In-fleece-station

This is some of my crummy hand carded roving, I was dying some of my hand spun yarn and decided I'd dye roving too, why not? These are colored with food coloring and powdered drink mix. Since it was a hot sunny day, I just covered the wet, dyed wool with some plastic wrap and let the sun heat it up on the bbq counter. It got hot! This is some of the wool that wasn't thoroughly scoured during washing, so I'm not sure how well the dye took. I've since spun this and Navaho plied it. But I still haven't checked it for color fastness. I need to get an 'after' picture up.


Here it is spun and plied. Over plied in some spots, and soft and fluffy in others. Squishy and stretchy.

Lets see, left to right are 2 skeins of single ply hand spun Corridale top, I think the 3rd & 4th skeins I'd ever spun. The next one is a 2 ply, consisting of skeins 5 & 6. The little blue skein is some merino that I prepped all by myself - so its lumpy and bumpy, but very stretchy. I'm really pleased with how stretchy and sproingy the merino and rambouillet are.

More 2 ply corridale, the rest of skeins 5 & 6, the little skein is Navaho plied. I like how all the colors came out, and right now I'm thinking of using all these to knit and felt a little purse. Unless I think of something else I'd rather do. :-)


I have one more dying project, a big one. I have around 2 pounds of hand spun (not by me), undyed corridale that I want to knit into a hoody. I want a rich brown shade, and so decided to use acid dyes. I bought the dyes, and I keep thinking I'll get it done tomorrow, but never quite get to it. Soon.

I wanted to see what it was like to spin commercially prepped Merino top, so I bought one ounce from a LYS, it was nice to spin, and its soft, but not as springy or cushy as my not-so-well-prepped rovings. The color is very pretty.


I didn't take a nap after my last post, I started my fleece list. Type of fleece, color, purchase weight and price and stuff like that. I'd forgotten I started that list, until I reread the post. :-) Blond moment, or something like that. Hee, hee, at least I have my posts to remind me.

Yesterday some lovely black alpaca arrived, and last Tuesday a very small amount of brown Merino, now I can remember to enter them into the list. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to finish preping the first of the Rambouillet fleece, only a few ounces left. And some black Rambouillet is still on the way.

A few ounces of wool can easily translate into several more hours of flicking and carding. Very soon, I'll start playing with blending some of the wool and alpaca, and blending the natural colors together too. And I haven't bought any fleece in a week. But I'm still thinking about some more alpaca. Maybe some Suri.

For now, I need to research dishwashers, as yesterday ours went on strike. Full of dirty dishes of course. I'm pretty sure the circuit board needs replacing, and it seems like anytime I have someone come out to fix a major appliance, the repair runs about half the cost of just buying a new one. I've never been too pleased with the performance of this one, the bottom rack needs replacing anyway ($100) and its 8 years old. Thats my story and I'm sticking to it.