Spinning the Llandovery Whiteface Hill blend - Foxes and Pumpkins

At the end of November I was playing with my blending hackle and created this fibre for spinning.  I have finally found some time to sit down and get some spinning done over the Easter break.  During the pre-draft I had to try my best to ensure that various lumps and bumps of the additions to the wool were spread out along the length and then during the spinning process, which I started on 2nd April, I had to make sure that I pulled apart and thinned out the lumps of Silk Noil as I went and ensured that they were well secured in with the spin and again on the ply.  

I've not gone for anything really fine due to the amount of lumps and bumps that I put into the blend and so I've spun this up to Double Knit weight (11 wpi), producing two skeins for a total of 193g/457m.  The fibre content is 75% Llandovery Whiteface Hill Wool, 9% Tussah Silk, 6% Trilobal Nylon, 5% Silk Noil, 5% Hemp.

Spinning the Olive Green Jacob blend

I have found the time to finally spin the blend that I made back in June with the Olive Green Jacob wool.  I forgot to take any photos of the pre-drafted fibre in my spinning basket and I had plenty of chances to do that because I made 4 skeins and each has two halves so I had 8 opportunities and I just didn't take any photos because I'm dippy!  Thankfully I did remember to take at least one photo of the spinning-in-progress.

When I pre-drafted this I had to thin out all of the additions that I added and then when I spun it I thinned it out some more and was mindful when the silk noil came up to make sure that got thinned out too so that I got some texture but not great big bumps of it.  Some people love really really textured yarns but I do not, I don't mind a little bit of interest but I'm not into overly textured yarns.

I got 4 skeins, all sport weight, 101g/215m, 105g/215m, 104g/221m and 103g/228m. The final fibre content is: 54% Jacob Wool, 16% 23 micron Merino Wool, 14% mixed white wools, 5.5% Cellulose, 4% Tussah Silk, 3% Hemp, 2.5% Silk Noil, 1% Trilobal Nylon.  I had trouble capturing the true colour in photographs and I had to manually adjust them to increase the green as they were showing as almost greyscale photos.

Spinning the white blend of the North Country Cheviot

I know that I have started to blend the Llandovery Whiteface Hill ready for spinning but I really should crack on and finish the spinning that I started as well.  I've already spun the lime green version a few months ago now so it was time to spin the natural version of the North Country Cheviot blend.   I almost forgot to take any work in progress photos of the spinning, but at least I did remember, unlike last time!

This one is prettier now that it's spun up and it will be interesting to see how it knits up at some point in the future.  I intend to find a pattern that will use both yarns in one project.

The fibre content of this one is 83% Cheviot Wool, 6% Tussah Silk, 4.5% Silk Noil, 4.5% Hemp, 2% Trilobal Nylon

It has spun up to sport weight and the skeins are 77g/180m and 72g/162m

Combing the rest of the Llandovery Whiteface Hill sheep fleece

This past year or so I've been working on spinning up older braids of fibre and preparing fleece that I have had for the longest time along with either dyeing fibres for my "ingredients cupboard" or using up items from my "ingredients cupboard" in blends.  This particular fleece isn't old, I'd only had it just over a year but I had two pillowcases full of this fleece and there was a lot of kemp that was sticking out through the fabric of the pillowcase so it was making a bit of a mess as well as taking up a lot of space.  I decided to comb this fleece to save on space.  I did actually finish combing the first pillowcase full back in early December 2022 and this contained 583g of fleece and after 19 hours of combing, not in one session, I had 218g of nice soft fluff.  

The second pillowcase full weighs 1,105g and has been sat across the room looking at me menacingly ever since.  I finally started to tackle this monster job on Friday 8th September 2023 and I have worked at it all over the weekend and have now finally finished combing it, 5 days beginning on the 8th and finishing today, on the 12th September.  It took just about 25 and a half hours to comb my way through it and I got 400g of fluff.  So, this almost whole fleece that was left over from the Breeds Project started out at 1,688g and I have got 618g of soft fluff ready for spinning or dyeing and spinning and it has taken me 44 hours and 20 minutes of work to get to that.  Overall though, including that what I used for the project, I got a total of 712g of fluff from 1,916g of kempy fleece and that is a yield of 37.16%.

I didn't take any additional photos, other than what I took last year when I spun some up for the British Breeds Project.

I have plans to dye the fluff, now that the kemp has been removed, and use some of the things in my "ingredients cupboard" to make blends for spinning.  I haven't decided what colours yet, I need to see what I have in the cupboard and dye the wool to match or co-ordinate with that.

Spinning the green blend of the North Country Cheviot

I thought that would make a start on spinning up some of the blends that I have been making in recent months.  I've started with the Lime North Country Cheviot with natural coloured additions.  I completely forgot to take any work in progress photos of the spinning, I think I just got so engrossed with spinning that before I knew it I was all done.

I actually think it looks prettier in the fluffy fibre format than it does now that it's spun up but it will be interesting to see how it knits up at some point in the future.

The fibre content of this one is 86% Cheviot Wool, 6% Tussah Silk, 3% Mulberry Silk Noil, 3% Hemp, 2% Trilobal Nylon.

