Life’s too short to spin nasty wool

I am ruthlessly sorting the wool in the fibre room.

Good bits are pulled off for washing, yukky bits are sent to the compost pile with no regrets. I used to try to wring every bit into something functional, but you know what? There’s plenty more wool where this stuff came from, and if I’m gonna spin, I’m gonna enjoy it.

It’d be different if I paid for the stuff, if there was a limited supply of fibre, or if every bit of wool was destined to clothe my family or something. However, given that none of those are true … only the best stuff gets to stay. Everything else goes outside!

What I did today: an Inuit-inspired needle case

Today, I embarked on a bit of an experiment. The experiment was designed to solve a recurring problem, namely the fact that I can never seem to find my metal wool needles (the big blunt tipped ones you use for sewing up or weaving in ends). It was also designed to use materials I had on hand.

Inspired by an Inuit needle case design, I worked out a strategy for creating something similar.

First, I needed a hollow bone. I have some from the lamb bones that we got back from the butcher, so I cleaned one thoroughly and filed and sanded the ends so they were smooth, and I soaked it in vinegar to get rid of the smell.

Then I needed two toggles: one that could serve as a loop for a strap, if the case was to be hung somewhere, or perhaps worn on a lanyard, and one to serve as a ‘stopper’ at the bottom. I had a lovely red bead that would be a great stopper, and a small chunk cut from another bone made a loop and stopper all in one.

Last but not least, I needed something to stick the needles through. The Inuit used a strip of hide, but that’s not something I have in ready supply. I do, however, have plenty of wool, so I knit an i-cord double the length of the bone. It’s very narrow at the base, so that it will fit through the hole in the red bead, then widens for the section that will be inside the bone, to give lots of room for poking needles through it. At the top, it narrows again to form the extension that leads up to the round loop/stopper.

The finished needle case, in closed position:

 

And open, to give access to the needles inside:

 

Yeah, I know I could buy something to suit the purpose … or I could keep my needles in the drawer (I actually do that, most of the time) … but this was a neat thing to try and I think it’ll be quite handy.

I even have enough materials to make another one, just for fun. :)

The Nova Scotia Hat

A friend of mine who also likes yarn and knitting and such went to Nova Scotia this summer on a holiday. Before she left, I gave her $20 and said “find me some cool yarn and send it back!”

Now see, that gave her a totally valid reason to drag her significant other into all the yarn shops along the way, so it was a win-win kind of deal. :)

The yarn that came home was a lovely Cotswold/mohair mix, hand dyed in beautiful jewel tones. At first, I thought maybe it wanted to be a scarf, but there just wasn’t quite enough of it to make a worthwhile scarf, and well, it just didn’t seem right. So, yarn being the wonderfully reusable stuff that it is, I pulled it back and made a hat instead.

Voila: the Nova Scotia Hat.

Any knitters out there interested in the pattern? If so, leave a comment and I’ll write it up. It was pretty easy knitting, overall, even those cool crossed over long stitches aren’t hard, and there’s only 2 rounds of them.

Progress, frustrations, and knitting

There's always a long list of things to do when you live on a farm, even a small one, and so it's really easy to make some kind of progress. Pick any of the jobs on the lengthy list and voila, you are further ahead than you were yesterday!

Last weekend, everyone in the whole family was away except me, through an odd combination of circumstances. I slept in, ate what I wanted when I felt hungry, and got a whole lot of productive work done without really feeling worn out at the end! I wandered outside Saturday morning to see which job I felt like doing, and I decided to start on the fenceline feeder for the sheep. The Boy has requested a change in feeding strategy, and since he does most of the feeding, it seems reasonable that he should get the infrastructure he wants. So, I took down the boundary fence from the piece of winter pasture that will become the feeder and cut and attached the hog panels to the posts. We'll add sheets of plywood on an angle along the back, and that'll hold the hay for the sheep to eat: they stick their noses through the hog panels, but can't get their whole heads through (we hope). A test run late in the spring looked promising, so here's hoping.

Once I got that done, I realized that the winter pasture desperately needed to be cleared out, so I fired up the bobcat and practiced my digging and shovelling maneouvers. I'm no bobcat artist, but working on flat ground I did have a lot of opportunity to try different things, and managed to improve my skills a little, while making a big pile of compost-to-be.

The next question, obviously, was what to do with the pile I had just made.

I had read the Maple Corners blog that morning, and saw Annie's "Wall of Junk" - the very creatively decorated fence that hides her compost pile. Inspired, I put up some fence posts and cross boards, and made a mental note to be on the lookout for cool 'junk' to decorate it with! A bit more bobcat work and I had the existing compost pile moved into the new bin, and room for another bin. Sunday saw the creation of the second bin, and the compost-to-be from the winter pasture put into it's proper cooking spot. Monday night I actually saw the pile steaming again, which is really encouraging ... and it's shrinking, so it's defintely doing what it oughta do.

The two new compost bins are along the north border of the property, where we really do need a perimiter fence. This weekend, I started extending that fence with more posts and boards - it doesn't have to be absolutely sheep-proof, just sheep-resistant, so that we can turn them out into the area we euphemistically refer to as a 'lawn' on occasion to keep it mowed. Twelve posts later (put in all by myself - The Reluctant Farmer was busy doing other much-needed jobs like sealing the windows so they don't leak in the rain, and working on siding the house), we have a perimiter fence along most of the north border to the yard. The sheep were out there on Saturday and did make a dent in the grass, but since it's not properly fenced off everywhere, we had to chase them back in a few times and now they're safely behind proper fences and gates.

