Spinning the yellow Jacob Wool

I don't know why I have sat on this blended fibre for a couple of weeks before spinning it but I've spun it now and I'm really happy with the results.  The final fibre content figures are: 48% Jacob Wool, 41% Merino Wool, 6% Hemp, 4% Trilobal Nylon, 1% Angelina.  Adding the Merino has given it a much softer hand and its is gorgeously soft and shimmery, although my photography is struggling to show off the shimmers and glitters.  There is 147g of double knit weight yarn here but I've yet to decide what it will end up being knitted into exactly.

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.

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.

Making natural dye from carrot tops and using it

Today I've boiled up the chopped up tops of the homegrown carrots.  The strained greens were added to the compost heap and then I prepared the fibre for dyeing.  The problem with natural dyes is that whilst the dye itself is eco-friendly the mordant that you need to use to make the dye fix to the fibres are all metal chemicals and far from eco-friendly.

With carrot greens you can get a range of colours depending on the mordant that you use so you can get yellow, bronze or green.  I decided to try and obtain bronze which means using Chrome as the mordant.  I had to leave the dye to one side whilst I mordanted my chosen fibre in Chrome at a rate of 4g Chrome to 4.5 Litres of water.  I have some washed but unprepared white fleece so I used 55g of Falkland Merino, 40g of Alpaca and then a chunk of Mulberry Silk that I had left that weighed 6g.

Once they were mordanted they all went into the dye pot at the same time, keeping them in their own little section of the pot, trying not to let the fibres mix at this point.  They simmered in the pot for about an hour then left to cool before I took them out and rinsed them in salt water, washed it, rinse again and then put them on my hanging drier to dry.

In the photo below, from left to right is the Falkland Merino, Mulberry Silk, Alpaca with the top row showing the unprepared but dyed fibre and the second row shows the combed Falkalnd Merino, which was reduced to 33g after combing, the Mulberry Silk which didn't need anything doing to it and finally the Alpaca, which was reduced to 28g after combing.  The last photo shows all the fibres together, looking wonderful.  I'm very happy with the results.

I have ordered a blending hackle, as this was the right thing for me, so I am just waiting for that to arrive and then I can get blending all these fibres together.

Working on a Romney fleece

I need to be quicker at processing fleece and spinning it up because I actually bought this fleece back in August 2012 and I am only now working on it 5 1/2 years later.  That's a crazy amount of time to have a fleece and not do anything with it.

Romney, which used to be called Romney Marsh Sheep is a long-wool breed of sheep originating in Kent and is often referred to locally as a "Kent". 

When this arrived all those years ago it was rolled up and took me some time to figure out how to open it out.  It had lots of sheep marker on it in different colours.  I'm not sure if this was spray marker used for marking sheep that are pregnant/how many lambs they're having or whether some of this was from the raddle that is strapped to a Rams chest and marks the Ewe during mating.

Its a Ewe fleece and weighed 3.4kg before skirting and washing.  After washing it weighed 2.175kg.  I'm not sure if its because it's been stored for so long or whether its just me being so much more experienced and picky about the fleece that I am prepared to put the effort in make into yarn but this is far more coarser than I recall.  This is another fleece where I ended up binning most of it and only keeping the best fibres from the fleece so from the 2.175kg that was waiting to be combed, I only actually have 362g of hand-combed top for spinning.

By the end of sorting out all that fleece and only coming away with such a small amount of swag I was quite disappointed and fed up with the whole thing so I spun it up very quickly and quite thick to get it out of my sight as quick as possible.  Three skeins of Aran weight yarn that I forgot to take photos of as this point.

I tried dyeing the yarn with the natural liquid dye kept from the boiled up carrot tops from last year and using the appropriate mordant it should have dyed the yarn green but it didn't work, it smelt rancid and stunk the house out.  I had to open doors and windows to try to vent the house and I also used one of the wax melts that I had for Christmas to make the house smell nice again.  I can't find anything anywhere about how long natural dyes from plant material will store for other than the statement "store until ready to use", but clearly 10 months is too long and I would imagine it needs to be used within about a month of making it.

I had to rinse the yarn really well and over-dye it using my Greener Shades Dye and I chose Ruby Red.

I love the colour these have turned out.  These are all aran weight and this one 128g/137m

This one is 117g/148m

and this one is 106g/105m

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.