Wednesday night’s topic last week at my Livestock Adviser class was sheep (!) and llamas. Yea!
Mother Hildegard George, of Our Lady of the Rock on Shaw Island was our speaker.
Mother Hildegard runs the sheep operation at the convent. They keep Cotswolds, selling breeding stock and wool products through their website. She brought a lot of wool-related materials (roving, yarn, books, magazines) because she’d heard that there were a bunch of fiber folks in the class. Sounds like they’ve got a really nice setup there on Shaw Island. 300 acres, no real predator problems.
During her class I started a swatch. About 4 inches wide. A nice smooshy corriedale (navajo plied). And I liked how it felt so much that I just kept going. Pretty soon I had 20-something inches of swatch, and I thought, “I should really turn this into something.”
First I made it into a band. Picked out the cast-on, and kitchenered the two ends together.
Here is Bruno, somewhat reluctantly modeling the band:
(Poor Bruno. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he’s a good sport. Gotta love the sweet Bruno.)
Anyway- it was a nice band,, but the edges rolled under like crazy. It needed something more. So, I picked up some stitches behind one edge (so the edge itself is visible on the front) and knit a hat top out of some lovely soft emsket Shetland. Then I did the same on the other edge, but knit about an inch or so of 2×2 ribbing.
And here ’tis- from the side:
and from the top:
I do like the cross-directional interest, especially since the yarn is kind of self-striping.
In other news, we have a mountain of fresh and fruity wool muffins from my last KoolAid dyeing adventure:
Yum.
Are you ready for your sheep yet? There is a shetland spinner flock out on the peninsula that needs adopted – it was on our NW Shetland list today – someone had offered to take them as this woman cannot care for them anymore and then the takers backed out. – I think Donna knows more. T.
P.S. Missed you last Saturday – will you be coming up for the Spin-In?