The weather outside is frightful (very cold and soggy, changing to snow as I’m writing this), so I’ve been mostly hiding inside this weekend doing wool stuff 🙂
On Friday John (The Shepherd for whom I knit a vest back in Sept-Oct) handed off to me some lovely marbled roving that he’d like spun up and knit into a sample piece (probably a scarf). So it was nice to have some time to dive right into that!
It’s a total of 9.1 oz, and I thought it’s take about a half and ounce for a test spin to see what it wanted to be yarn-wise.
Was interesting working from roving- because it’s not my usual mode. It spun up pretty fine on Elsa, and I got about 43 yards of fingerling weight 2-ply out of the half ounce sample. Here is a swatch I worked up out of some of it-
So that was fun- and it got me in a sampling mood. Then I thought about the other class I’m teaching at the Expo this year: Wool Processing.
I’d just washed up a bunch of Esther’s 2019 fleece, and it occurred to me that it might be nice to use her fleece as a case study for the class.
I’ve still got a small amount of her unwashed fleece, and so would be able to show examples of her fiber at all stages of processing. So I picked, carded, combed, and spun some of her wool up into woolen and worsted sample yarns.
It will be nice to have samples for the same fleece in all the different stages of prep- and show how that prep results in different yarn characteristics!