In anticipation of my carder arriving on Wednesday (THREE DAYS!), I decided to get a whole pile o' wool ready. I got out Buttercup's fleece and the dye last night, and had lots of fun creating a beautiful variety of greens. I worked in 100-gram batches of wool, and dyed in the mesh bags I use for washing. I've found this works very well for ease of handling the wool without felting or messing up the locks too much.



I decided that I want a green sweater, but not a flat monotone green. Using more than one color, or even more than one shade of a single color, gives a much more interesting yarn. The first batch I dyed was straight Spruce.



The next batch was a 2:1 mix of Spruce:Emerald.



I decided both these were more blue than I want for my sweater, but they will look nice carded in with the rest of the greens.

The third batch was 2:1 Spruce:Sun Yellow.



The fourth was 1:0.5:1 Spruce:Sun Yellow:Brown.



And the fifth was 0.5:1:0.25 Sapphire:Sun Yellow:Black.



There is some color variation within each batch, due to the natural variation of grays in the fleece, which ranges from pearly light gray to lightish charcoal. It looks somewhat blotchy now, but I think it will give a fabulous depth to the finished yarn.

After I did those five, I paused to evaluate. Actually, I paused to go to bed. I was so involved in dyeing Buttercup and washing Herkel (more on that in a minute), that I was shocked to look at the clock and see that it was 3:30am. Oops. Off I went to bed.



This morning, in real light, I evaluated. Numbers 1 and 2 are too blue. They will be accent colors. Number 3 is very very nice, and is a keeper. Numbers 4 and 5 also good, and are quite close in color, despite being very different mixes. I'll use Number 4, and I think it will combine very well with Number 3 as the base color for my yarn.

So, I'll dye most of the rest of the fleece with Numbers 3 and 4. I'm also going to dye 100g batches in bright chartreuse green, dark red, and black, as accent colors to blend in along with the blues I did last night.

So, that was last night. While the dyes were going, I also worked on Herkel's fleece. I didn't get all the grease out when I washed the fleece the first time, and consequently it was impossible to comb. The first two bags I washed combed up fine, so I think I may have gotten paranoid about felting it, or tried to do too much at once or something. Anyway, I've been unable to comb any more wool because it's just too sticky. I got it out last night intending to wash 100 grams, enough to ply with what I have already spun, but then I got on a roll and ended up washing the whole thing. It's not completely dry yet, but I can already tell it's much better. Once it's dry, I'll weigh out 100 g and set that aside to comb for the cobweb shawl project. I figure 200 g of yarn should spin up somewhere in the neighborhood of 4400 yards, if I keep going as fine as I have been. That should be enough for whatever shawl I end up designing, but I may set aside an additional 100 g, just in case. I decided to card the rest. Actually, I'll card one batt and see how it goes. This is very fine, crimpy wool, so if it gets neppy on the carder, I'll comb the whole thing.



So I started out with a dye evening, and washed wool to fill in the time when the dyes were cooking. The wool has to soak while it's washing, though, so I still had time on my hands. I put Season One of Battlestar Galactica (which my brother-in-law was kind enough to addict me to hook me on introduce me to over Christmas) on the DVD player and picked open some Border Leicester/Romney roving that sat way too long in its bag and was partially matted and didn't draft well.



I got this wool last summer, in Friday Harbor, from a spinning friend who was destashing. It's local Friday Harbor wool, from Shepherd's Croft, the farm of another spinning friend. I've spun one bobbin full of singles already (that ball in front), and while it came out OK,



the slight matting and difficult drafting made it less than fun. So I'm picking the roving open and will send it through the carder (THREE DAYS!!). I'm aiming for a sweater-weight 3-ply yarn with this, and may possibly combine it with the Tunis I spun a year ago. Each is only 8 oz, but if I get another pound or so of a coordinating wool to tie them together, it will work for a sweater. Maybe I'll contact Annette at Shepherd's Croft and buy a piece of one of her white fleeces next spring, and dye it.

