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.

I've combed the Olive Green Jacob fleece

Back in September I dyed 427g of Jacob fleece a kind of Olive Green using Greener Shades dye at 1%, made up of 45% River Blue, 45% Sunshine Yellow and 10% Ruby Red.  I have now combed that fleece and am left with 246g of fluff to do with what I want, most likely used in a blend.

As you can see from the photo showing a sample of the nests I got from it, it has created hand combed nests in a variety of shades but once its spun up or used in a blend and spun up it will all work well together to make something pretty and interesting.

Combing and spinning the white Jacob fleece

I don't need to blog about this breed because I have already done that when I wrote about the Black Jacob back in December 2020

I decided to use white Jacob to join all of the individually knit project pieces together.  I also have a decent amount of Jacob fleece in my stash and therefore at my disposal.

I decided to use the white parts from two different Jacob Fleece that were from the same flock of sheep and that I acquired way back in 2014 from a farmer friend of an ex-colleague and friend.  These were from Fleece No.2 and Fleece No.16, the same as I used for the grey centre piece of the project.

From Fleece No.2 there was 700g of washed fleece and this gave me 446g of fluff after combing.  From Fleece No.16 there was 460g of washed fleece and this gave me 285g after combing.  Each lot was in a different clear bag and I noticed that there was a very noticeable difference in the shade of white/cream between the two.  Well they are from different sheep and no two are exactly the same. Imagine it just like with humans, how many shades of natural blonde hair are there? Quite a lot! I split the contents of each bag into 7 equal weights and put one lot from each bag together on my blending hackle to even out the shade across all of the skeins that I will be making.

I didn't take any photos of the hand combed nests, whoops! I did take photos of the fleece before it was washed a few years ago though and I have those to show comparison between the two.

I did spin it all up into 7 skeins that weigh between 92g and 98g each and are sport weight.

My finished yarn is of medium quality to the touch of the hand and is so much nicer than the black Jacob sample.  In total there is 658g/1433m of sport weight yarn.

Grey Jacob

I don't need to blog about this breeds characteristics because I have already done that when I wrote about the Black Jacob that I spun up for the breed sampler.  The information about the breed can be found in this post here.

I decided to use Grey Jacob to make the centre piece of my British Breeds Project, a piece that would explain simply what all the sample pieces represent.  I also have a decent amount of Jacob fleece in my stash and therefore at my disposal.

I decided to use the mixed colour fleece from two different Jacob Fleece that were from the same flock of sheep and that I acquired way back in 2014 from a farmer friend of an ex-colleague and friend.  These were from Fleece No.2 and Fleece No.16.

From Fleece No.2 there was 276g of washed mixed colour fleece and this gave me 135g of fluff after combing and blending to even out the colour.  Fleece No.16 there was 187g of mixed colour fleece and this gave me 138g after combing.  Because of the difference in the shades I separated it out into the darkest and lightest of fibres and blended these together to even out the colours as much as possible.

These are the handcombed nests from both fleece, sorted into darkest and lightest shades.

Even after blending there was still a slight difference in the nests so I spun them as a lighter yarn and a darker yarn.  There is not a great difference of shade but its enough to be noticeable if you were to work them both on the same project.

My finished yarn is of medium quality to the touch of the hand and is so much nicer than the black Jacob sample.  Both skeins spun as sport weight and one is 135g/320m and the other is 132g/345m.  My knitted piece for the project only took 30g/79m so I have plenty left to do whatever with.

Jacob Sheep

Jacob Sheep has got to be the fleece that I am most familiar with.  I have prepared and spun countless fleece of this breed over the years.  In fact, it was the first breed of sheep fleece that I bought when I was learning to spin.

The Jacob sheep, at the time of writing, is in the "Other UK Native Breeds" category, according to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.  This means that there are over 3000 sheep of this breed registered with the relevant breed society.

A little over a year ago we went on a family visit to Charlcote Park, Warwickshire.  In the gatehouse is a display that claims that their ancestor, George Lucy, introduced the first ever flock of Jacob sheep to England in 1756.  I wrote about that visit in this post here.  This is most likely true as that is just a few years before these sheep became popular with landed gentry who owned large estates and used them as ornamental sheep.  According to the British Wool Marketing Board the breed was established in the UK during the 17th century.

