Making my own yellow blend for the last day of the TDF2023

I've been playing with my blending hackle again today and making a yellow fibre blend in preparation for the upcoming Tour de Fleece 2023.  There is always a "yellow jersey day", usually on the last day of The Tour.  I'm not buying any fibre for this event this year, I will make do with what I have because I have plenty that needs to be used up.

I have already dyed some fibre for this purpose just a few days ago and I have sorted out what else will be added to it to make it more interesting.

Top row: unknown cellulose/plant fibre and Trilobal Nylon both dyed a few days ago
Middle row: Angelina, Merino/Suri Alpaca blend I dyed a few days ago, Sari Silk in shade Honeycomb
Bottom row: Bamboo in shade Clara and Mulberry Silk Noil I dyed a few days ago

So the fibres I have picked out are all yellow but in different shades and textures and some are matt and some are shiny/lustrous.  In total 140g of fibre went through my blending hackle and I got 130g back out all nice and ready to spin in four bumps of fibre, which when paired up give me two x 65g lots.

Look how soft and fluffy this is.  It's gorgeous and I can't but help think of cute little ducklings.

The final fibre content is: 50% Merino wool, 21.5% Suri Alpaca, 7% Cellulose, 7% Bamboo, 4.5% Angelina, 3.5% Mulberry Silk, 3.5% Trilobal Nylon, 3% Sari Silk

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.

Tour de France/Tour de Fleece 2022 - Day 4 - Rest Day/Transfer from Denmark to France

Day 4 is a transfer day for cyclists to make their way from Denmark to France and technically the first and very early rest day but last year we still had optional challenges set, but not this year.

Transfer Day:  You know what they say; a transfer is as good as a rest!  Today the cyclists are being taken to the next stage and it is a chance or us to have an early break.  If you want to spin - carry on!  If you have other things to catch up on then now is a good opportunity... for example, if you have run out of snacks.

I'm not very well, both husband and youngest child have tested positive for Covid-19, despite being fully vaccinated, but all 4 of us are ill and we presume that all of us have it but as we only have a few test kits left and they are difficult to obtain we are keeping them for those of us who are required to test to go back to work/school.

I did a little bit of fleece combing today but nothing worth shouting about.

Combing the last of the Llanwenog

It's been well over 2 years, nearly 3 in fact, since I dyed the Llanwenog fleece and I have finally gotten around to combing the rust coloured part.  It has taken me a couple of days to get through the bag full of dyed fleece but I now have 216g of hand combed fibre.  I plan to now figure out what I want to blend with it to jazz it up a bit, as its not a particularly pretty colour.

Cotswold Sheep

I've decided to start off with some Cotswold, as I have some of this spun up already in sport weight, so that makes sense to me to use that to make my test samples for the knitted pieces for my throw.  I wrote blog posts at the time of spinning and these can be found here and here.  Sport weight is probably a good weight of yarn to use as all the different fleece types should be able to be spun at this weight without any issues as some breeds just can't be spun too finely and others can't be spun too thickly so sport weight is a good mid-weight yarn to aim for.

This is Angelo from the award winning Pickwick Flock owned by Rob Harvey Long of Malmesbury, Wiltshire and it is yarn I produced from his fleece that I have used for my sampler.

This photo I download from the internet and it shows off the fleece nicely.

The Cotswold sheep, at the time of writing, is in the "At Risk" category, according to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.  This means that there is between 900 and 1500 sheep of this breed registered with the relevant breed society.

Historically they are a descendent of sheep introduced to the Cotswold Hills by the Romans and by the middle ages the area was known as a centre of the English wool trade but as the wool market slowed down their popularity fell and by the end of WWI just a few flocks remained and by the 1950's the numbers had fallen even further.  Numbers have since risen but and the breed is currently at a stable position but is not out of danger yet.  According to the British Wool Marketing Board the breed was established in the UK during the 13th century.

The Cotswold is a fairly large, hardy breed and is one of the English Longwool breeds with a well developed forelock of curly fleece.  They stand tall and their bodies are quite long and their face and legs are white and free from wool.  The produce a heavy, lustrous fleece that is in high demand with hand spinners.  Depending on the source of information, the staple length is between 6 and 15 inches long (15-38 cm long) and can be anything from 4-10 kilos in weight. The majority are white but black and grey can also be found, although these are rare.

