Pure Cotswold Lamb Shawl - Design S203

This is my second attempt at this shawl, the first being when I discovered that I didn't have enough of the yarn I was making it with, or should I say that the figures for the amount of metres of yarn I would need was massively out in the pattern.  This design was originally a really old Danish pattern for a doily and has been re-purposed/adapted/re-published as a shawl design using yarn rather than fine crochet thread.   Had I read to the end of the pattern before I started I would have seen that there was a note from the designer to say that she had run out of yarn before the end of the design.  My question is "why didn't she have the yarn requirement figures adjusted before publishing the pattern?"

Anyway, the yarn I was originally making this design with was used on another shawl and for this design I chose some Cotswold Lamb that I spun from an award winning flock, not only because its beautiful but because I know I will not run out of yarn this time as I have so many skeins of this and I used three full skeins plus a tiny bit from another one.

I had a total panic towards the end of making this shawl.  With 15 rows left to complete the metal knitting tip fell off one end of the wire of the circular needles.  With more than 800 stitches on the needles at the time you can imagine that I let out a little scream but thankfully it happened just after I had finished knitting a row and was putting my knitting down to take a break so all that fell off was 2 stitches but they were so clearly defined I was able to just pop them back onto the wire until I super glued the end back onto the needle.

The cast off was a special stretchy kind of cast off that took me over 2 1/2 hours to do so that the edging was stretchy enough to make the beautiful shaped edge you see below.

 I have plenty of yarn left so keep a lookout for more Cotswold lamb shawls in the future.

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.