It has spun up to sport weight and the skeins are 101g/182m and 74g/128m

Combing the last of the Jacob fleece

I've finally combed the black part of the fleece from Fleece No 16 that I acquired from a farmer in Elford, Staffordshire back in June 2014. It's only taken me 9 years to get around to it.  

I started out with 350g and after combing I have 246g of combed top.  I plan to use this to make 4 different skeins of yarn.  I have ideas to use up smaller amounts of fibre that I have, some from the 2022 Fibre Advent Calendar that I don't know what else to use it for and make some barber-poled yarns. 

I might make a gradient with some small amounts of green merino and then ply that with the black/brown Jacob, that could make an interesting yarn.

This is the last of the Jacob fleece to be prepared for spinning so once this and the olive green has been spun up there is no more to be spun from the fleece that I got from Elford.

Putting the British Breeds Project together

I have finally finished the British Breeds Project that I have been working on for the best part of 2 years.  I created the knitted charts back in December 2020 using an old Cross Stitch Design programme that I had and that thankfully still worked on updated operating systems.  Each breed had it's own stitch chart that I printed out onto A4 paper and worked from when knitting and using the programme I was also able to move and rotate each individual breed design into a format that would show how it would all fit together.  It took quite a bit of time to get this right as I wanted the coloured fleece evenly distributed and balanced throughout the overall design as best as I could and in one or two cases I had to re-work the breeds name to fit the available space within the overall design, because some of the names are quite long so can fit on one, two or three lines.  This might sound confusing, but when you look at the design layout below it should become clearer.  I also wanted the names radiating outwards from a central descriptive panel, which is why some of them are upside down, and I also left a bit of room between each piece for the joining together, which I knew I would be doing by some kind of crochet method.

So, I spent from December 2020 to around about November 2021 locating pre-prepared fibres for spinning and fleece for preparing and spinning and spinning it all up and knitting the pieces.  As the number of knitted pieces built up I started pinning them together as per the overall design shown above.  By 8th November 2021 I had reached the point where I was just missing the fleece of one particular breed and everything else was knitted up and pinned to each other but I was already aware that there may be a problem with the actual layout of the pieces as a couple of them had knitted up so much bigger and others knitted up a bit smaller.  I decided that there was no point doing anything with regard to re-designing the layout until I had the final breed, which I finally got in June 2022.  

This was how it was looking pinned together as per the first design with a few pieces still missing

I spent most of July participating in the Tour de Fleece 2022 and then I had a weeks holiday.  Once back from holiday I knitted up the piece and spent the next couple of weeks washing and blocking all of the individual pieces and measuring the actual physical size of each one and then re-drawing each one on the Cross Stitch programme but all the wording got messed up doing this so I decided that I no longer needed the stitched text in each box and so just use typed text to identify what each piece is.  Typed text cannot be rotated, which is why it is all facing one way in the design below, despite the fact that it is also broken up and it is clear the some of the boxes will be sideways on in real life.  This new design, whilst not true to size, does at least show the true size correlation between each of the pieces.  I also left larger gaps for the crochet joins, with each row/column of squares on the graph representing one row of crochet.

My crochet joins were started by working 5ch, 1sc, 5ch, 1sc all the way around each piece with the 1sc being spaced at 2cm intervals and however many rows were needed, keeping in mind that there is at least one row needs around each knitted piece and the row that joins the two together, so if there is 5 graph squares between knitted pieces that is two rows around each piece and one row of loops to crochet the pieces together.  I started with the centre square, the description, and worked outwards from there, creating strips with small joins between each piece where needs be that fitted edge to edge, keeping it square/rectangular at every addition thus: Ryeland, North Country Cheviot, Description, South Country Cheviot were joined together to make a strip.  Devon and Cornwall Longwool was added onto the side of that, which kept it square.  Welsh Hill Speckled Face was added across the bottom of those, then Devon Closewool and Beulah Speckled Face were joined to each other and then that strip added to the rest and so on.  If you look at the design you can see how it would build up bit by bit and by doing the small joins between short edges first and then joining the long strips in one piece it makes for neater joins

Close up of one of the joins

Starting to build up, the centre isn't in the centre right now but its all remaining square

I don't have anywhere large enough to get a full shot of it but it fits a King Size bed and hangs slightly over the side nicely

After laying it out on the bed once it was all joined together I realised that it needed a couple of rounds of crochet around the entire outer edge and maybe some kind of finishing edging to it, so I done the two rounds of chain and single crochet, increasing to from 5 to 7 chains on the 4 corners and then looked for an edging.  I found one and tried it out but whilst it went well with it it didn't quite fit, it had too many stitches and wouldn't lie flat so I adapted it and removed some of the stitches.

All my crochet instructions are the English terminology so my edging was: 2 treble into the chain space, 3ch, single crochet into the back of the first chain to make a picot, 2 treble into the same chain space, single crochet into the single crochet between chain spaces. Repeat in each chain space until the corner: 4 treble, 3ch, single crochet into the back of the first chain to make a picot, 4 treble into the same 7ch space, single crochet into the single crochet and then revert back to the regular 2 treble, picot, 2 treble pattern down the next edge.