You can spin this fleece straight from the locks if you like or you can flick or comb them.  Personally I go with wool combs all the way.  The locks can also be used as they are to create novelty yarns by spinning the ends in and letting the lock fall free and dangly, the same can be done in weaving.  They are also often used to make doll's wigs.  The Cotswold fleece takes dye well and the lustrousness makes the colours really shine.  Its good for heavyweight items that need to endure a lot of wear such as rugs, bags and furnishings but if you spin it fine it is wonderful for lace as it produces very good distinct stitches.  I made lace with some of Angelo's fleece and you can see photos here.

When it came to knitting up my sample for my throw, it took me 3 attempts before I was happy with the chosen alphabet style, undoing each one and reusing the yarn.  The knack is being able to read what you have knitted, if you can't make out what it says then its useless. I used an old cross stitch design programme to make the charts for knitting the words.

This is the yarn that I used.

I am sure you can read what it says

My knitted piece took just 22g/42m of yarn and I haven't washed and blocked the knitted piece yet, I want to wait until I've made a good number of them but I've pinned it out to take a photo as without the pins it just rolls up on itself.  It is a fair size so I know that the finished throw is going to be massive but I'm OK with that.

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 some Suri Alpaca

Way back in 2015 I bought 200g of Suri Alpaca fleece from someone in Gloucestershire.  The fleece came from a female Suri Alpaca called Shimmy.  She must have sent me more than 200g because even after washing the dust and dirt out it still weighed 208g once it was dry.

I've put off working on this because I've never worked with fibre this long, silky and slippery before, most of it is between 5 and 8 inches in length.  Time to stop being scared of it and just get on and at least prepare it.

There are lots of different shades in this fleece and most of it could be easily separated from the other shades and so I kept it this way as I combed it so that I would have hand combed nests in different colours which gives me more options than just blending it all together.

At the end of combing I have 160g left.  Its incredibly soft and silky, very much like long human hair in terms of texture and apparently incredibly difficult to spin on its own as there is no memory to this fibre, no elasticity and you need plenty of twist to keep it together but not too much else it very quickly turns rough and rope textured, but not enough and it will stretch and fall apart. 

From doing some research Suri Alpaca is OK on its own if you want to weave with it but not so much for knitting or spinning, it has good drape but is likely to loose shape completely quite quickly so is better blended with something that will provide grip and elasticity, like wool, merino perhaps.  I do have some small amounts of merino in similar shades of brown so I will compare those and order more if necessarily and then make a gradient yarn in a blend of Suri Alpaca and Merino but I will have to cut the Alpaca fibres in half to make them similar length to Merino so that they will blend.  By blending with Merino it not only will it improve the finished yarn but will make the gradient go further meaning that I can make a much bigger shawl from this.

Combing the pale green Llanwenog fleece

I thought I'd make a start on preparing the dyed Llanwenog fleece for spinning, starting with the pale green because that is my favourite colour.

I've never used this breed of sheep fleece before so didn't really know what to expect and I didn't take any work-in-progress photos.  Normally I just leave the finished fibre in little round nests for spinning but I thought I would have a go at making a really rudimentary fibre braid by lining up the unwound nests side by side, overlapping each other a bit and then plaiting them together into a braid.  Its kind of worked, messy but it will hold for now.

I'd like to add something to it, not sure what, maybe some sparkles, but I can't do that on my combs, I need to wait until I get myself a blending hackle or drum carder, which ever I decide to get.  Its not bad though, fairly soft, definitely bouncy and my 270g is now only 140g but I do only keep the best of the fibres to produce the nicest of yarns possible.

Zwartbles Fleece

One of the blackest black fleece sheep breeds is said to be the Zwartbles Sheep which originates from Holland and has been imported into countries around the world.  I bought what was advertised as a "1kg of shearling lamb Zwartbles fleece" back in 2014 and, as always, it got skirted and washed on arrival and once dry it then gets put into an old pillowcase, the top tied and with a label and stored until I have time to process it.  My 1kg of freshly shorn fleece became 690g of washed fleece.

A shearling lamb fleece, or shearling fleece, refers to a lamb born late in the season, maybe May/June time as opposed to most lambs being born January/February, that is not sheared in the year of its birth but sheared the following year as its too young to be sheared in the year of its birth.  The main shearing season in the UK is May-July.

I know that this has been stored for 2 1/2 years but as I worked through this fleece I began to have serious doubts about the validity of this being a shearling lamb fleece.  It is extremely coarse and wiry, more like a fleece that has come from an old sheep and not from a lamb at all.

