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