Lilac Blue-faced Leicester Wool Shawl - Design D198

My next project was a holiday knit.  We were camping at Hendremynach in Barmouth, Wales for a few days and knowing the Great British weather I was prepared for time spent inside the tent.  It was extremely windy for most of our stay, as we were camping about 100 yards from the coast line.  The campsite is fairly quiet, it has a shop and shower block but not a clubhouse and that suits us perfectly as we go on holiday for the peace and quiet.  The most noise came a couple of families that were camping not far from us but thankfully they left the day after we arrived.  I have to say that we got a bit of a shock on our first night as the last train came past at 11pm and we were already tucked up in our sleeping bags and dozing off when it sounded its horn as kids from "the noisy family" were obviously near to the track crossing.  I would recommend the campsite, tents and caravans allowed, if you want a quiet walking type holiday or somewhere that you can just get away to for some fresh sea air and sit knitting or spinning or other crafting.  I've put a link to the website at the beginning of this paragraph.

We did get out and about and do a lot of walking and seeing as we were in Wales we met a few of these on our travels, although I am not entirely sure what breed they are and hubby had to drag me away otherwise I would have spent hours just standing looking at them.

Anyway, as I said, the Great British weather didn't let us down and I had a good few hours in the tent whilst it poured down outside and when the kids went to bed before us on the night time to get some knitting done.  I made the same simple shawl design that I just made in blue & white mohair but this time I used some of my own hand-spun from a "mule" fleece.  It's not the softest of yarns and when it was finished I noticed natural discolouration throughout the shawl and I tried my best on my return home to remove the staining through washing and soaking but it didn't budge so I dyed the shawl using Greener Shades dye made up of 65% River Blue and 35% Amethyst Purple at a dye depth of 0.2% for a lighter shade.  Had I dyed it at a higher dye depth it would have been a lot darker.

There is still colour variation throughout the shawl but at least it is now a lot prettier than leaving it natural where it looks like pee stains when in fact it wasn't pee stains at all but a stain that is caused by micro-organisms that live on the sheep combined with rain and the sun and when you buy a fleece you can't always tell if its a permanent stain or if it will wash out.  Its just one of those things that as a spinner you have to deal with when then come along.  I finished making this on 29th May 2015.

Want to know how I made yarn for this shawl? Just click "Mule" fleece

"Mule" Fleece - the second fleece

Further to my earlier post regarding my buying of 5 "mule" fleece, this is what I did with the second fleece.

The Second Fleece

The second fleece that I have chosen to tackle I didn't make a note of how heavy it started out at  before any washing or preparation but after being washed and combed there is 1400g of clean combed top ready to be spun.  This time I wanted to have a go at dyeing all of this fleece, in different lots and different colours.  I got a lot of different skeins from this fleece between 7th March 2014 and 21st April 2014, all of it was dyed and all of it was spun as 2-ply.

The first yarn I actually combed some of the fleece first and then dyed it using ColourCraft All in One Dye in shade "Orange" but it is more of a pale peachy orange than bright clown fish orange.  I split the amount into two and just spun it as it come and plied it to make a Worsted weight 2ply yarn, 2 skeins weighing 220g/410m total.

For the second yarn, again I combed some of the fleece first and then dyed it using ColourCraft All in One Dye in shade "Lemon" and again I split it into two equal amounts, this time making a Double Knit weight 2ply yarn of 143g/420m total.

There was still a lot of dye left in the pot after dyeing the lemon skein so I grabbed a load of fleece and just threw it in the dye pot and left it there for a good while to see what would happen.  Well, I didn't get Lemon, I got Daffodil yellow!  After combing and spinning I made 2 skeins of Double Knit weight 2ply yarn of 262g/883m total.

The fourth and fifth yarns were a bit of mish-mash of colours, with the dyes not seeming to be taking hold on the fibre at all and me kind of doing an impression of The Muppets Swedish chef, with everything just getting thrown in the dye pot.