All this work doesn't come without frustrations ... the fence boards aren't level and have to be taken down and put back up ... the sheep get out and have to be chased back ... the sheep knock down one of the fence boards that is only up with temporary nails, until I can check that it is level ... a thunderstorm arrives while the sheep are all wandering around and I have to chase them back into a proper pasture while getting drenches ... I manage to give myself a nasty bruise while deconstructing a shade house to use as a trellis ... but all in all, it was still a productive couple of weekends.

Knitting continues: the vest I am working on is turning out very nicely, if I do say so myself, and I have been working on it diligently. Now I have to figure out what it needs for a collar.

I think I'll go knit some more.

So, what is this skinless sheepskin rug, anyway?

I’ve mentioned the ‘skinless sheepskin rug’ project a few times, and now that it is complete, I can give you a full explanation - with pictures, even! Here is the finished product, on display at the Natural Fibres Competition at Fibre Week:
The objective was to make something that looked like a sheepskin rug without needing a tanner’s skills (or a dead sheep, for that matter). The secondary objective was to create something that could be entered in the Natural Fibres competition at Fibre Week, which meant all the materials had to be completely natural. I might have used a synthetic warp, for strength, but in keeping with the natural fibre theme, I used some cotton warp set fairly wide apart. The backing fabric used a double strand of thin wool rovings from Custom Woolen Mills, as I knew from past experience that those would felt into a nice solid fabric base after washing. Last but not least, fistfuls of raw fleece were pulled from the bags of wool that are currently blocking access to the rest of my fibre room. :)

The basic strategy is very straightforward: weave about an inch of plain weave with the thin wool, beating it well so it’ll make a solid base fabric. Then the fun begins: pull out locks of wool about as big around as your thumb from the pile of raw fleece, and wrap each lock around every third warp thread in such a way that they tuft up, much the same way thrums are made on mittens.

Choose locks of approximately equal size and look for ones that are fairly clean – dirt is okay as it’ll dissolve in the wash, but hay and straw will just felt in place, so it’s a good idea to pick those out as you go. When the row of fleece is finished, beat it down and continue with the plain weave for another inch, then repeat the tufting process, offset by one warp thread. The offset helps to distribute the locks more evenly across the surface of the fabric, it breaks up the columns you’d get otherwise.
The back of the fabric looks really interesting, you can see where each lock is looped around the warp threads.

When the whole thing is as long as it needs to be, the warp is cut, the ends knotted, and the whole thing gets thrown in the wash on warm/cold with a generous dose of laundry soap to clean the wool. It’s a long wash cycle, waiting to see if it turns out or becomes a solid felted lump of useless fibre … which is why I had done two test swatches first, just to be on the safe side. Front load washers do not give you the option to stop midcycle and peek! :)

The finished rug is not quite as dense as it was before washing, so it’s a good idea to err on the side of fleece overdose if you want a good thick mat when you’re finished. The completed piece would make a great floor rug for beside the bed (imagine sinking your cold toes into that first thing in the morning!), or a chair cover (I put it on the driver’s seat for the ride home from Olds, and wow, is it ever comfortable!), and would be ideal for a person suffering from bedsores or confined to a wheelchair (in fact, real and synthetic sheep skins are often used in those situations – washable real wool might be a welcome alternative for some).

Another use would be as a saddlepad for a rider who doesn’t use a close-contact saddle and has a bony horse: wool is the ideal material for a saddle blanket as it absorbs moisture and won’t chafe against the skin. This particular style would provide plenty of cushioning between saddle and horse, and reduce friction significantly: the wool locks will move against the horse’s body and the top of the blanket will move with the saddle.

I’m very pleased with the finished product, and have definite plans to make more. I’ve got a few horse people interested in serving as product testers, so I think I’d better get some more warp done up and get started on another one!

Reporting live from Olds Fibre Week!

<beep ba beep ba beep beep beep>

This is Kermit the Frog, reporting live for Sesame Street News …

Actually, it’s me, reporting live from Olds Fibre Week!

I arrived today and got all set up in the parking lot (I do love having the motorhome, even if it drinks gasoline like water on a hot day, I still love it) and headed over to the registration desk. I lugged my skinless sheepskin rug, to enter it in the competition, and got stopped twice by people wanting to look at it on the way over. I got all registered and then wandered the merchant mall for awhile, where I tried needle felting for the first time (wow, is that ever easy! I can't believe I haven't tried that before!) and saw a lot of really pretty fibre (but of course with a room full of it at home, I'm not purchasing fibre right now!).

This evening was a llama spin-in - they brought llama fibre and had teams of people spin and create something. I was asked by a lady I'd never met to join a team, and so six of us (who’d never met before) joined creative forces to come up with something from raw fibre in two hours. I had taken my wheel over, thinking to spin while I watched, but as I'm not very good at spinning llama yet, I loaned my wheel to one of the other members and I coordinated the knitting. We knit up a little bag to hang on the wheel (to hold the gadgets you need). It was really fun, and I got to see how a lucet works (I very much want one of those now!) and I got to knit with slippery soft suri fibre spun in a wild loopy yarn.

Tomorrow morning is my class, and I have the evening to myself now - it's great, there is highspeed internet here and power, so I'm comfortable in my little space, with a full fridge, a laptop and a bunch of fibre to play with!

That’s it for tonight, folks, stay tuned for updates and further developments!

For two days, I will seem normal!

I am heading to Olds College for Fibre Week tomorrow … well, not for the whole week, just for two days and one class, but still. Fibre Week!

For two days I will be surrounded by other fibre addicts, even people who make their living doing neat stuff with wool and other natural materials, and in that environment, my addiction to all things wooly will seem downright normal!

