from the longwool.

I know I have sworn up and down that I would never buy a merino fleece to process myself. There's so much commercial merino available that's perfectly wonderful to spin. Well, seeing a moorit colored fleece on the table changed my tune really quickly.



This is Muriel. She wore a blanket and despite being a super-greasy lanolin-laden merino, she washed up nicely with barely any dirt to worry about. She has a really long 4" staple length. Washing was very tricky as merino wants to felt up when you look at it sideways, but I'm so happy with the results. I can't wait to spin this.



It is also a rather enormous fleece. Merinos are no slouches when it comes to production, and her fleece was well over 8 pounds. This took several batches of washes, and it was so dense it took almost a week to dry completely. The fleece is so crimpy and soft, I forgive her.



It's the most work I've ever had to put into a fleece.

I think I'll be kept busy for a while.

FO- Oatmeal Cardigan

Last year at Rhinebeck, I found the most beautiful Romney fleece from the Prebles farm in Maine. I washed and processed this by myself.

Fleece:


In January, I started to make the Batts:


Laceweight Singles:


Which 3-plied up to a DK weight:


Which gave me a fabric that I was happy to work with:


Which then became my Oatmeal Cardigan:


I love it. It's by far my favorite handspun garment that I have made.

I started this on the train on my way down to DC for a weekend but worked on it in fits and starts as it soon because way too warm to touch a big woolly mess. I finished the sleeves when I was up in Maine this summer and the rest of the sweater just flew along.



I'm finding it the perfectly casual fall sweater that cuts the chill nicely.

I did do some modifications. Most of them had to do with the fact that I spun this yarn up woolen- light and lofty- as opposed to worsted, which would have given me a denser, heavier yarn with less drape but more stitch definition. There is a cable on the yoke but my yarn is really too fuzzy for it to pop the way I would have liked it to. The pattern called for a small cable detail on the sleeves, but I left that out after I realized that it looked like a fuzzy mistake. I did another modification on the sleeves as well- the pattern called for increases every 4 rows, and I changed that to every 6 rows to get a more fitted sleeve.





I also decided not to use buttons, but I found these delicate little pewter claps at M&J trimming on 6th ave.







I'm pretty much in love with it.

The specs:

I used about 1000 yards of handspun DK weight yarn for this project. I actually have another 300 yards leftover as well as I'm terrible at guessing how much I've actually spun. I used US size 6 (4mm) needles to get the gauge of 18 stitches per 4 inches.

I made the 40" size thinking it would be roomy, but ya know, with the variations of the handspun,the actual size was more like 38", which gives it some negative ease. The pattern was the Oatmeal Cardigan by Amy King from the Winter 2009 Spinoff magazine.