Bag o' Wool

This is a bag of combed nests from Canadian wool board fleece, the eastern division. This took about three weeks to comb in my available moments. It is going to be blended with alpaca I think, at least at this moment in time and quite probably another fibre in my stash.

It was quite dirty with vegetation, but worth the effort I put into combing.

The breed is 'unknown'.
Final destination: sweater.

560 g combed fine fibre

Alpaca might be nice as a component for blending with the 560 g of the fine combings.

alpaca preparation

I saved the short fibre from combing for another project.
I'm thinking I will blend with cotton for a summer knit top for next year.
Fibres to be dyed separately, protein acid dye, cotton in fibre reactive dye. I have a quill head for my Lendrum wheel which is nice for woollen spinning.
Colour I am undecided on.

Fine short staple for blending

Fine Fleece

A Fine Fleece

I took 100 grams of raw fleece, scoured it, and hand carded it. I then spun it into a 2 ply.
It was sitting close by when I finished dyeing the skein below and I had some dye leftover I was going to discard. I decided to use it on this sample skein. It is a really pretty blue and very soft.

100 g of raw fleece after scouring became 66 g of clean fleece.
66 g of clean fleece became 61 g of plyed yarn, loosing some to second cuts, etc.

Ile de France 194 g

I had to dye a little more. This I prepared a little differently.
I flick carded the scoured locks to remove veggie matter. Then it went through the drum carder.
By now it was looking really nice. But I then hand carded into rolags and spun it using point of contact backward draw.
Before dyeing, I soaked it in hot water and TNA soap (like Synthrapol) and plenty of dirt came out still. I soaked it again and rinsed it, then it was ready to be dyed.

Exciting Package

I had this come in the mail today.

Then I opened it. 

I opened it further yet. 

Can you see the crimp?  Isn't that something special!!

Let's take a closer look...

Let's give a little lock a wash and see what happens. 

Now compared to one that's right from the box. 

Nice fleece. Very nice fleece. I lost count at 16 crimps per inch. 

What breed is it you ask?

I can only say it is from the fine wool category and that's all I know. And that it is Canadian grown.

I'm not going to take the whole thing out to look at until Friday, then I will give it a closer look and start washing it, but I'm very pleased indeed.