I am way  more excited than I thought I’d be. The motorhome is packed up and ready to go (we did find out that the water heater tank ruptured over the winter, so I have no running water, but that’s not a show-stopper .. the toilet still works!), I completed the project I want to submit for the Natural Fibre competition, and my spinning wheel and knitting needles are packed up and ready for action.

I’ll head down on Monday, get registered and set up (motorhomes can park in the college parking lot, which is terrifically convenient and very cost-effective!). Next, I plan to get my skinless sheepskin rug entered for the competition and then check out the goings-on. Monday evening there is a llama spin-in that should be fun to watch:

You’ve heard of sheep to shawl competitions –this year’s Spin In presents the “llama to luxuries” contest. We will provide the fleeces –you bring your team and your creativity to make a small luxury item of your choice. Come join us for a relaxing (?) and fun evening. Everyone welcome!

Then on Tuesday, I’ll be taking this class:

WORKING WITH ENERGETIC SPUN SINGLES

Students will spin S and Z singles and knit swatches to explore twist mechanics.  Students will understand and apply knowledge of how twist and a variety of knitting stitches can be utilized in future knitting adventures.  Participants should be able to spin consistent S and Z threads, plus have advanced beginner/intermediate knitting abilities.

The translation, for the non-spinners in the crowd, is that I’ll be learning how to work with yarn that is just one thread (think about most yarn you’ve seen, it is two or three threads twisted together, right? the single threads are called, strangely enough, singles). It’s one of those things you never see in a book, so it’ll be wonderful to take a class and learn about it live and in person. I’ve never taken a spinning class before!

Tuesday night there is a silent auction and a fashion show, so I’ll stay over Tuesday night as well then head home Wednesday morning so I can drive in daylight and not be rushed or tired.

A full report on the fibre festival will be posted when I return!

Fibre Workshop

Several of our district 4-H sheep members came to our house today for a 'fibre workshop' - a chance to see first hand all the neat things you can do with wool.

Hanging around the room were knitted and woven things of many descriptions: shawls, bags, scarves, mats, and even a knitted blanket. Piled on tables were hand dyed and naturally coloured fleece batts and skeins of handspun yarn. Work in progress was on the loom, the wheel was ready to use, three drop spindles awaited students, and boxes of wool and llama and alpaca fibre were set out for everyone to feel and compare.


We talked about the different types of fleece, and how to recongize a good fleece when you see one - and how to raise your sheep so their fleeces have more value to spinners. We stuck our hands in boxes of wool and discovered lanolin, and crimp, and the flyaway fuzziness of the non-wool fibres that lack lanolin. We tried hand carders, combs, and the drum carder, and got everyone to spin a bit on the drop spindle ... and one of the sheep leaders to spin on the spinning wheel!


Last but not least, everyone was given a bit of yarn and some knitting needles (sharpened and sanded chopsticks) and shown how to do basic garter stitch knitting. Several of the kids did really well, and a few were so deeply engrossed in the work that they took their needles and wool home for further experimentation. One girl fell in love with the wheel and had to be pulled away by her mom when it was time to go home ... I sent her off with a drop spindle, as I sense a new fibre addict in the making and I want to encourage that when I see it!


The sheep leader who set up the event offered to bring me a 'bag of wool leftover from last year', and I said that wool is always welcome in this house!

I was expecting, say, a garbage bag full .... not a fifty pound burlap sack!


The first fleece from the sack is already soaking. :) Woohoo, more wool!

Scottish Wool Shawl: finished!

When my sister and her husband were in Scotland, one of the missions undertaken was to find some wool to send back to me (my sister is a great enabler of my wool addiction: on a trip to Ireland, she drove around the countryside searching for sheep, and eventually managed to talk a shepherd in the midst of shearing his flock out of some raw fleece!).

This lovely yarn really wanted to be worked up in stockinette stitch ... that's about as plain as you can get in the knitting world, but I swatched it in several different patterns and this was the only one that worked to show off the little nubs of colour embedded in the yarn.

So, with a scale and a swatch and a calculator, I figured out a pattern that would produce a long shawl, wide enough to keep my back and upper arms covered and long enough to wrap all the way around my body. I knew I wanted the finished shawl to be nearly 6 feet long, and by weighing and measuring the sample I was able to extrapolate how much wool would be needed to create the finished product ... and, I had enough. The pattern is a simple repeat of plain stockinette with two purl stitches inserted every twenty stitches: nothing fancy, but the purl ribs give the plain knitting a bit of definition and add some visual interest. Four sets of twenty knit stitches with two purl stitches on either side of each knitted band ... repeat for six feet. Yes, it took awhile to knit, but it's a nice easy pattern, something you can work on while thinking of something else, and very restful to work on.

There was enough green wool to make the body of the shawl, and enough blue to make a border all around (which not only looks nice, it also stabilizes the edge). The blue edging is crocheted, although the finished work looks a lot like knitting as I used a single crochet stitch, not wanting any loops or picots along the side. The blue really brings out the colour in the green wool, and there was just enough to make for four rounds of crochet around the edge: the tiny ball of leftover blue yarn would fit in a toddler's hand.

Of course, I love the finished product all the more because I know this wool came from across the ocean, and was diligently searched out by a sister who loves me enough to find the perfect present when she is on vacation (enough, even, to sweet talk the shopkeeper into parting with wool she didn't even have on display: this precious stuff was stashed away in a back room and only offered for sale when the tale of the wool-crazed sister in Canada was relayed).

So, many thanks to my wonderful sister for the great yarn, and to her wonderful husband for his part in wool-chasing excursions across Europe!

