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 I have re-measured them since taking the photos, which is why the discrepancy between the labels and what I've typed.  This one 128g/133m.

This one is 117g/121m

and this one is 106g/93m

Apricot Smoothie - Romney Fleece & Dyeing with Food Colouring

Wanting to try another breed of sheep I purchased a small amount of Romney Fleece from Philippa of Kingston Manor Farm in Canterbury.  Her flock has won awards for their fleece.  I bought approx 500g of Romney wether fleece (a wether is a castrated male) that has 15cm long staples with good crimp and a soft handle.  Romney Sheep are part of the Longwool family.

Really, really nice fleece, very soft with lots of lustre, a little yellowed in places, but not too bad.

I washed the fleece first and when dried it weighed 500g, so she must have given me quite a bit more than 500g of fleece to begin with.  I got to work combing it and was left with 375g of lovely combed nests ready to spin but I noticed that some of them were "dark cream" so I decided that I would try dyeing it at the point.  I have been reading some interesting information about dyeing fleece and fibre so I thought I would start with food dyes as I am too scared to try proper full on acid dyes yet.

I went to the local Morrisons Supermarket and purchased some natural food dyes in a range of colours, they don't have a large range but red, blue, pink, green etc, the basics.  I chose pink for this wool and dyed it in two halves.  The dye pigment in the pink food colouring is Beetroot.

I soaked the wool in 1 litre of water containing 1 tablespoon of white vinegar for about 20 minutes.  In the meantime I filled a heat resistant glass bowl about half full with warm water and added a splash of white vinegar and half a bottle of the food colouring.  I carefully lifted the wool out of its bath and gently squeezed most of the water out and then added it to the prepared bowl of dye.

The next bit is to cover the bowl and heat it in the microwave on full power for 6 minutes then you have to let it stand for 5 minuted and then heat again for a further 6 minutes and Ding!, it's done.  Remove the bowl from the microwave and leave it alone now to cool down.  Once it is cool you can remove the wool from its dye bath and squeeze out any excess fluid.  Rinse the wool in warm plain water until no dye bleeds from it.  Obviously I went through this process twice due to the amount that I was dyeing.  Leave it to dry.

I got lemons, oranges and coral pinks.  Reminds me of the sweets as a kid that were called "fruit salad".

I had to re-comb it all once it was dry as I had inadvertently felted some of it and I wanted to blend the colours.  I ended up with 336g which I spun as a sport-weight single yarn with 804m.