Update on Project Fleece

To buy a fleece is to embrace process, and I am doing just that. There’s nothing fast about creating clothing from a freshly shorn fleece! It’s been a while since I talked about Tamarind, the beautiful chocolate brown sheep whose fleece I have half of (Dave has the other half).

I decided to stop spinning singles after I had 17 one-ounce bobbins. I have many more batts I could spin, but I know I’m going to use this color as the accent on a yoked sweater – so I don’t need much. I wanted to move on to spinning the main color so I can cast on. My goal is to finish the sweater before I go to Scotland in March. Here are my first two bobbins of 3-ply yarn, along with some singles still on storage bobbins:

By the time I was done, I had 16 ounces of yarn. I twisted up those four skeins together so you can see that a pound of yarn is bigger than my head!

Here’s a close up:

I want to knit the body of the sweater in the lightest grey that Muesli’s fleece provides, and I got 21 one-ounce batts in that color. That is probably enough. But I wasn’t sure, and I wanted to go ahead and process the medium grey fleece into batts in case I needed to use them (I thought I might ply 2 singles of light grey with 1 singles of medium grey). The medium grey had more cotted ends (matted together). At least, I think that’s what they were. I knew from my previous spinning that it would be best to remove these at the outset rather than expect the carder to open them up all the way. I used my flick carder to do this.

Here is how the clean fleece looks right out of the basket. Beautiful crimp but the ends are stuck together:

I twist the lock in the middle and flick from the middle out to the tip – just like brushing hair. Then I turn it the other way to flick the other side from the middle out to the cut end (where it was shorn). This is what it looks like after that:

When the fiber is already this well aligned, it goes through the drum carder more easily and, by extension, spins more easily.

Back to the light grey – here is my first bobbin of singles (4 oz) snuggling into a fluffy batt:

My goal is to spin one ounce per day. That’s doable and doesn’t result in muscle ache. Why speed up now, right? Slow and steady wins the race.