Another weekend of spinning. This is about how it’s going to be until everything is done. I finished more yarns over the weekend and now that The Boyfriend is done borrowing my camera I’ll get pictures taken. A local knitting group did a dye workshop a few blocks away, I stopped by for a visit Saturday afternoon and ended up with a bottle of extra dye. I need to dye some of the Andean two-ply for the traditional three color patterns, so now I have medium gray, white and blue. The white is from a Blue-faced Leicester top I picked up for fun, it’s similar fiber although not so long a staple length.
I also did the drop spindle skein, again because I didn’t like how it came out the first time. The fiber for that was a grab-bag of fleece that appears to be Border Leicester. It was cotted (tangled) and had some color variation, so I flicked, drum carded and then combed just a little. Saturday I reeled some silk and Sunday was the guild meeting where I did fiber prep. I tried an experiment with the mystery farm fleece, a 4/3 12-ply cable. It was lofty and bouncy and huge, and with that many plies it doesn’t matter what the single looks like. But the fiber is filthy, so there I was with the dog brush yet again to get the junk out. It’s short and fine and crimpy but obviously has some down breed in it. The woman from the farm thinks it might be part Rambouillet, closely related to Merino, but there’s no way to really know.
Today I’m working on the remaining woolen with the Suffolk fleece. I used a friend’s drum carder to make batts and now I’m tearing them into chunks to make rolags. I couldn’t do it with hand cards because I couldn’t get batts large enough for the yarn I need. I’m also doing it with the quill, because it has to be large and low twist. Long draw works really well that way and the Lendrum quill head is huge. It’s weird to work with this big spike pointing directly at me, I can’t draft as far as with a normal position but this yarn doesn’t take long. Even if it’s still slower to spin than it should be because I have to get it as perfectly even as possible. Woolen just doesn’t like to do that.
