Friday 6 March 2015

Teeswater x Shetland Fleece

This is another fleece that is a cross-breed, this time its a Teeswater crossed with a Shetland.  An interesting fleece as you have the long wavy lustrous locks of the Teeswater combined with the shorter, softer, highly crimped locks of the Shetland.  This came from a farm close to Yeovil in Somerset in July 2012.

It arrived weighing 1.8kg and after a quick sort and washing weighed 1.45kg.


The next job was to turn this beautiful fleece into spinnable fibre using my wool combs.  That was a big job but I thoroughly enjoyed it as its a beautiful fleece to work with.  Yeah, that's me holding my big bag of hand combed top just after I had finished combing the last of the fleece.  It took me about 3 weeks to comb my way through the entire fleece, starting on 19th January and finishing on 11th February but I didn't work solely on this, I had other things to do as well.  I got 955g of hand combed nests to spin, which is about 66% yield from this fleece.


I started spinning on 12th February and this was an absolute joy to spin.  It took me a full 7 days to spin the three skeins shown in the photo below, which has beautiful lustre, just look at that shine and that's not flash white-out as I took the photo without the flash being on.  The skeins are in need of their final bath though.


I finished spinning this fleece on 5th March and I got 9 skeins of yarn from this fleece, totalling 912g after their final baths which washed out any remaining dirt and lanolin.  Here is just one of those skeins in close up.


This will make a beautiful bridal shawl one day.


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