First of all, announcements!

1. Bloggy Birthdays! Marcy yesterday, Dan tomorrow (and never jam today). Cake to both - I’ll see both this weekend and I think there will be some birthday treats.
2. Club Tsock #2, Daughter of the Regiment, has apparently landed nearly everywhere it’s supposed to. Flock members, if you haven’t received yours, please let us know.
3. MA Sheep & Wool - coming up this weekend, Cummington, MA. We will be there, tent on the west side of the main drag. Come hang out! (Note: Apparently the MA people didn’t get the memo either, and we’re still listed as Vancalcar Acres instead of Holiday Yarns.)

 
So… as I was saying… Dan had this Great Fleece Adventure. And yours truly was on the phone with him half the time he was there, and the upshot is…

1. Combs.

   

   Yup. My first. Indigo Hound single-pitch Viking combs. In their own little custom leather sheath.

   

   Slippery, slippery is the slope.

2. A two-yard niddy, as seen in the last post:

   

   With one little corner chewed off by (I am reliably informed) a very cute border collie - but hey, it still works.

3. Fleeces. Three of them.

   

   That is, two whole ones, half of another, portions of two more - so five sheep, but the rough functional equivalent of three fleeces.

This brings my total fleece inventory to… to… no, I think I’m not quite ready to quote a number, on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me, or perhaps commit me. Suffice it to say that… I now have a LOT of fleece, and have been wallowing in Romney for the past week or so.

Slippery, slippery, slippery….

Dan’s car was quite literally FULL of fleece; having chosen and set aside my share of the booty I then helped him lug some 40 pounds to Zeilinger’s, so I can attest that 40 pounds is a pretty impressive amount.

My own smaller car was also fairly full of fleece by the end of the day, some of it smelling pretty rank, because this was an estate de-stash, and some of the fleeces had been stored for three years. You know how they say “never buy a stored fleece”? Well, for one thing, I’ve had pretty good luck with stored fleeces, though to date nothing older than the previous year’s shearing. And for another - hey, they don’t say “never accept a stored fleece if it’s free” - right? Right. So with nothing to lose, home I came carting a lot of stinky old fleece (as well as a nice batch of better-smelling and more recent stuff).

I needn’t have worried. In fact, I didn’t. (See above re nothing to lose.) In the event, even the nastiest of it cleans up a treat. It’ll take me a while to work my way through all of it, and I have to confess that I haven’t weighed most of it so I don’t really even know how much I have. But what I do know, about what I do have, is that it’s “cherce.”

There’s a BIG grey Romney from 2006.

Some sun damage at the tips, but even after pretty brutal trimming the staple is about 5″, and it’s beautifully soft and a lovely color. More hereafter about what I’m doing with it (so far, anyway).

There’s a smaller Border Leicester, also from 2006, also grey but more heathery and variegated.

There was only one Cotswold fleece, and neither Dan nor I had ever worked with Cotswold before, so we split it.

I can’t remember whether or not this one was more recent (I have notes somewhere, but don’t ask me where). Doesn’t look like much, but zowie it cleans up real purty.

Then there were two devastatingly beautiful 2008 Border Leicesters, as to which Dan, when he gave me my pick, said, “You can take anything you like, but you can’t have more than half of either of these.” (No argument here. I thought it was pretty durn generous of him to part with any.)

I couldn’t resist taking a little of “Cocoa’s” fleece, but not more than a fair-sized sample because Dan was really in love with this one, and who is to blame him?

After washing, I have about 4.5 ounces…

… with a long dark shiny staple about, well, however many inches this is:

I was a little greedier with the white BL named “Vera Wang,” because Dan had said in so many words that he wasn’t really as interested in white fleece for this go-round. I thought I wasn’t either (see above re not admitting how much fleece I already have, and much of that is white), but this was too pretty to resist.

Same staple length as “Cocoa,” shiny, crimpy, silky. I’m afraid I helped myself to almost half.