I combed my way through the fleece, handfuls of locks going straight into the bin due to how coarse and wiry they were, the sun-bleached tips broke off as expected and my 690g of washed fleece became just 119g of hand-combed top for spinning and just 11.9% of the original weight of fleece that I purchased.  Terrible, absolutely terrible and yet all I've heard about this breeds fleece is how nice it is, not as nice as Merino or Polwarth, but good reviews.  I'm seriously disappointed with this one at the moment.  I will try the breed again in the future but make sure I get it from another source.

At the end of everything I have 115g/458m of fingering weight yarn that is slightly crisp, not totally horrible, but its not cuddly soft either but will be a bit more hard wearing and less likely to pill than most other yarns.

Portland Fleece - Part I

I brought a kilo of Portland fleece online from Farnell Farm in Kent back in July 2014.  Portland is one of the many breeds that are classed as a conservation breed where they were close to extinction but efforts have been made to dramatically increase numbers and save the breed.

They are a small breed and the fleece washes up to be a warm shade of white.  There can be red kemp in the britch area of the fleece, and I did encounter some.  Kemp is a very coarse hair like fibre that you really want to remove during the preparation process.  The photo below shows a couple of locks, with a small amount of "seconds" attached, so called because it is the very short fibres produced when the shears go over a sheep a second time, shortening the fleece that is remaining on the sheep, and some will inevitably stick to the fleece as it is removed.  These are easily removed by wool combs during the preparation for spinning.

 The photo above, on the left, shows a clump of washed fleece with lots of red kemp in it and the photo above on the right shows a washed lock and an unwashed lock of fleece.

At the time of spinning the yarn my camera had broken and I didn't have a decent camera on my smart phone and so, unfortunately, there are no photos of the wool being combed, or of the combed nests or even of the spun un-dyed yarns.

I can tell you though that from my unwashed fleece weighed 1086g and after washing and removing a small amount of coarse fibre, including the red kemp, I was left with 675g of clean fleece ready to be prepared.  After combing I was left with approximately 420g of nice, clean, soft fibre to spin.  I spun 2-ply as usual and made 4 skeins of yarn, one in a fingering weight and 3 in double knit weights.  I decided to dye the yarn and will cover this in Part II.

Lincoln Longwool Lamb Part III - Purple

Following on from my last post about this fleece, this is the third and final part of the same lamb's fleece that I purchased back in July 2014.

I dyed this part of the fleece a really rich purple, very similar to Cadbury's purple, using Colour Craft All in One Easyfix dye in Purple.  I started out with 208g of dyed locks and after combing in was left with 129g of hand-combed nests ready to be spun, a yield of around 62%.

The camera flash has not helped with colour reproduction in the first photo, which shows the locks of dyed fleece drying after being dyed.  The middle photo shows some of the hand-combed nests and the final photo shows one of the "singles" on a bobbin after being spun containing approximately half of the spun nests.

This produced a Light Fingering weight yarn, 125g/432m that has strong rich colour and a fantastic lustre.

So that is all 3 different colours lots of the fleece, dyed and spun.  I was inspired to dye them these particular colours by something that I have had for many years and that is a tea-light lantern that I believe I purchased from Boots the Chemist more than 15 years ago, that has 3 different colours of glass panels, the colours are repeated around the back too.

Raspberry Chocolate BFL

I bought some ready prepared, pre-dyed BlueFaced Leicester tops from Sara's Texture Crafts in shade Raspberry Choc.  I split each one into long strips and spun them separately.  I plied them to make a Fingering Weight yarn, 206g/900m total.  In the future I may have a go at preparing BFL from raw fleece, who knows!

And a glamour shot, which actually shows the true colour.  I have two of these skeins.

Gotland fleece Part I

I wanted a longwool that wasn't white and I did make enquiries about a Black Wensleydale fleece, which are rare to come by, but it was out of my league financially.  I settled on this Gotland fleece from P J Watts of Kingston Manor Farm, Canterbury, the same lady I bought the Romney fleece from.

When it arrived it weighed 1673g and I was really excited by the high lustre of the grey locks and it was really soft too.  Yes, it had sunburnt tips, a lot of fleece does and these break off during preparation, but what I wasn't expecting was what I discovered at the sheared end of the locks.

So, just what was at the sheared end of the locks?  A nice big scurf and lanolin encrusted "rise".  The "rise" is the name given to the part of the lock that indicates the end of last seasons growth and the start of the new seasons growth and this part of the lock is weak and normally breaks off.  You get this "rise" in every fleece but it is not usually this big and not usually this visually pronounced.  I think the breed of the sheep has a lot to do with it in this case.