It's all done and for the time being has been put into storage until the time that I can show it off somewhere at some distant time in the future.

Llandovery Whiteface Hill Sheep

The Llandovery Whiteface Hill sheep is a breed of Welsh Mountain sheep that has been bred for generations to thrive in the area of the Black Mountain in Carmarthenshire and is a little larger than other Welsh Mountain sheep.  Development of the breed has focused on retaining the hardiness and maternal quality of the breed whilst improving conformation to ensure that demand for ewes for breeding stock and lambs for the food chain and the focus remains on improvements for the meat market.  There is no focus on improving the fleece.  Demand for breeding ewes come from all across Wales and beyond for the production of Welsh Mules and Welsh Half-breds. The Llandovery Whiteface Hill Sheep Society was founded in 1998 by a small number of local farmers wanting to progress the genetic development of the breed.  However, they do not appear to have a website as yet.

Llandovery Whiteface Hill ewes

Llandovery Whiteface Hill rams

The Llandovery Whiteface Hill sheep, at the time of writing, is in the Rare Breeds Survival Trust category 6: "Other UK Native Breeds" (over 3000) registered breeding ewes.  Breeders remain in the localised area of Llandovery and the sheep are sold at Llandovery Market.  There is no information about this breed in either of my two reference books and one of them is produced by the British Wool Marketing Board, who couldn't tell me anything about the breed when I approached them for information and if it wasn't for the fact that this breed is listed on the Rare Breeds Survival Trust website I would not have known that it even existed.  There is also very little information on the Internet about the breed either and nothing about the qualities of the fleece, micron counts, weight or staple length or how best to prepare it.  It seems that it is undiscovered from a hand spinning point of view.

They are a medium build sheep with a whiteface and legs, which are free from wool, white ears and black nostrils. Ewes are naturally polled but rams can be with or without horns.

They produce a medium size dense white fleece, mine arrived at a little over 3kg, that contains a large amount of kemp in both white and red.  The staple length is around 4-5 inches (10-12.5cm)

The advise in my reference books for similar fleece is that they can be spun from teased locks, it can be carded or combed. If you leave the kemp in that it is going to create a very textured scratchy yarn with interest from the red kemp.  If you comb it and remove the kemp then you will be left with lovely soft wool.

Yarns spun from Llandovery Whiteface Hill fleece that contain the kemp are definitely suited to household items and upholstery and if you have removed the kemp then I would say that they are definitely good for next-to-skin use.  

This one has been extremely difficult to get my hands on and it has taken me over a year to obtain a fleece. I couldn't find any for sale anywhere because it is not well known and I discovered that the British Wool Marketing Board just clump the fleece in with other white Welsh Mountain fleece.   Given that there is no website for the breed society there was no obvious point of contact.  I did find a blog post that mentioned the breed and I contacted that person, who was very helpful and put me in touch with a farmer of the breed who informed me that his sheep were sheared the previous week, on 16th June 2021, and he was happy to sell a fleece to me.  Then it went silent and I never heard from him again.  I feared it might have been due to Covid but it wasn't and I eventually gave up on him.

I recommenced my search in April of this year, just before the start of shearing season, and the best time to make contact with breeders to reserve a fleece.  Seeing as how the Rare Breeds Survival Trust know about how many of this breed there are I contacted them for help and they gave me an e-mail address for the breed society.  I made contact but never got a response.  Browsing Instagram one day I suddenly got the idea to search for Llandovery and lots of business accounts came up, one of which was a wool shop in the town, so I made contact.  I got a response the following day to say she couldn't help but she put me in touch with someone else.  That person couldn't help me either but she gave me a phone number to call so I rang the number and it was the Llandovery Market, where they sell the sheep.  I explained to them what I was doing and that it was the last fleece I needed to complete the project.  They gave me a name and a phone number of a local farmer who, in their words, is very approachable and helpful.  I rang and left a message and after a couple of chats on the phone I purchased a fleece and it arrived quite quickly.

I have bought this breed in as a full fleece from Wyn Morgan in the Brecon Beacons and it arrived on 8th June, my 20th wedding anniversary, and it weighed just over 3kg.  I had a little peek inside the top of the bag and it looked very kempy but I wasn't able to get it out of the bag and examine it until I had time to start washing it on the 10th June.

About half of the fleece was washed on 10th June and it filled my drying hanger so the rest had to wait until this was dry.  This first batch filled a pillowcase and weighed 1,105g (excluding the weight of the pillowcase.  The rest of the fleece was washed on 14th June and weighed 811g once it was dry, giving me a total of 1,916g of clean but kemp rich fleece to prepare.

I combed 228g of fleece to get 94g of gorgeous, soft, hand combed top, just enough for my project.
  

Look at how white and fluffy that single looks on the bobbin

My finished yarn is of good quality to the touch of the hand it is really soft and squishy and light with just a very tiny crispness to it if you squeeze it hard. I have 93g/230m of sport weight yarn. My knitted piece for the project took 46g/114m so I have some left to do whatever with, and the rest of the fleece of course.