Their true origins are not known for definite but there has long been speculation that they are related to the sheep mentioned in the Old Testament of the Bible .  According to the Book of Genesis 30:31-43. Jacob took every speckled and spotted sheep from Laban's flock, his father-in-law, as payment for his work and bred them.  In a dream God told him to use only spotted rams for breeding and soon every sheep in the flock was spotted.  The sheep, previously just known as piebald sheep, was given the name of Jacob sometime during the 20th century.  

A study in 2009 found the Jacob to be more closely linked to sheep from Africa and South-west Asia than to British breeds, although all domestic breeds can be traced back to an origin within "the Fertile Crescent", an area in the Middle-East spanning Iraq, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, north Kuwait, south Turkey, western Iran, northern Egypt and Cyprus.  Many of the sheep were piebald in nature and a sheep expert at the Israeli Agriculture Ministry has been quoted as saying that British Jacob was not indigenous to ancient Israel and the sheep's resemblance to that described in the Bible is just a coincidence and that "Jacob Sheep are related to Jacob the same was the American Indians are related to India".  

They have been bred in England for more than 350 years and are well documented here and it is accepted that they are a British Breed.  Jacob sheep were first introduced to North America in the early-20th Century and due to selective breeding differences there are now significant differences between North American Jacob and British Jacob sheep.  I am only interested in the British Jacob and this is what I will be writing about.

The Jacob is a small build sheep with a badgerface, black muzzle and cheeks and a white blaze. The legs are free of wool below the knees and the head is free of wool forward of the horns and on the cheeks. They are polycerate, which means they can have two, four or six horns and this is in both sexes, although the males horns tend to be larger and more impressive.  Most British Jacob sheep have just two horns but there are some that have more. It is a piebald breed with fleece that ranges from cream and brown to almost black and is very similar in texture and handle to Down's breed of sheep. 

The fleece quality varies from fine to coarse and some fleece include kemp.  None of the raw fleece that I have ever had, and I've had quite a lot, have ever had any kemp in them.  They produce a fleece that generally weighs between 1.5kg and 2.75kg that has a soft to medium handle with a staple length of  between 3 and 6 inches long (7.5-18 cm long) and is usually 32-34 microns.  It is light, soft, springy and open and there is usually a difference in the length of the staples of the different colours within the same fleece and I have written about this in the past.

This fleece can be carded or combed using Viking combs.  How you handle the different colours is entirely at the spinners discretion.  You can separate them out and spin just black/brown and just white/cream or you can blend them together to produce a whole range of shades of grey, depending on how much of each colour you blend.  In the past I have produced natural coloured gradient yarns by varying the amount of each colour that is blended together.  Even if you do choose to spin the black/brown and white/cream separately it is inevitable that there will be an amount of fleece that you cannot separate totally and will make a grey or multi-coloured yarn from this anyway.  Also, don't be fooled into thinking that you cannot dye the dark parts of the fleece.  I have done this several times.  On the darkest parts you will need strong dark colours but you can achieve navy blue, dark green and dark red for examples.  You can also dye the grey in an array of colours with the blackest of the fibres showing through to produce marled yarns which can be very striking.

Yarns spun from Jacob fleece can be used for a whole variety of items and this will depend on the quality of the fleece that you spin from, which varies too greatly for me to say for certain what it can make.  That decision, in this case, is entirely in the creators hands. 

I have bought this breed in as pre-prepared fibre in a box containing 50g each of four British Breeds and I also had a 25g sample that I got with another pack that I stretched it out to the same length as the 50g and spun them together at the same time.  It was the most coarse and just horrible Jacob wool that I have ever encountered.  It was also full of kemp, which I tried to remove as I spun and ended up having to use tweezers after I had spun it to pull out all the nasty kemp that was sticking out and I did this in short lengths, knit that bit, cleaned up another length and then knit with that and I did this until I had knitted my sampler.  Pulling the kemp out greatly improved the quality but it still wasn't as nice as when I've bought it in as fleece from local farms. If this is the standard of Jacob that retailers are selling to spinners then I finally understand why a lot of fellow spinners say that they don't like Jacob and complain about how horrible it is.  I could have spent the time combing some black Jacob fleece that I still have left from fleece I bought in a few years ago but I thought I'd use this seeing as it was just the right amount for my needs.