Oh, and that gorgeous basket up there? I picked that up yesterday in Portland after taking Shaun to the airport. We went to Goodwill for a couple pairs of long pants that actually fit Emma's fast-growing self, and there it was: a sturdy wood slat basket with leather handles, reinforced top and bottom edges, and a removable cloth liner, for a dollar! It's 15 inches in diameter and 9" tall. I got the basket, three pairs of pants, a skirt, a dress, and three shirts for Emma, three shirts for me, four Handwoven magazines, a hardcover Harry Potter book, a kid's book and little dolly for Emma, a DVD, and a brand new L.L. Bean backpack bookbag with the tags still on. All for about $50. I love thrift stores.

Well, we're moved in. Still no internet at home (Really, Verizon? It truly takes you a week and a half to flip the switch and let us get online? Whatever. You said by the end of today, remember. AT THE VERY LATEST, you said. We'll see.), so I'm stealth blogging from work.

We're mostly unpacked, and settled in nicely. I like the layout much better than the other house, especially the living room. We got rid of the honkin' enormous entertainment center that came with the house we bought in Friday Harbor, and bought ourselves a pretty little coffee table style TV stand and a DVD rack, which is much better. We also bought a dinette set that will be Emma's desk. A girl has to have a place to color, after all, and I think it's really important that she has a dedicated place to do her homework. The table fits perfectly in the breakfast nook in the kitchen, along with two of the chairs, and the other two chairs are in the living room. Yay, we have extra seating now! Plus, it's not an overly large table but still big enough for Emma, a friend, and all their crayons and pens and papers and scissors and glue and tape and glitter and stickers.

I know I said last time that we have too much stuff, so how does buying more furniture fit in? Honestly, next time we move, the TV table, DVD rack, and dinette set should take up less room in the truck than the entertainment center we got rid of. When I said honkin', I meant honkin'. I'm sure they collectively weigh less, too. The dinette is real wood, not particleboard, and the TV table, while particleboard, is nice and small.

Enough of moving. Unpacking is almost done, and I'm sick of it. So I washed some wool.



This is eleven batches of the merino ewe hogget fleece I got last July. I was getting a bit nervous with having this hanging about still greasy, so decided that it was time to start washing. I didn't want the lanolin to harden.

That's probably about a third of the fleece, washed in mesh bags in dishpans in the bathtub. Two soapy soaks and two rinses, and while I haven't thoroughly checked it for residual grease yet, I think it's clean. I'll do that tonight once it's dry, before I put it into the storage pillowcase. Merino is a greasy breed, eager to felt, and this is a hogget fleece (first shearing) so the fiber is very fine. I washed it carefully, in small batches, with my hottest tap water, and so seem to have avoided any felting issues, thankfully. This should comb up beautifully.

I've also been spinning. In addition to some contract work (cashmere and silk, mmm), I've been plugging away on Herkel's wool. I'm still working on the bobbin I started when my in-laws were here in June, with the first 100 grams of wool I combed. I spun one nest of the combed top last night, a total of 8 grams, and it took me 2 hours and 20 minutes. I have 38 grams of top left, about 11 hours of spinning time!

I get all smug when think about how many yards of singles must be on that bobbin....

Another update on what I've been up to:



That's a lovely natural gray Corriedale fleece, that I somehow purchased from last month from Sheepeez on Etsy. I saw this fleece while browsing one day, loved it, but talked myself out of buying it because money's tight. A couple weeks later, after I had sold a skein or two of yarn, I saw that it was still listed. Well, that has to be a sign, right?



It's from a 100% Corriedale sheep named Buttercup, in gorgeous shades of gray from light to dark. Buttercup is a girl but the fleece was a bit... shall we say...fragrant. It was mandatory that I wash it right away. I like the way raw fleece smells, but I suspect the less-obsessed members of my household don't hold the same appreciation I do.