Weaving tricks

When weaving, the yarn has to be passed back and forth from side to side. The wool is normally wound onto a device called a shuttle, which comes in a number of shapes, the most common that I've seen being a boat shuttle. The boat shuttle looks like a little wooden boat with a small bobbin in the centre, around which the yarn is wound. As you pass the shuttle through, the yarn unwinds and fills the space in the weaving.


Well, I haven't got a shuttle, but I do have a lot of metal knitting needles that aren't being used (I prefer bamboo, but I inherited a fairly large stash of metal needles, so I have quite a few of them around). Wrapping the yarn around the knitting needle provides a nice bobbin of yarn, and the needle is long enough to pass comfortably through the weaving, without requiring me to stretch my arms into the opening or stick my fingers between the warp threads. So, for me, they solve the problem quite nicely.


Wrapping the yarn onto the needle is a slow process, though. So, I came up with a solution:

The drill's jaws hold the pointy end of the knitting needle quite handily, and on slow speed it twists at a nice pace. The hand that isn't holding the drill moves the yarn up and down the needle to spread it out evenly, and when the finished product looks sort of like a yarn corn dog, and it's not too fat to fit in the shed, then you're done!

Another great thing about using the needle for a shuttle is that you can set it on the tray in front of the loom and just tug on the loose end of yarn to unwind enough for the next pass through the shed, an easy trick to accomplish with one hand.

Socks for The Reluctant Farmer

I finally finished a new pair of socks for The Reluctant Farmer.

They are made from handspun wool: the brown strand is naturally brown Corriedale, from a fleece I bought online, and the white is Columbia/Hampshire. The wool spun up into a nice thin sock yarn, and I knit these up on the lovely wooden needles that The Boy got me for Christmas.

I used Elizabeth Zimmerman's "afterthought heels" , since I have never yet met anyone who is as hard on socks as The Reluctant Farmer and there is no doubt that I'll be replacing heels in these socks in the future. The afterthought heel can be pulled out and redone, so it's made for mending.

I don't think I like them quite so much as the socks made the usual way (with traditionally turned heel) but they have the advantage of being flexible and easy to work on: you can knit the whole sock then figure out where the heel should go, and put it in afterwards, and they'll be easy to repair.

I'm just happy that I got them finished before the next round of cold weather arrives. I'm terribly slow at finishing socks!

A really super cool birthday gift

A couple of days ago, I recieved a parcel in the mail from my sister, who lives in Lithuania. Inside was a plastic bag filled with raw sheep's wool, and a postcard from Ireland, inscribed very simply "Happy Birthday".

Surely something was missing.

Where was the story?

I mean ... I knew she and her husband had gone back to Lithuania from Canada via Ireland ... and I knew there were sheep in Ireland ... but ... that's just not enough pieces to build a cohesive narrative.

Today, I got an email from my sister with the rest of the tale:

Yup, there's a story! It was supposed to be accompanied by pictures, but we have searched all of our memory cards and can't find the photos from our stop. I was really* hoping we'd find them, but it looks like something went wrong (like, just maybe there wasn't a memory card in the camera at the time - oops!).

So...I had really really wanted to bring you some Lithuanian fleece for your birthday when we came to Canada. I hunted and hunted (and hunted), but couldn't find any, or anyone who could tell me where to find some. Most of the sheep places are further to the east, and without a car and a grip on Lithuanian agricultural language, it was impossible to work something out. Anyway, my second option was to find some fleece in Ireland. This seemed at least linguistically manageable, so as soon as we were off the plane, I started looking for places. I did some asking around, and a nice lady at a woolens shop suggested that I ask a sheep farmer.

While we were driving around the winding back roads of Ireland, we passed a big sheep farm, and I made Nathan turn the car around and go back (not easy on those one-lane, skinny roads!). It looked like the kind of place that raises sheep for a living - lots of big sheds, and tons of pasture. I went up to the front door and knocked, waited, and knocked some more, but no one came. I was sooooo disappointed, but I think Nathan was relieved. "Are you seriously going to ring their doorbell and ask them for fleece?" Hey - I was on a mission.

The next evening, while we were headed out for supper from the castle tower, we drove around yet another bend in the road, and lo-and-behold...there were two kids and two guys out wrangling sheep and doing the shearing! There was a small dip at the edge of the road, so I told Nathan to quickly pull over. We got out of the car, and I ran across the road to the fence where the guys were working. The older guy, who I think was the owner, was directing sheep traffic and watching as the other guy wrestled the sheep and sheared them. They were inside a small fenced area, and he had the electric clippers hooked up to a tall metal rigging. The owner guy was super friendly, and said "hello" even while I was on my way over. I said "hi" and asked how the shearing was going. They had just gotten started, and the worker guy was fighting to keep the sheep he was shearing on it's back. I told the owner guy that I had a weird question, and wanted to know if he had any fleece for sale. I told him that my sister in Canada has a few sheep and does her own carding and spinning. He hardly even blinked, and just said "oh, sure" and walked over to the fleece that was piling up as it came off the sheep the shearing guy was holding. He scooped up a handful, then wrapped it around a few times until he had a bunch, came back to me and said, "is that good?" It was *fresh* off the sheep - I saw those bits come off! I asked him how much, but he just said "bah" and waved me away. We watched the sheaing for a few more minutes, and they smiled for the camera (man, I wish those had worked out!). The sheaing guy had a big grin on his face the whole time - I think he was getting a kick out of it, and he was super nice to us. The owner guy told me they were Suffolk sheep, and the farm was just outside of Navan, Ireland. The area was beautiful, with rolling green hills, and lush trees bending in archways over the road. I'm pretty sure those were some very happy sheep!