I made a start on washing the fleece but was finding it really difficult to pull the individual locks away from the main fleece, this was because of this nasty matted rise as the white strip was pretty much felted.  I asked for advice from other spinners on a forum of what would be the best way to proceed with this problematical fleece and discovered that this particular breed of sheep needs to be sheared around January/February time, due to this breeds individual fleece growth season.  This fleece wasn't sheared until June 2014.  As you can see from these photos, this "rise" accounts for about 1/3 of the lock length and this has to be removed and binned.  The easiest way to proceed was to remove the rise, either by pulling it off if it will, or cutting if off if needs be, before washing the fleece.  I done a mixture of these methods.

After removing the "rise" from the majority of the fleece and washing it, my original 1673g was reduced to 960g.  When it came to the combing process, I started with the small amount of fleece that I had not already removed this rise from.  I loaded my comb lock by lock, as usual, making sure that the "rise" was at the back of the comb as I only want to be combing the good part of the fleece and leaving the rubbish at the back of the comb.  See the photos below of this loading process.

The photos in the top row below show what this same comb-full of locks looks like after one pass through.  The photos on the bottom row show the rise that had broken off during the combing process along with a bit of coarse fibres then what the rubbish looked like once I had removed it from the comb and before it went in the bin.

The photos below show the locks after their second comb through, with the last photo showing the rubbish produced this time.

I always do at least 3 full pass-through's of the combs on every fleece that I prepare.  A full pass-through is combing the locks from one comb to the other until all that is left is the rubbish on the comb that you are combing from, which is removed from that particular comb, swap combs from one hand to the other and go again for the next pass through.

As you can see by the end of the third pass through of the combs, there is not a lot of rubbish and from the last photo you can see that it is mostly the sunburnt tips that have now broken off.

I dizzed this off the combs, stopping about 3" short of the comb and pulling away so that all of the shortest fibres, 3" or less, were left on the comb.  The longest fibres which I had dizzed off were made into a nest and put in one bag and then I returned to the combs and dizzed off the shorter fibres into nests and these went into a different bag.  At the end of the combing process I was left with 239g of the shorter fibres and 461g of the longer fibres.

Angelo - the Cotswold lamb - Part II

So, Angelo's fleece was 1950g when it arrived and after having the second cuts removed and being washed I am left with 1413g, which needs to be hand combed.  Look at the lovely pillowcase full of gorgeous locks.  Please see Part I for more info.

Now to the combs.  With this fleece I made sure that I loaded the combs up with the cut end on the comb and the tip hanging down like it was on the sheep.

As you can see the tips are still a bit tight and a bit mucky but the combs should get these loosened and opened up.  The photo on the right I think looks like Santa's beard.

Slowly turning locks into fluff...

We have fluff.  Wow, look at the white fluff.  Beautiful!

A hand-combed nest and a small sample of spinning.  Not quite got it right but it was good to practice so I know how to adjust my spinning to this fleece and what I want to get from it.

Spinning the singles ready for plying and showing fineness with the UK 1 pence coin.

I plied the singles and skeined them up into just over 100g in each skein because they still looked a little dirty to me, something I really noticed  just as I was about to wash the second batch of 3 skeins and so I lay one of the first 3 skeins, which was all nice and clean, in amongst the yarns waiting to be washed.  As you can see from the photo on the left, there was a bit of a difference in colour.  This is down to those tips still being a little stuck together and discoloured as I combed them but its all come out in the wash.

I got 10 skeins of yarn, all around the 100g or thereabouts mark and all in the sport weight range, all absolutely beautiful and soft with high lustre.  The last photo shows them all lined up in number order, Skein 1 on the left, Skein 10 on the right.

These are going to make some fabulous wedding shawls, can't wait to get cracking on these but I have so many other things to do first.

I've bought myself a set of Wool Combs

Since my last post, I have purchased a set of Valkyrie Extrafine Viking Wool Combs, after studying a chart posted on a Spinning Forum which detailed the results of a "study" about which type of Valkyrie combs worked best with the fleece of certain sheep breeds.  The heads are 5 inches wide with a 4 inch working width and contains 43 closely spaced 3 3/4 inch long hardened polished steel tines.  I bought the universal mounting pad too, which can be clamped onto a table.  They are not a cheap tool, at around £150 for the combs, pad and delivery within the UK.