FO: Riddari, with an acceptable amount of buldge

I have spent way too much time on this beast.  

The actual knitting took me no time- maybe two weeks start to finish?- and it looked just dandy until I took the scissors to it.

The idea of it was an Icelandic-style jumper done in 100% British Wools:  it was fascinating to combine these wools, to get a feel for each one.  The Black Welsh was the roughest to work with- it's rustic and full of lanolin, but it will look like new forever.  The grey Suffolk was a bit softer, but I obsessively picked wires of guard hairs out of it.  The moorit Shetland, lovely and lofty, the BFL silky and soft.  Each is their natural color, making a nice sample of the natural variety of colorful sheep.  I dubbed this "the Cod Wars" sweater- the UK had a series of bullying encounters with Iceland over fishing rights in the rich waters around Iceland, and from the 1950's to the late 70's, the UK would send trawlers there under the protection of warships to fish around Iceland.

 Like I said, the problems started when I took the scissors to the front.  See, the pattern was written for a much lighter weight yarn, but I loved the yoke pattern so much that I did the math and followed the instructions for a child's extra small size knit in a rather tight gauge.  The fabric is dense and impenetrable to wind and water, but perhaps a bit to warm for anyplace but Iceland.  A bit of air conditioning was in order and I decided to run a crochet steek up the front, snipped it into a cardigan and installed a vintage brass zipper.  That's when I started having big problems.

The zipper would not lay flat, creating big lumps and bumps up the front.  Huge ones.  After twice hand-picking and trying to ease the lumps out, frantic calls to tailors and friends were made.  I debated trying to sew it back up and save it as a cardigan, but the colorwork would have looked all wrong.  I decided to outsource, and took it to Susan at Sharpworks down in Herne Hill.  Susan wouldn't do it for me, but advised me to take out the crochet steeks, which was adding a tight line of stitches and extra fabric that was distorting things.  She also advised me to stretch the fabric taught along the zipper to minimize the zipper tape bunching.

I went home, took out the crochet steeks, and eased the zipper in one more time, trying to stretch out the lumps without turning it into a dress.

Ta dum!  An acceptable amount of bulges!  Since I had to stretch the fabric, it's a bit longer then I intended- I could have stretched it more and ended up with a dress.  It's not perfectly flat, but it doesn't look like a tumor is growing under there either.  Oh!  and it's warm enough to be outerwear.  And you know, now that I've been struggling with this for more than a month now, I've noticed that a fair amount of commercially made zip-up sweaters have zippers that don't like perfectly flat as well, so instead of drowning in a river of tears of frustration, I said this is good enough and walked away.

The kicker?  No way no how are Icelandic Lopapeysa traditional to Iceland.  They were developed in the 1950's to make use of the abundance of Icelandic wool, and they are based on styles of traditional knitwear from far-off places suck as Turkey, Sweden, South America, and Greenland.  They quickly became a favorite of tourist and locals alike.

 I do need to clean up my edges a little bit more- I don't have a perfectly clean line running up the front.  What's a few more hours with needle and thread?  I promise you I won't un-pick the zipper again.  Part of the raggedness around the edges are due to the fact that I've tinkered with this way too much and edges began to fray at the same rate as my temper.      

 It's not going to get cold enough here in the South of England to ever need something this fantastically wooly.  A trip to Iceland is in order, or perhaps, one day, a Maine winter will be endured.

The pattern is Riddari.  The yarn is Rowan British Sheep Breeds Chunky, a yarn much bulkier than what was called for in the pattern, but I've been determined to knit down my stash instead of reaching for my bank card every time the urge to knit a sweater hits.

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.

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.