My finished yarn is of poor quality to the touch of the hand and you can feel the prickly kemp.  My knitted piece for the project only took 12g/28m and I threw the rest of it in the bin.

Design SB188 in natural black Jacob wool

One more shawl of this design before I move onto something else.  This time I have chosen some natural black Jacob wool that I spun 4 years ago.  The fleece for it was sourced locally and you can read more about that here.  

This time, when I finished the shawl I had a lot of yarn remaining and so instead of finishing and then making a brooch, I lay it to one side, made the brooch and then came back to the shawl and added extra rows of pattern to the bottom edge so as to be able to use up all of this lovely handspun yarn.  This means that this shawl is slightly longer than the ones made in acrylic yarn.  Also, because this shawl is made from pure wool which has been processed carefully by hand for spinning and then spun by me it does mean that this shawl will be a lot more expensive than those made from acrylic yarn as there is an element of labour charges involved, as well as the price of the buying the fleece.

I use long strong cable ties to help form scallops when I am blocking any shawl that has a scalloped bottom edge.  Obviously I still need to use pins to keep it in shape and place but the cable ties mean I can use less pins and help create a smoother line.

A Big Experiment

Back on 6th June I announced on my Facebook page I was combing some Jacob fleece in preparation for a large spinning job. The first part of the fleece was combed back in March and was the darker grey fibres of the fleece and I got 183g of combed fibre from it. The second part of the fleece was combed at the beginning of June and was the lighter grey fibres of the fleece but I selected the darkest of these fibres in the first instance so that I could make the bag of darker fibres up to a nice round 200g and the lighter grey fibres produced about 320g of combed fibre. Keep reading to discover my reasoning for doing that.

I've made no secret of my dislike of a couple of the fibre braids from the monthly fibre club that I was once part of. I did ask other members of the group if anyone wanted to buy the braids from me on the sale/trade page but despite several of them saying previously that they loved the colours of these braids there were no takers for my braids of fibre. I brushed it off the cold shoulder and I came up with the idea of spinning it in a similar way to a yarn I spun way back in 2013, the last skein in this post but this time using grey rather than black.

Now, the reason for me wanting to make the dark fibre bag up too 200g is because if I add that amount to one of the 100g of braids it makes 300g and then I have about 320g in the other bag with the light grey fibres and these two amounts will make two separate plies to then be spun together. So this would give me a total of around 600g broken down into 6 skeins of approximately 100g each with a fibre content of approximately 66% Jacob wool/34% Merino wool.

I split the braid up into 6 equal parts and then the dark grey into 6 equal parts and put each set into their own little bag. I then took one bag and broke the two lots of fibres down even further into the same number of little bumps, although the dark grey bumps were twice the weight of the rainbow bumps. I then spun it finely one part rainbow followed by two parts grey, rainbow, grey, rainbow, grey, rainbow... and this made one ply.

The light grey I didn't split up or weigh out into 6 parts as this will make up the other ply and I will just use it with each 100g of the grey/rainbow mix until it runs out and it makes for a very interesting barber-pole effect even in just the grey on grey sections.

I've not finished this spinning project yet but I have spun two skeins so far, each approx 100g, but the heat got the better of me last week and I felt it was too hot to be handling fluffy fibres that could felt in my hot hands.

I have another 4 skeins worth to spin and I am surprised by how much I like it. Its not nowhere near as garish as I thought it would be when I planned the project with the view of over-dying it blue, in the knowledge of how the blue dye would react with the original colours so the grey Jacob would become mottled and the yellows would become green, the pinks would become purple etc etc just like mixing paint. I need to do a bit of a test knit to see how it knits up before I decide whether to over-dye it blue or not. It may be that I decide to over-dye half of it blue and leave half as it is as this would supply me with enough yarn in each colourway to make something substantial.

Combing the darker Jacob fibres

I've combed some of the darker fibres from the same Jacob fleece that I've been working on lately.  I've made a couple of yarns already from the lighter coloured fibres that I dyed using Logwood and Carrot tops dyes.  I'm trying to reduce the space that my fleece takes up so that I have more space for yarns and fibre.  I'm not sure its working that well so far but it has to reduce the overall bulk and weight eventually.