It's all good now, though. It washed up odor-free, lovely and soft.



The raw fleece weighed 5.5 pounds, and after washing it weighs 3 pounds. The staple is about 4 inches, and it has a gentle crimp. It's soft, but sort of a durable soft.



I'm thinking there's a sweater in that pile of wool.

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.

I saw this little quiz on Suz's blog, and took it just for fun. I was a little surprised at the results:


How evil are you?

Angelic? Wha...? I mean, I don't think I'm a horrible person, but come on, can't I be at least a little evil? Some of the questions were a little too general, though. For example, the last question ("What do you fantasize most about?") did not have "wool" or "birdwatching" as choices. Come to think of it, though, those options probably wouldn't have changed the quiz outcome. Oh well. Just please don't call me Pollyanna.

I washed Herkel's fleece today.



It came mostly clean with one soapy soak, but there were still some dirty clumpy tips, so I gave it a second soapy soak. Then two rinses, the last with a glug of vinegar, and voila!



I was searching around the web last night, casually looking at wool comb prices, just for background information, you know...... The lowest prices I found online for Indigo Hound English combs were at Bountiful. I'm looking at the five-pitch fine model. Anybody know a better price than $135? Or do you know somebody that has a set they no longer want? They don't ever seem to come up on the used equipment pages.



In other news, I've been waiting patiently and today I got my invite to Ravelry. I signed up at the beginning of September, after resisting for a long time. I did it primarily to be able to browse the finished projects and see what things look like in different yarns, and see how the items look when made and worn by various people. I thought that I probably wouldn't enter anything myself, but just use it as a reference. However, I uploaded pictures to Flickr throughout the past week, and when I got my invite this morning, I found myself frittering away the entire time Emma was at school, creating project pages and exploring Ravelry. I entered a few older projects (I had to add the Urchin Shawl to their pattern list, after all!), but I don't know that I'll enter every project I've ever done. It's just too much of a time sink. Maybe slowly, over time.

I did, however, get all Flickr-ified over the past week, so if you want to see my recent and historic weaving, knitting, crochet, hardanger, and cross stitch projects, feel free to look! I haven't added the spinning pictures yet. I'm mostly only uploading finished item pictures, since I have progress pictures here on the blog and there's no need to duplicate things that much. I know that Ravelry only does knit and crochet, but I got on a roll with the uploading, and put in all the finished fibery pictures I had on my computer. I haven't done any cross stitch for probably close to five years, but I think I may have to pull out a couple UFO's and finish them off.

So anyway, I have lemminged right along onto the Ravelry bandwagon. My name over there is snailspirals, if anyone wants to be my friend.....

(Now I'm having flashbacks to first grade, when I asked a girl named Sharon if she would be my friend, and she looked at me scornfully and said "No." That may have been when my reclusive tendencies took root.)

Today was a very good, fiber filled day. I got all inspired this morning, and moved an old dresser in from the garage to the loom room, and transferred all my weaving accessories and small yarn cones from the boxes in the closet into the drawers. The loom came with a dresser to hold all this stuff, but when Emma's cheap-o clothes dresser gave up the ghost last spring, the weaving dresser went to live in her room. I just hadn't gotten around to bringing in the other one. It is nice to have my bobbin winder off the arm of the futon, and a place to keep my warping reel off the floor and out of the way.



There's actually a door that's supposed to go over that gaping hole in the front, but it's warped and needs to be fixed. The whole dresser needs to be refinished, but I obviously haven't gotten to that for a year now, and I'd rather have my stuff put away. Actually, I'm not sure I should refinish it, as it's old and may have some value. The person that gave it to us didn't know much about it, except that it's old. There are no markings or labels on it, so I don't really have any way of finding out. The walnut desk to the right of the dresser, though, is definitely an antique; it was made by my great-great grandfather for my maternal grandmother when she was a girl, in the early 1920's.