Anyway, that is what I was determined to get you for your birthday, and I am sooooo glad that it made it to you! We mailed it from a little post office on the edge of Dublin (also no easy feat - traffic in Ireland is crazy!). I saw the post office, and yelled "stop!" I had my Tim Horton's cup in my hand (did I tell you we found a Tim Horton's coffee-from-a-machine place at a gas station outside Dublin? Too cool!), we parked illegally at the gas station, ran across the road, stole a box from the stack of unpacking that the lady at the convenience store was doing (well, I think she was tossing them anyway), bought a role of tape, and packed it up on the floor of this little convenience store/post-office place. We smelled like sheep, but it was worth it!

Hope you enjoy your fleece - we had fun getting it!
D&N

Now isn't that quite the story?

My sister is a stunningly talented writer. She is also stubborn and determined to accomplish what she sets her mind to ... and how lucky for me that this time, she set her mind to acquiring European fleece for me to spin!

I have already washed, carded and spun some of the wool. It's delightfully crimpy, and is working up into a lovely midweight yarn. I think I'll make it into something with Aran cables. After all, it's Irish wool!

Suggestions...?

Fingerless Gloves

I found a lovely pattern for fingerless gloves and have made a few of them now ...

The pink ones are for a girl from 4-H, whose family gifted me with three sheep in return for some farm-sitting while they go on a holiday (I really think I'm getting the better part of that deal but who am I to argue with such generosity?). These are made from hand spun wool, dyed bright pink with Kool-Aid.

The brown ones (which are actually the first set I made from this pattern) were shipped to my brother-in-law in Lithuania .... where the city decides when the central heating in your apartment will be turned on - and the city never seems to think it's cold when normal people think it's cold - resulting in chilly apartments and cold hands. :) These are made from some naturally brown Corriedale fleece that I purchased in raw form: I washed, carded, spun and knit them, and I'm very happy that they fit!

Winter cold, tea and wool

Yep, winter has arrived. We have snow on the ground and temperatures between -15 and -20 most days, cooler at night. The stock tank heater has been installed, we've gone through nearly three bales of hay already, and the trucks are complaining about starting on chilly mornings ... as am I. Somehow I always have much less energy in the winter - the darkness and chill seems to drain me of strength.

Still, a mug of tea for the drive to town does wonders to improve one's morning, I have discovered, as does the heated seat warmer that Princess Girl and Dinosaur Boy gave to me as thanks for chauffeuring them to and from school.

In the evenings, I like to do my spinning or knitting, as the warmth of the wool is somehow warming to more than just my hands. I have done more experimentation with Kool-Aid and wool dyeing, and have managed to come up with a neat variegated skein of greens, browns and beiges that reminds me of Vancouver Island, as well as more pink (no matter how hard I try, things seem to end up shockingly pink).

I've been knitting up some new projects, too: I found a lovely set of fingerless gloves and a beautiful cabled sweater to make from some lovely blue wool that my parents brought back for me from a trip they took to PEI a few years back. It's been waiting for just the right pattern to come along, and so far, I'm pleased with how it looks!

I think I'll go work on it some more right now, in fact.

Fibre Day

Today was an entire day dedicated to playing with fibre. How much fun is that, eh?

Princess Girl 'helped' me most of the day, which was quite entertaining.

I ordered some lovely black Corriedale wool awhile back, and was awaiting the arrival of the drum carder before doing much with it. Well, the drum carder is here, so it's time to play! Black sheep usually have wool in a few different shades - this particular fleece has everything from chocolate brown/black to mocha brown to gray, and when it's all carded together it makes for a beautiful heathered black look. I can't wait to see the resulting yarn!.

While we were playing with the drum carder, we dug out the Kool-Aid dyed wool that we did back in the summer, teased the locks open with the dog comb (you have to loosen them up a bit before putting the wool in), and ran the purple stuff through the carder. It wasn't very nice wool to begin with, so even after drum carding it's kinda slubby and weird, but it spun up into an interesting thick/thin/slubby yarn that Princess Girl would like made into a scarf. She helped with the entire process: dying the wool, getting it ready for the carder, and spinning. (Okay, her 'help' in spinning consisted of sitting beside me and playing with two little plastic ponies in the batts of fibre, but hey, she was there for all of it!). I cast on a few stitches of the spun singles and will get that scarf made up quickly - weird slubby yarn tends to look reasonably good when done up in garter stitch on really big needles. And it goes quickly!

Let's see, what else did we do? We washed some of the wool from my Cola, the Icelandic/Southdown lamb - and had our first unanticipated felting. I should've known better - Icelandic is finicky for felting, but I wanted it to dry quickly so I put it in the washer just to spin out the water. I've done this before with Southdown, which is almost entirely resistant to felting, but it's clearly a very bad idea for something as fussy as Icelandic! So ... we now know that Icelandic/Southdown fleece felts beautifully. Ah well, it wasn't the whole batch of fleece, so we washed up some more and laid it out very, very carefully on the drying racks. The good news is that the stuff from the washer wasn't a complete loss - I was able to rescue quite a bit and card that up into big fluffy (very fluffy!) batts.

I've been very interested to see how the crossbreed fibre spins up, so I can make my breeding plans appropriately. After all, if a particular cross yields yukky wool, we're not gonna want to breed more of them, this is a handspinner's flock! So, on to the experiement: the resulting singles are rather fuzzy ... this wool is like the thel part of Icelandic wool (the soft inner stuff) with hardly any of the tog fibres (the guard hairs). Now if I could spin a nice loose single on my wheel, I bet it'd be beautiful, but I'm not that good yet. I'll see what it turns out like after plying and setting the twist. Hmm, maybe I'll try spinning some on the drop spindle ... I can get loosely spun singles that way, but can't quite do that with the wheel yet.

