Elford Jacob Fleece No.9 Part II

Around mid-September I started work on combing the black/white mixed fibres from the Jacob fleece that I'd been working on for most of the year and I ended up with a bag full of hand-combed nests in various shades of browny-grey totalling 382g.

I could have spent more time and wasted more fibres by blending the darkest with the lightest and trying to achieve a bag of hand-combed nests that was pretty much an even shade throughout but I decided to make another gradient yarn, or two.

I sorted the hand-combed nests as best I could from lightest to darkest and took every-other-one and threaded them onto a wrapping paper cardboard tube centre and then done the same for the remaining nests, spinning every other one from each set for the first ply and the remaining for the second ply and then plying them together, so technically each single ply is made from every fourth nest out of the original line up.  I'm having déjà-vu here, I've done this before!

I made two different thickness of yarns, a fingering weight (left) that is 112g/440m and a sport weight (right) that is 116g/360m and both are lovely and squishy.

Scarlet Wizard

Since finishing the shawl with the dragonflies on it I have not made anything for the shop as I've had a big cross stitch on a tapestry frame waiting to be finished for ages, and with nowhere to store it when the Christmas tree went up, I decided to concentrate on that and get it out of the way.  It took longer than I hoped and with the snow that we've had the schools have been closed and I've had the kids at home.  Whilst I can stitch when the kids are home it is a lot slower because of the constant distractions.

This was a Dimensions Gold Collection Kit called Scarlet Wizard and I've figured out how to make a video from photos so have put the work-in-progress photos in order so you can see it progress from start to finish, apologies for the constant change in the colour from photo to photo, this was due to differences in light and whether I took the photo with my phone or my camera.

Here is the finished cross stitch and below that is the video.