Anyway, I'm waffling so I grabbed a bag of 372g of fleece and got combing it.  At the end I was left with 180g of hand combed top ready to spin or blend with other stuff.  I'm not 100% sure what I will do with this yet.  It may well become a gradient but not necessarily left as a natural coloured gradient, I may decide to dye it and, because of the coloured fibres, it should produce a gradient in whatever shade I decide to dye it.  There are also other options too like blending the lightest and darkest nests together to even out the colours to produce a more even coloured grey yarn.  I will most likely go with the dyed gradient option.

Combing more of the natural dyed Jacob

After that spinning session I just needed a day to do something different so I combed the Jacob that I dyed using carrot tops last year.   I started out with 160g and ended up with 78g of combed top, quite nice but not nice enough as it is right now.  It needs something adding to it but I need to sleep on it and make some choices.

Jacobs Gold

I am thrilled with how this has turned out and I am having trouble capturing the sparkles and shimmers that this yarn contains.  It positively glows in real life due to the Angelina and the Firestar (Trilobal Nylon) content in this yarn.

I blended it just a few days ago and now it is finished, soaked, snapped and dried.  I have 95g/246m of double knit weight yarn and its lovely and soft.  The final fibre content is: 75.5% Jacob Wool, 10.5% Trilobal Nylon, 5% Corriedale Wool, 5% Silk, 2% Merino, 2% Stellina/Angelina.

Blending some black Jacob fibres

Today I have got my blending hackle out and finally taken to task the small bag of Jacob fibre that I combed back in the first week of July last year.  It was from a fleece I got back in 2014.  This is the fleece it has come from, fleece 2 from Home Farm in Elford, Tamworth.  Its a lovely fleece but mostly white.  I am using the black fibres from this one.

I started out with 127g of black fleece last year but after it was combed this was reduced to just 77g of beautiful combed top.  I did forget to take any photos of the combed top but I have borrowed one from another Jacob fleece I prepared and spun a while ago to give an idea of what it looked like before I blended it with all the other bits and pieces, although the dark fibres from this fleece are less brown and more grey-black.

Top Row: Jacob, Yellow Silk, A sparkly white and gold blend
Bottom Row: Yellow Corriedale, Firestar (Tri-lobal Nylon), Bronze Angelina

 All the other bits and pieces have come from either one of the HilltopCloud Ingredients boxes that I've bought or from a big bag of lap waste that I got from World of Wool.

 I will be spinning this over the weekend and I can't wait to see the finished yarn as it is ever so slightly sparkly all over.

Trying more plant based dyes

After harvesting the homegrown carrots, I have once again made some dye using the carrot tops but this time I am not waiting to use it at a later date, I am using it straight away.  I am also going to try a couple of dried goods for dyeing that I bought from a supplier, marigolds and logwood.

I mordanted the entirety of the white parts of a Jacob fleece in Bichromate of Potash first.  Its not a safe chemical and certainly not eco-friendly, which is a shame as by using plant material for dyes you would think that the whole process would be more eco-friendly than other dyes, but sadly not.  For plant dyes to take effectively you need to mordant the fibre and it is the various mordants that are not eco-friendly.

The fleece came from a friend of an ex-work colleague, you can read about that here.  This one was fleece No.5.

The first thing I dyed with was the carrot top dye that I had just made.  The tops had been chopped and soaked for 3 days, boiled up and simmered for about an hour.  I strained the greenery from the dye, which went into our compost bin, and put the dye liquid back into the dye pot and added 160g of mordanted fleece into it.  I don't think this is as vibrant as last time I used carrot top dyes but I am using a different fibre as well as maybe different strength of plant material relative to the amount of water.  I don't know, its often guesswork with me.

The next thing to go in the dye pot was some dried logwood which had been soaked in a little container of water for 12 hours.  This then had to be simmered for about an hour to obtain the dye.  Logwood produces dark grey dye but interestingly the water turned red when it was simmering.  I had read that if you add about a tablespoon of powdered chalk to the prepared logwood dye before you add the fibre then this produces blue fibres, rather than dark grey.  I gave this a go and put 247g of mordanted fleece into the dye pot.