Speaking of plying and setting twist, last night I spun up a second bobbin of purebred Icelandic (from the rovings I got done at the mill) and plyed that up. Today I washed and whacked it*, and it's drying on the racks with the raw fleece. It ended up as a 9 WPI** bulky yarn, which is waiting for me to decide on a use. I may see if I am able to spin up enough to make something larger (shawl? sweater, even? I certainly have lots and lots of roving...), but I'm still very new to spinning, so it'll be interesting to see if I can recreate that 9 WPI on the next bobbins.

So... after a day of playing with wool, I have a box by my wheel containing several batts of Southdown fibre (which doesn't spin up so well thanks to my less-than-ideal-shearing, but the batts are still good for pillows and quilts), a couple of batts of black Corriedale (that I cannot wait to spin!), some pink KoolAid dyed commercial wool batting (which we ran through the drumcarder just to open it up a bit), and a few batts of some 'mystery sheep fleece' that was a gift from my sister back when I lived in the city. I wish I knew what kind of sheep it was, because the wool is wonderful! And I have a ball of purple slubby weird yarn that is on it's way to becoming a scarf, and a third of a bobbin's worth of Icelandic/Southdown singles.

Whew. What a day! We sure had fun, though.

And I bet a few of you learned some wool processing terminology out of the adventure, too!

* washed and whacked: this is that 'setting the twist' thing mentioned earlier - after the wool is spun and plyed, you wash it one more time ... this relaxes the fibres a bit, and then as it is almost dry, you whack it on the floor a few times to felt the fibres together ever so slightly ... this sets the twist in the yarn so it doesn't unwind or go all fuzzy later in it's life

**WPI = Wraps per Inch, a measurement used to identify the thickness of handspun wool

Fibre Night

We had one amazing fibre night!

The drum carder arrived: a gift from The Reluctant Farmer. A drum carder allows me to take wool from the sheep (washed first) and run it through the carder to make batts, which are then useful for things like quilt filling or as raw material for spinning. This takes the place of hand carders and is much, much, much faster and produces far better 'stuff'. We tested it out! You can see Princess Girl wearing one end result on her head, Dinosaur Boy wearing one as a Santa Beard, and The Boy holding someof the raw material in his hands. I have the tool used to pull the finished batts off of the carder, it's a wicked sharp thing.

The wool I sent out for processing also came back from the mill yesterday: I had sent in wool from Natalie and Brownie (the Icelandic ewes) and some of the wool from the pile of Columbia and Hampshire "junk wool" given to me by a friend. My goodness, did it ever turn out nice! I spun up some of the Icelandic and it is soft and fuzzy and beautiful. I also tried spinning some of the Southdown wool (Jack's fleece) that we carded up on the drum carder, and although it's a bit on the slubby side (due in no small part to my crummy shearing job) it is quite serviceable and much better than what I can do with hand carders.

The kids had fun helping me, too, as you can see .... so all in all, it was a fun night. :)

Coloured yarn, with help from the kids

Princess Girl and Dinosaur Boy helped me soak some wool in KoolAid a couple of weekends back ...

... and now I've spun the coloured wool into yarn, plied it and washed it, and it's all ready for knitting.

Here are the littler kids with their dad, showing off the results of our work.

It'll be made into some surprises that will show up at Christmas time ... you'll have to come back then to find out what this wool will become!

A very productive day

This morning we headed up to Gram and Grandpa's house to help with the sod: their yard is finally landscaped, and wow, does it ever look big with the sod in place! We all got dirty and muddy constructing a green patchwork quilt in the yard, but the final result is lovely. Gram made a great meal for us when we were done, so we headed back home tired, happy, and full.

Back at Apple Jack Creek, The Reluctant Farmer fired up the bobcat and pushed some fence posts into place with the bucket (he's been wanting to try that - pounding posts with a steel post pounder gets old really, really fast), and then recruited The Boy and myself to get the last bit of vapor barrier sticky stuff on the outside of his foundation. Indoors, The Boy did a couple of loads of wash, packed up for camp (his class is going to an outdoor education camp this week), and was generally useful in running errands for the activities happening outside.

Late in the afternoon, The Reluctant Farmer drove the bobcat around the yard, pushing dirt down around the foundation and working on the backfill. That job can't be finished completely until the windows are in, but it sure is nice to have some of the piles of dirt flattened out!

Meanwhile, Bruce the ram was up on the trimming stand for shearing. He wasn't really happy about being there, crosstied to a couple of fence posts and unable to go anywhere, nor was he thrilled about the snipping noises he kept hearing. Still, I did manage to get a year and a half's worth of fleece trimmed off, and without a single cut on either sheep or shearer!

I did leave Bruce with a fair bit of wool covering, as winter is coming on quickly and he won't have time to grow a nice long coat before the cold weather arrives. He looks really goofy - I haven't yet figured out how to trim a sheep smoothly *and* get no second cuts in the fleece, so whenever I shear, the sheep end up resembling those foam egg crate mattress toppers with lots of hills and valleys ... at least for a few days, after which the wool seems to fluff itself back up into some semblance of decency. I really should take a shearing course. My priority lies in getting useable fleece from the sheep, rather than in leaving them as pretty as possible ... so far, they are (temporarily) quite ugly and I have nice fleece, so I guess it's working!

Bruce has lovely wool - I will be spinning some of it tonight. I weighed the box of fleece when I was done: 7 lbs of wool! That should keep me occupied for a little while.

Drop Spindles

My Auntie Sharon is interested in drop spindles, so I thought I'd provide a brief explanation of how they work.