I hope you will be able to keep up with what I did.  After dying the two lots of yellow wool, there was still some colour to the water so I thought I would try my luck at getting some more pale lemon and threw in the last of the fleece but as it turned out the dye was more exhausted than I thought and all I got was a couple of patches of "urine yellow".  I decided to go green and chose ColourCraft All in One Dye in shade "Leaf Green" but even after 30 minutes that dye did not appear to be taking at all and when I lifted the fleece out of the dye pot it all appeared to be white.  I made up another green dye from ColourCraft, this time in shade "Emerald Green" and added that to the pot also, just in case there was something wrong with "Leaf Green" dye.  I left it with the heat on for 20 minutes but still not taking up any dye.  Totally confounded, I added a good glug, glug, glug of white vinegar to change the acidity of the dye pot in the hopes that this would solve the problem.  It didn't work.  Here is where I really lost the plot and turned to food dye.  Yes, food dye!  One bottle of green food dye followed by one bottle of blue food dye.  Arh, a bit of dye uptake but too patchy to be useful.  What to do, what to do...  I know, there is some Chestnut Brown dye in the dye kit that I am unlike to ever use on its own so by throwing that into the pot as well is not really wasting it seeing as this fleece seems hell bent on remaining white.  I made it up, threw it in, gave it a stir and made a forest!  This is my "Autumn in a Dye Pot".  I really don't know what happened, why it wouldn't take the dye in the first place but that brown dye worked like magic and the fleece turned all the colours that had been thrown into the pot.

So, the fourth yarn I made by separating some of the colours and combing them into individual coloured nests and spinning them randomly so that when they were plied I would get a barber pole yarn.

I got a huge skein of Double Knit weight 2ply yarn weighing 156g/568m.

The fifth yarn I used the other half of the "Autumn in a Dye Pot" fleece, this time blending all the colours together to produce a Khaki coloured Sport weight 2ply yarn weighing 166g/626m total.

So, it just goes to show that sometimes you can make something half decent out of a right old mess.

I decided that I had had enough of "mule" fleece and sold the other 3 washed fleeces on.

"Mule" fleece - The first fleece.

I saw a bargain on Ebay and thought I may as well give it a shot, it will give me a lot to practice on.  If the fleece is rubbish, I've not lost a lot, if the fleece is good and I mess up, I've not lost a lot and if the fleece is good and I do a decent enough job then I may just get some usable yarn.

So, my bargain?  5 "mule" ewe fleece, weighing around 12kg in total that had been stored together for a couple of years.  A "mule" ewe is the result of mating a Blue Faced Leicester ram with a hill breed ewe, such as a ewe from the Black Faced Mountain family, the Cheviot family, the Welsh Mountain family or the Clun Forest family.  In this case the ewe used to produce the mule is unknown.

None of the fleece had been skirted, so that had to be done and then I started working my way through all of the fleece, washing them one at a time.  Most were thick with lanolin and had a lot of "orange" stuff stuck in it.  I think that this was possibly some kind of sand, maybe building sand, and it all washed out very easily though and turned the water an orangey-red colour and left me with fairly white fleece.  They are not the softest of fleece, a little coarse in places, but I guess that's the hill sheep element showing through..

The First Fleece

The first fleece that I have chosen to tackle started out at 2.4kg before any washing or preparation.  After being washed and combed there is 1176g of clean combed top ready to be spun.  Its very bouncy and quite crisp and some of it is definitely on the coarser side of OK.  I tried to keep the coarsest fluff together so that it could be spun together and not "contaminate" the nicer fluff.  I got a lot of different skeins from this fleece over a long period of time between 23rd August 2012 and 9th January 2013, and I spun some as single ply, some as 2-ply, some as traditional 3-ply (3 singles spun together) and some as Navajo plied (3-ply using loops made and spun from a single ply).

Skeins A, B and I have been used up in small non-clothing items as they were the coarsest of all the skeins and not suitable for wearing due to the scratchiness of them.  All of the other skeins will eventually be used to make pretty shawls, either left in their natural colour or dyed.

Skein C was knitted into a pretty but simple kerchief/small shawl but due to the natural variations in colour of the yarn I was not happy with the end result, it looked dirty and unwashed, quite "yellowish" in places so I decided to try dyeing the finished item.  I dyed it using some Greener Shades dye and I am now happy with the finished kerchief.