That occupied my time while Emma was at school today. After I picked her up and we had lunch, I decided to overdye some yarn. I tried dandelion-dyeing two skeins last spring, and it wasn't too successful. They came out a kind of murky green-yellow. (The project wasn't a total loss, though. Emma and I had a wonderful afternoon picking two gallons of dandelion flowers from all over our neighborhood.) Anyway, I decided to overdye the skeins blue.

Then, while I had those in the dye pot, I decided on a whim to try my hand at space-dyeing. I had ordered eleven skeins of Knitpicks Bare 100% merino DK weight yarn last spring when I was gearing up for the crochet class I taught in Friday Harbor. I wasn't sure what yarn I wanted to supply for the students, so I bought the DK and also worsted weight Wool of the Andes. I ended up using the Wool of the Andes in the class, so I was left with this giant bag of DK merino. Big pile of white yarn.....dye equipment out.......dreary rainy afternoon....... It seemed like the right thing to do.



I did three skeins space-dyed: the rainbow one on the top row, the red-orange-yellow one in the middle, and the blue-purple one on the bottom (didn't photograph well). The two darker blue skeins on the top right are what started the dye adventure (they are the handspun Coopworth skeins from August 2006), and they came out a beautiful peacock blue. The lighter blue skein on the top left is a skein of Knitpicks that I threw in the dyebath (straight Sapphire Jacquard dye) with the Coopworth. I put that skein in partway through the cooking, and it came out a nice robin's egg blue.

The two green skeins on the bottom are dyed with the leftovers. I put too much blue and green on the rainbow skein and it didn't exhaust (though the other colors did), so when I rinsed the skein, it lost a lot of dye. The water in the sink turned a pretty shade of dark teal, so I siphoned it out of the sink into the dyepot, added the leftover green, blue, and yellow dyes from the cups I used to paint the space-dyed skeins, and let it cook. The darker one is a really pretty emerald green and the other, which I put in halfway through, came out half as dark. They look good together, and would make a nice scarf, I think.

Happily, my hands and kitchen came through unscathed, with no dye drips. I painted the space-dyed skeins on plastic wrap on the counter, so I was vigilant about the mess. Emma wanted to help paint, but I vetoed that. We'll dye again when it's warm out, and take the mess outside so she can help.

So, that was the dye part of my day. While that was going on, the mail came. It was a very exciting mail day. I forced myself to wait until the dyeing was done and cleaned up, though, before looking at what I got. First, I unpacked this:



Courtesy of the Spinner's and Weaver's Housecleaning Pages, a Schacht 15" end-delivery shuttle and seven pirns! I haven't looked at that website for months, and when I popped in there last week after my interview, I saw this listed. It had been up for less than half an hour, and I took it as a sign. Fired off an email to the lister, sent a check the next day, and it was mine! Less than half the price of new, too, which is great.

There was a second box in the mail, too. From a farm in California. A sheep farm. Inside was this:



This is 1.5 pounds of Merino/Columbia cross wool, from a sheep named Herkel, who lives at Utopia Ranch. It is so beautiful.



Look at that crimp.



So. Very. Soft.



It will wash up bright, bright white. Lustrous and glisteny.



Staple length is 4.5". Did I mention the gorgeous crimp and softness? I may have to get combs and process this lock by lock.

Oh, and I may have bought a second batch of this fleece today. About 5 minutes after opening the box containing the first half. :-)

Well! It's been a while. I've been very busy, and am getting lots of things done. I finally finished Dad's Christmas Sweater on Tuesday night. I really think it will fit Dad this time- it's quite big on me, and fits Shaun just fine. If it doesn't fit, too bad. I am NOT ripping this out again!!



It's a really good feeling to have this done, and done right this time. Now it's a garment that will be used, and isn't just wasted effort.

I also finished a pair of socks this week, but I forgot to take a picture, and they're not very interesting anyway. It's the pair I started here. The colors continued to pool weirdly, and I'm not sure I really like the finished product. They fit just fine, but the self-patterning yarn didn't pattern very well. I may overdye them.