I'm happy with the results of this one, I have a wonderful mix of dark blue and blue-grey fibres, this will be interesting once its combed.

Logwood can also be used on non-mordanted fibres and it is supposed to take.  The dye bath was clearly not exhausted so I ran and fetched some mohair fleece that I had had sitting around for some time.  I didn't dye all of the mohair but I did grab and good amount, 184g actually, and dumped it into the dye pot.  It didn't seem to be taking any of the dye at all until I added a good glug of citric acid to the dye pot, where it suddenly turned a mushroom kind of colour.  Not the best but not really nasty, I can use this, but I was hoping for some kind of blue-grey like the Jacob wool produced.

The final batch of dye was made using dried marigold flowers, which I followed the instructions for and soaked them for about an hour before simmering them for an hour.  I put 64g of mordanted fleece into the dye pot and hoped that it turned out the colour I had read about and that I hoped for.  No such luck.  Its quite boring to be honest and certainly does not have any orange colouration to it that my natural dye book said it produces with this mordant, as different mordants can affect the final colour produced and this is why I chose to mordant with Bichromate of Potash.

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.

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.

Hillcresent Farm Jacob Fleece No.1

This is the last fleece from the seven that I bought as a job lot from a local farm.

Sheared on 26th May 2013 this one weighed 1.5Kg after I skirted it and below you will see a photo of the sheep that this fleece came from with her new born lamb in 2015.

This particular fleece had very few white locks which meant that it was not worth the effort trying to produce a very small amount of white yarn.  I separated the blackest locks from the rest of the fleece so that I can spin from these two colours of the fleece and I washed the two colours separately.

The black part of the fleece gave me 432g after washing and the mixed colours of fleece gave me 567g.

The Black Fleece

The locks of this fleece are anything up to 8 inches long, incredibly long for a Jacob sheep and black fleece has a tendency to grow longer than white fleece, or white parts of the same fleece.  A lot of the length broke off during the combing process due to the length of the sun-bleached tips.  From my original washed weight of 432g I was left with 220g of hand-combed nests for spinning, which is about 46% yield.

I wanted to make something different to my usual thickness of yarn this time and so aimed to spin this fleece as thick as I could, which is not easy to do when your hands naturally tell you to do something else.  I did manage to make two skeins of yarn, each just over 100g, in a super bulky weight and totalling 297g/248m.

The Mixed Colours

I decided to leave this in its natural colour and I just combed it as it came out of the bag, not paying any attention to what colours in what amounts was on the comb.  At the end of combing the big bag of fleece I was left with 272g of combed nests from my 567g of washed fleece.

The bag of combed nests was quite colourful with all the different blended shades of browns and greys in there and I decided to sort all of the nests from darkest to lightest as best as I could.  I then got a very long cardboard tube left over from wrapping paper and threaded every-other-one of the nests in shade order onto the tube.  As you wind the length up around your hand and secure it there is a "hole" in the middle a bit like a doughnut.  I then took a second tube and loaded the remaining nests onto that, again in shade order.

This gave me the opportunity to either make one huge skein of yarn in a natural gradient colour by spinning a single from each tube worth of fibre and then plying together, but this would have to have a break in the middle as you would never fit that amount of yarn onto one bobbin as you ply it.  Or I could make 2 different natural gradient yarns, perhaps in two different weights/thicknesses of yarn.  The latter is what I decided to do.

I spun two different weights of yarn, both were spun as a single and then Navajo plied, which is a method of creating a 3-ply yarn from a single length using a loop method, and this keeps the colours in the order that you want them in the finished yarn.  One yarn was worsted weight, 133g/270m and the other one was super bulky weight, 127g/66m.  The pictures below shows the worsted weight yarn.

The super bulky yarn was used to make a hat for my husband to keep his head warm after he participated in MacMillan's Brave the Shave event.  He didn't go completely bald, but not far off, and the hat was darkest at the rim and fading to pale grey at the crown and kind of matched his hair, dark but going grey.  He had no idea that I had made this for him and I presented him with it after he had had his hair buzzed off.