Preparing and spinning Coloured Ryeland

I want to try all kinds of different sheep fleece and I saw this small amount of Coloured Ryeland fleece on Ebay.  A bag of 120g of raw fleece from a young teenage farmer based up in Scotland.  Just the right amount to try a fleece.  I found quite a few small black dead beetles in the fleece, which scared me half to death but the at least it wasn't dead spiders, that would really freak me out!  I washed the fleece and left it to dry.

Dirty fleece on the left, clean fleece on the right.

I had a go at carding this fleece as the staple length wasn't really long enough for my wool combs.  I really struggle with carding and I can't make those nice little neat rolags to save my life so the best I could do was just card it and the lift it off flat.

I spun two singles from this fleece kind of woollen style and then plied together to make a yarn 73g/99m that is approximately an aran weight yarn.  I would like to try Coloured Ryeland again in the future when I have more experience and see what I can do with it then.

Click to discover more about Ryeland and Coloured Ryeland Sheep

Staffordshire County Show 2012

With my interests in spinning firmly taking hold and wanting to learn more about different breeds of sheep and other animals and maybe make some contacts with farmers who sell fleece direct to the public I suggested to my husband that maybe we visit a couple of Country Shows with the kids and make it a great family day out.  We booked tickets to go see Staffordshire County Show 2012 at the Staffordshire County Showground and we visited yesterday, on 5th June.

We didn't tell the kids where we were going, we kept it a surprise until we got there when we were all wowed with the shear size of the event and how much there was to see and do.  With the typical British weather, we did get rained on on and off throughout the day but we still had a good time.  My girls are the two in the second photo, standing in front of the North Ronaldsay sheep.  I can tell you that the white bull in the 6th photo was absolutely huge and was one of the biggest that we saw at the show.  The sheep in photos 9 and 10 are really docile and came up to us for petting and are Ryeland sheep.

I didn't make contact with any farmers on the day but I did find a stall that was selling bags of spinning fibre, both tops and roving, I'm not entirely sure what the difference is, will have to research that.  I had a hard time deciding which breeds and type I wanted to try but finally settled on these 4, all of which are roving and I got them from Griffiths Mill.

I can't wait to get spinning these and will write separate posts about my experiences with these when I spin them.

Rich chocolate brown Alpaca

I enjoyed preparing and spinning the Alpaca fleece so much that I decided to have another go, this time with the fleece from Orlando, a rich brown Huacaya Alpaca belonging to Aston Alpaca's in Aston Flamville, Leicestershire.

I started out with approximately 381g of Alpaca fleece.  With Alpaca you don't tend to get bits of hay and such as much as sheep but they do like to roll in dust.  You can see the dust in the unwashed fleece below on the left, especially in the clump on the right hand side, and how nice it washed up in the photo on the right.

I spun it worsted style and then plied the two singles to give me 174g/257m of light fingering weight yarn.

Click to discover more about Alpaca

First attempt at preparing Alpaca

Being the kind of person that I am, in that if I am going to learn to do something I want to have a full understanding of the process from start to finish, I purchased some raw Alpaca fleece from a local Alpaca Farm called Aston Alpacas, just across the county border in Leicestershire, whom I first came into contact with at The Whitacres and Shustoke Show in the summer.

I chose three different colour fleeces that appealed to me and here are the alpacas that the fleeces came from.

First up is gorgeous girl Giselle...

next we have pretty Amorcita...

and bringing up the rear is this lovely chap, Orlando.

Don't you just want to run your hands through their lovely coats!

Before doing anything with the fleeces I watched lots of know-how videos on You Tube and then I prepared Giselle's fleece.  I started by "picking it out", this is basically pulling it apart finely, which allows most of the dirt to fall out, so best do this over a bin or some newspaper and removing any large pieces of organic matter (hay, grass etc) and any really short knarly bits.  Next I placed some of the fleece in one of those "delicate garment wash bags" and plunged it into hot soapy water and pushed it down without agitating it, to avoid it felting, and let it soak for about an hour.  I then lifted the bag out, emptied the water and refilled the sink with more hot soapy water and done the same again.  The final soak was in plain hot water.  The next stage is to allow it to dry naturally before hand carding the fibre ready for spinning.

The raw fleece

 after being picked out

being soaked

 out to dry

close up of drying

carding

ready to spin

This is the resulting yarn.  I added a tiny amount of Mulberry Silk as I spun so this is 97% Alpaca, 3% Mulberry Silk.  There is 169g/193m of 2ply yarn.  I realise my spinning is not very good yet, I haven't been spinning long.

I will prepare the other two fleeces later in the year when the weather warms up.

I hope you have found this blog post interesting, informative, educational or maybe it has inspired you to learn something new...

click to discover more about Alpaca

Spinning of pre-dyed Teeswater locks

Following on from my post regarding the preparation of the pre-dyed Teeswater locks that I got off Ebay, I had to decide what I wanted to do with my little piles of different coloured combed locks.    I spun all of the red/pink and the red/white into a single, mixing the colours up as I went.  I then spun all of the red/yellow and the red/green into a second single, again mixing the colours up as I went.  

I then plied these two singles together to create a 2-ply yarn which weighed 123g and was approx 106m long.  I made a simple scarf with a button fastening with the finished yarn.

I had a bit of left over on the red/pink and red/white bobbin and so plied this back on itself to create a little skein of yarn which weighed 16g and measured 15m.  I donated this little skein to my kids school for their craft work.

With the blue/green combed locks I made a pretty single ply yarn which weighed 20g and measured approx 59m.  I made a beaded lace headband with this yarn.

Click to discover more about Teeswater sheep

Neptune Capelet - Design W419

Following on from making a firey red beaded edged capelet I decided to make another in vivid blue.  The yarn is Colinette Tagliatelli in shade Neptune and its a 90% Merino, 10% Nylon ribbon type yarn which is hand-dyed in Wales.  I love this yarn, so nice to work with.  I started crocheting on 14th April and was completed by 18th April 2012.

Blocking made a huge difference to the final item and those beads on the fringing are just perfect.

Preparing pre-dyed Teeswater locks for spinning

I purchased 2 x 100g of mixed colour dyed Teeswater locks off Ebay.  When I opened the bags, I discovered that the locks were a bit mucky and sticky and so washed them and then let them dry before I could do anything with them.

Once they were dry I sorted them into colours as best as I could but given the fact that most of the long locks were dyed two colours, this was quite difficult but I did manage to sort into piles of blue/green, red/pink, red/white, red/yellow and red/green.

Using a metal dog comb, I teased out the locks, one at a time, by holding in the middle and working each end independently and combing out the knots and such just like you would with long human hair.  Out of the original 200g, I was left with 164g of combed locks which are ready for spinning.

I will write a separate blog post about the spinning of this Teeswater.

Click to discover more about Teeswater Sheep