Black Jacob Wool Laced Edged Shawlette - Design LF195

I'm making another shawlette in the same design as the cornflower blue one I just finished.  I've chosen to use some Jacob wool that I spun in the early days of my spinning experience.  You can read about the fleece and how the yarn was prepared here.  Its a "single" yarn, as opposed to a "plied" yarn and is light fingering weight.

The problem with knitting with dark wool is that it is really hard to see exactly what you are doing and how the pattern is coming along so you need to work in good light and preferably wear light coloured clothes or have a light coloured piece of fabric that you can use as a backdrop to your knitting so you can see the pattern.

I got this one done over a few days, again the picot cast off edge took a good few hours to complete.

Cornflower Blue Lace Edged Shawlette - Design LF195

Some time ago I bought some lovely vintage wool off a lady who's father used to be a sales rep for the yarn companies way back in the 1940's and 1950's.  Lots of 'lots' in an array of colours.  Her father worked for a few different companies and most of the yarns had their original tags on.  No fancy ball bands here.  I have re-skeined all them to open them out and check for damage and weakness, washed them all and re-skeined them all up, measuring them as I go and keeping the old tags.

There is nothing wrong with this vintage wool, its beautiful and has to be the oldest yarn that I've worked with so far.  Yes, that does say 26th October 1948 and I have a shelf full of other similarly aged yarns that I bought from this lady.  This one is from Priestley & Co up in Yorkshire, the mill of course, has been closed down for many years now, as is true of many of the old northern wool mills, which is a crying shame.

It is so fine and lightweight and yet really warm.  I think its scrubbed up wonderfully for something so old and it only took me about a week to make. The picot cast off took me 2 1/2 - 3 hours to complete but look how beautiful it is.

Elford Jacob Fleece No.9

Way back in 2014 I helped a friend of a friend out by taking a number of Jacob fleece off her hands, see this post for more details on that.

I numbered all the fleece and kept fleece's 2, 5, 9 and 16 for myself, along with a rubbish one that was only good for binning or making into a rug.  This is what I did with fleece No.9, a predominantly white fleece with very little black, a large section of cotted fleece in the middle and weighing 2.1kg but the rest is very long stapled and lanolin rich, a spinners dream.

It washed up really nice and I began combing this fleece in January 2017.  After combing I have 816g of lovely hand-combed white fibre waiting to be spun.  I will get to the black fibres at a later date.

I worked on the white parts of this fleece on and off between January and August, finishing off with the dyeing in August.  Its a large amount of fleece to work on and I've had a lot going on this year with various hospital appointments and major surgery.

I spun one bobbin up in February and this got put to one side until I had time over the Easter break to get back to spinning and then I completed two skeins in less than a week.  In total, I made 4 skeins of yarn from the white part of the fleece in different yarn weights and I after I cooked some homegrown beetroot I transferred the liquid from my cooking pot to my dye pot and dyed all four skeins at the same time, the same colour.  They have all turned out a variegated yellow colour which I am reasonably pleased with.