And here are the preliminary results:

Cotswold above, Vera Wang below. The sample yarns are superficially similar in texture and color and shine. Vera is a joy to spin - love me some long shiny longwool staple - but the real surprise was the Cotswold, which cleaned up bright and pearly and spins up with a soft subtle halo. I haven’t washed these yet, and I fully expect the halo will bloom a little more when I do.

L-R: heathery grey BL, Cocoa, Romney. All lovely.

I haven’t thought very far into the future about the big picture for these - I’m afraid I never do when I fall in love with fleece - but I did have at least one specific idea about the Romney, and I have made a healthy start on that.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately, in the Abby crowd and in several spinny groups on Ravelry, about what makes a good handspun sock yarn. As millspun yarns go, I have a deep and abiding love for the custom-spun yarn we use for the Tsock kits. Once you get into the world of handspun, though, the range of possibilities - combinations and permutations of different fibers and different prep and spinning techniques - expands incalculably. Merino has become the commercial default because it’s famously soft and is plentifully processed. But is softness the only quality you want in a sock yarn? Not hardly. Several spinners I know tout Romney for sock yarn because it is strong and durable and, if handled correctly, smooth. I’ve been thinking for some time about a blend of Romney with kid mohair and a little silk, for extra durability and smoothness and softness, spun softly and plied tightly; but until now I haven’t had the wherewithal to experiment with it on a large scale.

No longer an issue. I’m pretty plentifully supplied with kid mohair locks and tussah top, both dyed in a range of appealing colors - have already been using them in the sparkly “Painting on Velvet” batts I’ve been playing with. (Yeah, another story I haven’t really told yet, though there were intimations of the beginnings of it in this post, and while I’m in this parenthesis I take leave to remark that sparkly batts and the yarns derived therefrom are a PAIN to photograph accurately, which is one reason I haven’t even tried.) And I really love the idea of heathery color blends on a grey base.

So I washed up a good whack of Romney, trimmed and flicked it, fired up the drum carder, and started playing.

Mini-test-batt:

Sample yarn - spun semi-woolen, quick-&-dirty chain-ply (the real thing will be a proper conventional 3-ply):

Swatch:

This isn’t ideal yet, but it’s promising enough to warrant further experiment. I want to get the singles a little finer and softer, the ply-twist a little tighter - still reaching for the fruition of the theory. The picture doesn’t do justice to the heatheriness of the color blend, which is all I could wish.

Wash more; trim & flick more; card more.

Here’s about a pound of Romney, turned into many huge fluffy batts:

Sorry, that looks like one big grey amorphous blob, doesn’t it. Almost as hard to photograph as sparkly stuff. And where’s a cat when you need him for scale? Anyway, that’s a good-sized window screen that I use for drying. And in real life the batts look even bigger than they are because the Romney staple is SO crimpy-sproingy. Which I think bodes well for socks.

Still with the blues.

I think I’m calling this “Mood Indigo.”

A little over 90 grams (divided evenly into three for the convenience of producing one ply per batt), so enough for a pair of socks. About 85% Romney, 10% Kid Mohair, 5% Tussah Silk.

I’m not planning to spin that set - if all goes well they’re for someone else. So last night I started again with the test samples and some different colors:

Colorwise, not exactly what I had in mind - I need some darker red silk for that - but interesting, I think. In my haste I got a little sloppy and the silk got a little neppy (“Bessie met a bus; a bus met Bessie; the bus was messy; the mess was Bessie…”). I kind of like the flecky way it looks, but for sock purposes I’m not 100% happy about the slight bumpiness.

Spinning up a bit finer…

Plying up a little tighter (though still maybe not quite tight enough for my taste)…

Swatching up smooth and springy, and pretty close to my standard sock gauge this time:

Promising.

Very.

I think it might be time to break out the teals and greens and play some more.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Bloggerei, Spinning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.