Snail Spirals

Big news! My employers have asked me to go full time! Woo hoo, a bigger paycheck! The downside, of course, is that I'll be away from Emma more, and our daycare costs will be higher until school starts. She will be splitting her day between daycare and playdates, so that helps. Except next week, of course, when her best friend is going on vacation. I still need to figure something out for then. It may end up being lots of daycare. I'll be glad when Shaun gets back from Friday Harbor (seventeen more days!) and I can stop being a single mom. I love her dearly, but sometimes it's overwhelming.

So I was asked about going full time a week or so ago, and accepted. I start full time on Aug 1. To celebrate, I bought a fleece.



That's the picture from the listing, as I haven't taken one of my own yet. I got this from a seller on Etsy, genopalette, and it is yummy. It's a Merino ewe hogget fleece, beautiful and white and soft and soft and soft. A hogget fleece is the first shearing, a rather ugly word for something so beautiful.



Raw on left, washed on the right. That lock is the only one I've washed so far. I just couldn't wait to see what the wool looked like clean. The fleece is pretty greasy, as I expected, and the raw wool has a tan cast from the lanolin and dirt. That washed right out though, just swished in a bowl of hot soapy water and then in a bowl of plain hot water.

The wool has really good lock formation, and should be easy to process and comb. The raw fleece weighs 5 3/8 pounds, so I expect I'll have a bit more than 2 1/2 pounds to work with after it's washed. I spread it out to look at, and I couldn't see any second cuts and only a few shreds of grass. This is a beautiful fleece.