All the Pretty Fleece - Romney

I have a love of Romney, especially the fleeces from the Romneys my dear friend Shirley DeMaris raises. To me she has the best ones out there, I think part of it is because I find her little blocky teddy bear faced sheeps the cutest ever.

Shirley and one of her rams at the Shaniko wool gathering.

This fleece was grown by Maxine.

This is a lovely wavy soft silky silver gray fleece.

This fleece was much greasier than the last one that I did. So after a couple of cold water washes to get the dirt off I did a hot water wash with a tiny bit of original blue Dawn dish soap. Then I did a hot water rinse with a good glug of white vinegar. The vinegar helps return the wool to its proper ph and leaves it softer than it would be without it. How can I tell when its clean is a common question, well the simple answer is you can feel it. A fleece will be tacky to the touch if it has a bunch of grease in it.

You can see the yellow of the grease in this picture of the wool before washing.

This fleece has a nice soft silky handle. I can't wait to spin it up.

*Update*

Oh man how this fleece begs to be yarn, it hopped right onto the bobbin and just spun like straw into gold. You don't have to be Rumpelstiltskin to make magical yarn with this wool. I got a bit more technical this round. First I weighed out the washed wool, .5 oz for each yarn.

Getting fancy now!

Then I combed one batch, I even weighed the waste wool. It wouldn't register as ounces so I had to switch to grams. I only lost 3 grams to waste. I struggle a bit with the conversions so I have a handy converter app on my phone. 0.5 oz is equal to 13 grams, so a loss of 3 grams isn't too bad.

Lovely nests of combed top.

Then I carded the other batch of washed wool, this gave me .5 oz of carded fluffy rolags.

Fluffy carded rolags begging to be spun.

Then came the hardest decision, what to spin this lovely fleece on.... well I decided to pull out the wheel I learned to spin on. My first wheel is a Country Craftsman, and this is what she lives for. This wheel loves to spin fast and really makes spinning long wools fun. I like to compare this wheel to a well trained hot blooded horse, you can't be lazy and half doze off while spinning on her. You must make constant adjustments as your bobbin fills.

I fondly call her my Lady.

Once spun you can once again see the difference in the way carded and combed fibers lay in the finished yarn. As before the carded fibers make a more open lofty yarn and the combed fibers make a smooth shinny yarn. This fleece could very easily be used either way, I like the way both yarns came out.

Carded on top, combed on bottom

Now why I weighed them to begin with. I noticed last time a difference in yardage I got out of roughly the same amount of fiber. This time I made sure that the starting weights where as close as I could possibly make them. I got 53 yards of yarn out of the .5 oz  when I carded the fiber and I got 61 yards out of slightly less than .5 oz when I combed the fiber. So if you want to get the most out of your Romney fleece don't worry about the waste you get when using combs.

All the Pretty Fleeces - East Friesian

Happy group of East Friesians and East Friesian crosses having breakfast.
So to kick this adventure off I'm going to start out with something totally out there, East Friesian. East Friesians originated in Germany and are mainly know for their milk production. Because of their breeding being focused on milking their wool can be all over the place when it comes to quality and style. This fleece is from a ram named Micky and style of his wool is very much like a long wool, Boarder Leicester like, just not quite as wavy and a bit coarser in my experience.

Over all its a very nice strong long wool that has a silky handle.

I didn't get a before washing shot of this fleece because I was so excited to see what it was like clean. Being a very low grease fleece I decided that I would just do a cold water wash with no soap to make sure that it didn't have all of the oils stripped from it, leaving it coarse and dry. It was very dirty, I did four or five water changes on it before it left the water not a murky mess.

Today I will be carding and combing this fleece, then spinning both. I will keep you posted on the results. Until then Happy Spinning.


*Update*

I got my samples all spun up. Its fun to see how much differently the carded and combed spun. I decided to get totally hands on and use my gear spindle to do these test spins.

I love this spindle!

I chose to card and spin the East Friesian first. It cards up very fluffy and spins very easily, yet not as evenly as I would like. I ended up with a few lumps and bumps. It makes a very fluffy yarn when spun from rolag.

See how fluffy the rolags are compared to the unprepped locks.

You can see the lumpy bits to this yarn.

Then I moved on to combing a sample amount. There was more waste than I expected, but I was able to get very clean little nests of combed top from this method of prep. When spinning this it was just as easy to spin as the carded fiber, except it wanted to spin finer and much more evenly. Which in turn made a very smooth shiny yarn.

Such pretty little nests of combed top.

Smooth and shiny.

Oh man I learned a lot with this first fleece. I find that carding is much faster and easier, yet I prefer the results of the combing. If I was to spin the rest of the fleece I would comb it all because I find the resulting yarn softer, shinier and smoother, which would all give the final project better stitch definition. Or at least I think it would, maybe that should be something I play with, but  it will have to wait until later.

Carded yarn on top, combed yarn on bottom.

This lovely fleece and the picture of the flock of sheep are from my wonderful shepherd friend Correy McAtee of Custom Colored Critters 

My awesome spindle was made by Scott Snyder of Snyder Spindles

 

All the Pretty Fleeces - Introduction

This year I have decided to take on the big daunting task of spending lots of money on dirty wool. LOL! Okay the buying of the wool is really the easiest part, the big scary hard part is that I am planning on taking a hand full of each fleece hand washing it, prepping it by hand and spinning it, all the while sharing with you all of the hows and whys. My goal is to share with you the wide world of wool outside of a industry filled with merino.

I have been spinning now for almost 4 years, but I got my start in wool well before that. I started raising sheep in high school for a 4H project and I kinda never stopped. Well that was until life got in the way 5 years ago and I had to sell off my flock. To fill my need of sheep came angora rabbits and a spinning wheel. All the while making some pretty amazing friends that will be helping me on this project too.

Shortly after getting my wheel I started a large project of spinning a full fleece from one of my girls, Maude. She was a kind old North Country Cheviot, which will always live with me now.                    

Check out my totally awesome husband modeling the Maude vest for me. lol

Along the way I have dove into many other really fun fleece projects with all kinds of different breeds and colors of wool. Which has brought me back here, so lets take a look at all there is out there in this wide world of wool.

Onward and Upward!

With 2015 put away all nice and neat, its time to move forward. This year will be full of hope and adventure!

So far I have started a new knitting project. Over the long Christmas weekend I did a bit of binge watching of the fabulous Dr Who and I decided that I to needed an amazingly long totally cool scarf. So I ran right out to the internet and found myself a pattern for the scarf. Then I went to my local yarn shop and bought a ton of yarn!

I have also been brain storming a new project that allows me to buy a ton of new wool and to share all of these fleeces with all of you. I would really love to spin a couple new different breed a month. So we shall see were this wild endeavor leads.