Wool is made into yarn by twisting it: as it twists, the little fibres in the wool grab onto each other and hold on for dear life, making the yarn nice and strong. The trick to making yarn, then, is to find a way to keep it twisting while you feed in fibres a bit at a time.

With a spinning wheel, which you've probably seen at some time, the wheel itself keeps turning around, keeping the twist coming into the strand of yarn, and also winding the yarn onto a bobbin.

The older method - ancient, in fact - is a drop spindle. A drop spindle is a stick with a weight of some kind, sort of like a spinning top with a really long stem. The item on the right of this picture that vaguely resembles a mushroom cap on top of a long pencil is a drop spindle.

To spin with this, you wind some fibre around the long stem, pass it up over the 'mushroom cap' and under the hook that is centered on the spindle, then start the top spinning. This twists the loose fibre that is held between your hands and the top of the spindle, which gradually becomes yarn as it twists. Once you have a decent length of yarn spun up, you stop the spindle from spinning around, wind the yarn around the stem of the spindle, and start again.

Women have used tools like this to prepare fibre since before Bible times. When you use a drop spindle, you develop an entirely new appreciation for the generations of women who spun fibre in this way, then wove fabric from their yarn and sewed that fabric into garments to clothe their families. It is no wonder that most people made do with just one or two robes - it would have taken weeks of effort to create a single garment!

You can get lots of information about hand spinning (on drop spindles and wheels) here, including videos you can watch.

If you would like to try it out, you can find 'beginner spinning kits' with simple drop spindles and samples of fibre on ebay, or at your local fibre shop (any place that sells spinning wheels will carry these as well).

Princess Girl falls in love with fibre

Princess Girl and Dinosaur Boy are here three nights a week, and it has become routine that every evening, they ask to watch me spin wool. Believe it or not, it would be a huge disappointment for them if I didn't spin while they have their bedtime story! I am sure this will fade in time, but at the moment, the kids are fascinated by transformation of bunches of messy fibre to smooth, shiny wool.

Tuesday night, Princess Girl really wanted to help me. I put a stool beside my spinning chair as she wanted to "sit right aside you here", then I gave her a handful of fleece and a comb (one of the less pointy and pokey ones). She very studiously combed out the ends of the locks, then handed the teased fibres to me to put on my hand cards and make into rolags. She sat there while I spun, wonderingly holding the bits of fibre in her hands, and watching the pedal go up and down and the wheel go round and round, and yarn wind onto the bobbin.


Last night, she helped me knit.

Sitting beside me on the couch, she held the two balls of hand spun yarn from which I am knitting a scarf, and unwound wool for me as I needed it. At one point, she laid the two strands of yarn across her lap and, giggling, said "I have a wool seat belt!" She seems to find the texture of the yarn incredibly mysterious, holding the balls of wool and exclaiming over the softness.

She is most certainly a princess ... but you know, princesses of old were expected to spin wool and do their needlework, that's what ladies did! Perhaps there is hope for her yet. :)

What a fibre addict does when she has an evening to herself

I was all alone the other night, so I sat down and skirted a fleece.

Translator's note: 'skirting' a fleece means getting the yukky bits off - pulling the straw and hay and burrs and seeds and yukky wool out, and leaving just the nice clean stuff behind.

I am sending some of the fleeces out to be processed, and the mill will be happier (and able to produce a better finished product) if the worst of the mess is cleaned up before I send the wool to them.

For this job, I sat on a stool in the living room with a bag of sheep fleece dumped on the floor in a pile. I pulled lap-sized chunks of fleece from the pile, shook them to get anything loose to fall off, then removed smaller-things-that-weren't-wool by hand. I put the very best and cleanest wool into a box: this wool I'll process by hand, meaning I will card it on my hand carders, spin it (I like to spin 'in the grease', meaning before washing the natural lanolin out of the wool - it makes your hands really soft - and then wash the finished yarn). The "mostly clean" wool went into a box to go to the mill, and the yukkiest bits went into a pile that'll end up on the compost heap. It actually was a fairly pleasant experience: I listened to an audio book while I did it. When I finished, I hand carded some of the nice stuff and started spinning.

In fact, I think I'm gonna go clean another fleece tonight - I have a new audiobook on the go, and this is one of my last nights all alone in the house: The Boy is at summer camp, and the Reluctant Farmer is home in the city. In another week and a half or so, The Reluctant Farmer will be here full time, and Princess Girl and Dinosaur Boy too! It'll be nice to be closer to being settled, but the interim period (while the addition is still under construction and everyone is making do with the smaller space) will be ... interesting.

Yup, I'm gonna go clean fibre and enjoy the peace and quiet ... while it lasts. :)

Experimenting with colour

You can do interesting things with KoolAid powder, wool, and sunshine.

Place wool in a zip lock bag with warm water and unsweetened KoolAid powder. Add a splash of vinegar. Mush the wool around in the coloured water, then set the bag out in the sun for the afternoon. Remove the wool, drain it, rinse it, and hang it to dry.

Voila, coloured wool!

For this experiment I used some washed fleece that I found lying around - I believe it came from the stash of miscellaneous fleeces that are in my shed outside. It's got some second cuts in it, so it wants to be spun up into something on the lumpy bumpy 'creative' side. (Second cuts are the little short bits of wool that you end up with when the shearer goes back over a section to get closer to the skin, somewhat analogous to the bits of hair that fall down your shirt when you get a haircut. They tend to make little lumps on the final spun yarn.)

I took the "strawberry kiwi" and spun it up into a reasonably lumpy thick-and-thin single, then spun up a very smooth thread from some commercially prepared white batting. The two plied together nicely to make a candy striped yarn that I'm attempting to make into ... something. Possibly a felted sunglasses/eyeglasses case, possibly a handbag ... I'll see what happens as I knit.