Today I started washing the superfine New Zealand Merino fleece I bought off Ebay last fall. This is a truly special fleece. I unrolled the whole thing on the deck to shake it out and get a good look at it. When you look at the outside, from a distance, it doesn't look like much.



Kind of dingy. But, if you look closer and get underneath the greasy tips, you see this:



It is glorious. Unbelievably soft, fine fibers, crimpy, and snowy white. I washed up about a quarter of it this morning, and I think I'm in love. There is some VM that is left behind, and I think I'm going to have to send it through another soapy wash, but it is looking great. I'm going to spin this as very very very fine laceweight.

In gardening news, the first fuschias have opened in the baskets I planted myself!

Well, even though I haven't posted for a while, I've been getting lots done. I finished washing the Rambouillet x Cormo fleece over the weekend. What a job that was! I wanted to get it done before we move, so that the whole fleece was processed the same way- same water, same drying method. I can't wait to get this carded up and start spinning it. Need to borrow the Guild's carder first.

Here it is in all it's poufy whiteness. It is so soft and yummy. I haven't weighed it yet to see how much grease and dirt it lost during the wash (it started at 6.7 pounds), but it couldn't have been too much. I only picked out three burrs and five 1/2" pieces of straw while I was washing it, and that was all I saw. I am now a great believer of buying fleeces from sheep who have been coated. It makes a huge difference. There was some sandy debris that washed out as soon as it hit the water, and a fair bit of grease, enough that it required two soapy washes and two rinses, but it wasn't really caked.



Is that a future spinner in that picture? She's certainly fascinated by wool and the whole spinning process. When I was at spinning group last time, she held on to the back bar of my wheel and put her foot on the treadle next to mine while I was spinning. What a great helper!

I also finished most of a pair of socks over the weekend. This is a Fortissima self-striping yarn, not sure which color number. I tried a new (to me) beginning, and I really like it. Instead of casting on and knitting merrily away, I used a provisional cast on and worked 1x1 rib for an inch, worked a round of k2tog yo, worked stockinette for an inch, then folded over the rib and worked the provisional cast-on stitches together with the leg stitches and continued down the leg. The k2tog yo row made a nice little picot edge at the fold, the ribbing on the inside keeps the sock up, and the stockinette on the outside shows off the yarn. And no cast-on edge! I'd like to (modestly) point out how well the stripes match up.



I really like the way these turned out, and wish I had made all the socks I've ever made with this method. I'm sure that someone else has come up with this before, but I worked it out on my own. It's a very spiffy way to start top-down socks. I've always been vaguely unhappy with a cast-on edge at the top of a sock, just where it needs to be stretchiest.

I was going to finish these up last night, but I was too tired and had to go to bed shortly after Emma did. Maybe I'll get to them tonight, if I get some packing done first.

The house will be ours tomorrow! We went and signed all the escrow papers yesterday, which took almost an HOUR. There was a stack of forms and info sheets and contracts and stuff over an inch thick, and we had to go through every sheet with the escrow agent and sign or initial most of them. This morning we sent the down payment to them, and by midday tomorrow we can start moving in!!!!!!! We actually already have the key, and last night we went and looked around. Can't wait till it's ours!

Just in case you're interested, here's a comparison of the Rambouillet x Cormo wool before and after washing. These are two halves of one large lock, so they started out the same size. As you can see, there was quite a bit of take-up in the staple length after washing, as well as a lot of fluff-factor! The fibers are so springy, if you stretch out the crimps, they are still the same length.



And here's a shot of the rewashed fleece, carded with dog brushes and attenuated into roving. Lovely stuff. The second wash did the trick, and the wool drafts like a dream now.



I continued to spin on the Merino/tussah last night, and thought I was going to be able to finish the premeasured pile of roving, but at 10:00, I was too tired and had to go to bed. Tonight for sure!