I carded the "cherry" and "grape" into fluffy bundles of fleece then spun them onto the same yarn, alternating colours. The end result is a fairly loosely spun pink-purple concoction that will probably also end up as some felted item. The openness of the spun wool should lend itself reasonably well to felting, and hey, at this point, it's all about the experiments.

Ahhh, I do love fibre.

A really cool present

My aunt from Ontario (who would be my grandfather Apple Jack's daughter, Dad's sister) sent me a really cool package today!



We used to go to this little town called Frankenmuth (in Michigan) for holidays sometimes. There is a wonderful German Village feel to the place, with a glockenspiel in the town square and a restaurant that serves bread on the table in these little plastic dome covered dishes. What I remember most is the Christmas shop - it's Christmas all year round there, and I have a few very special ornaments brought all the way from there - including one that my aunt got from my favourite shop for The Boy's first Christmas!

Apparently there is also a woolen mill there (I had no idea!) and my aunt picked up some of this lovely fiber for me. The colour is called "Ocean", and it has shades of green, gray and blue all blended together. It's deliciously soft and I'm all excited about working with it! The note says "I bought some blue for you so you can have a different colour to work with for a change ... and this stuff you don't have to work to prepare." Woohoo! Coloured, prepared fiber! Only another fiber nut would understand how happy this makes me.

Hmm ... what does this fiber want to be? A hat? A scarf? Mittens? Thrummed mittens? I'll have to play with it some more and listen to what it says. :) I think it probably wants to be a couple of things - for sure it wants to be thrummed mitts.

The package also included a variation on the thrummed mitten pattern that I had sent (along with some fleece from my pile of "wool waiting for a place to go") awhile back. My aunt has made far more progress than I have: I've got one mitt finished (and haven't started it's buddy yet) and she's managed to complete 3 mitts and evolve a new pattern! I'll have to give her pattern a try: maybe it is immune to that "second mitten syndrome" that mine is suffering from.

Yippeee! More fiber! Thanks Auntie Sharon!

Shearing by hand

Most people call a professional shearer when it is time to get the wool off their sheep. Since McKenzie had already removed half the fleece from Split earlier in the year, though, and I only have five other sheep that need shearing, it didn't really seem worth the trouble to bring someone in.

So ... I got a pair of hand shears, and talked Union Guy into volunteering for Sheep Restraint Duty: he holds the sheep steady, I trim. Trimming a sheep with hand shears takes me anywhere from one to two hours: I am sure it can be done faster, but I'm still learning! Cookie went first, and she looked like a completely different animal when we were done (I don't think she'd ever been shorn!). Natalie was second, and she was very unhappy about the entire process ... perhaps because her lambs were nearby. Brownie was the last we've done, and she was pretty relaxed in comparison ... she struggled some, but her fleece came off in lovely large chunks (I am not yet skilled enough to get a fleece off all in one piece). We put an old carpet down where we were shearing, so her fleece stayed nice and clean.


Unfortunately, the sheep look like they were attacked by a weed whacker when I'm finished with them. They are much cooler, though, and the fleece fluffs back up again after a few days, so they don't look quite so bad. :)

The rams are still not shorn, and they are panting and looking quite miserable, even at temperatures not all that far above zero.

We got plenty of wool from the Icelandic girls, and it is indeed lovely to work with. Brownie's fleece was cleaner and in larger pieces so I tried spinning it directly from the shorn fleece. Wonder of wonders, it worked out! I have several skeins of spun singles washed up and ready to be added to the scarf I am knitting from the fleece taken from my own flock of sheep. What a wonderful feeling to raise the sheep, shear them by hand, prepare the wool entirely on my own, and knit it into something useful!

Fibre Work

AC was asking for photos of my recent fibre work experiments, so here they are!


We start with raw fleece: unwashed wool, straight off the sheep. This is carded, meaning several bits of fleece are stuck to a board that has multiple metal teeth sticking out of it (much like a wire dog brush) and transferred to another card of the same type with a swatting/pulling kind of motion. The fleece is shifted back and forth from one card to another until the fibres in the fleece have been unkinked and most of the vegetable matter has dropped out. The finished fleece is then rolled into a rolag which is used for spinning.

Historical note: my Gram apparently hand carded all the wool for some blankets that are now on The Boy's bed.

As I have not yet acquired a spinning wheel, all my spinning is done using the ancient technology of a drop spindle. Similar devices have been used for ages and ages, even back before Biblical times. Spinning on one of these gives you an incredible respect for the women who spun thread on drop spindles, then wove it into fabric and sewed garments for their families (and tents, and saddle blankets, and everything else they needed).

The spun wool is usually plied, but this time I chose to just make loosely spun singles. This means that the wool was spun into a single strand of yarn then used as it is, without plying. In this picture you see the scarf I've started (well, I assume it is going to be a scarf, but I reserve the right to change my mind).


This is how the wool looks when it is washed. The spun singles on the spindle are wrapped into a skein that is tied in four places to keep the loops from unwrapping. The wool is immersed in hot soapy water, then rinsed clean and hung to dry. Before knitting with this yarn, I will wind it into a ball, as that's less likely to get tangled while I'm working with it.
Usually, two or three of these skeins of singles would be plied together into a single strand of yarn, but this experiment was to see what would happen if I knit with unplied singles. So far the finished product is looking a bit fuzzy and a bit uneven - the yarn is not spun to an even thickness. I've decided this is a feature: you pay extra for slubby yarn at the craft store, but hey, I can make that stuff all by myself!