Natural Black Shetland Fleece

I bought a natural black Shetland shearling fleece on 24th June last year from a farm in Morval, Cornwall, having being sheared on 2nd June 2012.  It weighs just over 2kg and the staple length is 5-6 inches.  The tips of the locks are a little sun bleached but that happens a lot, especially with dark fleeces and any damage will break off during the preparation process.  Natural black fleeces are rarely jet black.

A shearling is a term used for a female sheep that has been sheared once and is old enough to have two-broad teeth, whereas a Ewe is a term for a female sheep after it has been sheared for a second time.

Top left: the fleece as seen on the sheep.  Bottom right: the fleece showing the part that was closest to the sheep.
All other photos show a close up of the locks.

I washed the fleece and tried my hand at carding again.  I'm not very good at carding and could do with some hands-on lessons.  I persevered and managed to card 123g of fleece, which I spun woollen style and then navajo plied to make an aran weight yarn which was 117g/88m after its final wash.  I made an adjustable headscarf with this yarn.

After my not-so-successful attempt at hand carding I decided to go back to my wool combs and so the rest of the fleece was prepared this way.  There was quite a bit of scurf and grit in the fleece but all that fell out during the combing to leave lovely soft, squishy hand-combed nests.

I spun as fine as I could to produce some wonderful singles and I decided to leave the rest of my yarns as singles.

I used some of Skein 1 to make a lace edged beret.  After making the beret I still have 177g/730m of lovely yarn left to use.

With some of Skein 2 I made this fabulous 7 panelled beaded lace shawl.  I didn't use all of the skein, I am left with 46g/363m, which is enough to make a small shawl.

Pale Blue Bolero

I had seen a free pattern by Lion Brand that I thought was really lovely and would be perfect to make for weddings.  It was a lovely long sleeved lace bolero with a fluffy edging.  I searched my vast stash of yarns to see what I had in the right amounts and weights of yarn.  I had got some lovely pale blue experimental yarn from Colinette that was mostly Polyamide with a small amount of wool and I also had some Patons Showboat, which is a thick but short fun fur type yarn with a bit of sparkle and both were in similar colours.  Perfect, and so I started work in early March.

I had a fair bit of trouble with the pattern and looked to the Lion Brand website for help where I discovered that almost every person who had written a review had actually given up on the pattern as they couldn't make head nor tail of it.  I decided to persevere with it, figuring it out and almost making it up as I went along.  It worked though and I wrote notes and included instructional photographs to help others who really wanted to make this design to understand how the bolero was constructed.  I made two of these in the end, finishing the second one on 14th March 2013.

Purple Beaded Victorian Lace Shawl - Design L323

The yarn that I used for this shawl was a bit of a mystery so I had to do undertake a burns test and a bleach test to determine that it appears to be 100% acrylic or some similar man-made fibre.  There is definitely no cotton and no animal fibres in this yarn whatsoever.

I chose my pattern and bought some beads for the project which are Size 6 Toho round seed beads in shade 1076 Magenta lined grey, which basically means that the glass is a smokey grey as opposed to regular clear glass.  I am using a size 3.25mm circular knitting needle and started the project on 22nd March 2011.

The design for this shawl has been re-written in modern knitting terms from a Victorian pattern and is what is known as "true lace", which means that every single row is complex lace stitches as opposed to one row of lace on the right side and one row purl.  Having issues with working from the charts for this pattern, what with that and family life I finally managed to complete the first diamond border by mid June 2011.  I didn't touch this shawl again until mid-September and it wasn't until I redrew the charts out myself, removing the silly and confusing colour coding that meant different things on right side and wrong side rows that was used on the originals did I start to make progress.  I was adding beads individually over the stitches as I knit them in the centre of the diamonds and between the two rose leaves.

Oh my, this project was taking forever to actually complete as it was once again sat waiting for me to pick it up again for about 6 months.  It was a combination of "I can't face it" mixed in with "I have all these other things to finish" and plenty of family life not giving me time or the peace and quiet to concentrate on this complicated design.  When I finally finished the knitting on 6th March 2013, this project had taken just shy of 2 years from start to finish and it was quite out of shape.  I used a total of 248 beads on this shawl, which gave it a little bit of much needed weight as it so light and floaty.

Of course, this shawl needed to be soaked and blocked to show it off to its full potential, with little peaks along the diamond border at each end..

It is absolutely beautiful and lovely drape and is so lightweight with just a hit of bling from the beads.

Sea Breeze Triangular Motif Shawl

At the time of writing this I am very much into Colinette yarns, especially their Tagliatelli and Giotto yarns.  This shawl is made using 6 x 100g skeins if Colinette Giotto in shade Sea Breeze.  Giotto is a super bulky ribbon type yarn and is 50% Cotton, 40% Rayon, 10% Nylon.

This shawl design is by Colinette yarns and was designed to be made with their Giotto yarn.  I am using a 6mm crochet hook and began this on 17th February.  I had trouble with this pattern as it just didn't read right and the wording used was confusing.  It also didn't help that the photographs in the booklet are all very catwalk/action style and there are no photos showing close ups of the motifs at all.  I finally figured it out after a few hours and then it was easy and quick to make.  Finishing this huge monster of a shawl on 27th February 2013.  I omitted the final row of motifs due to the sheer size of the thing already.

I don't want to make this again as it is so big and heavy and is really difficult to photograph successfully.

Wensleydale and trying to make a gradient yarn.

One of my favourite colours is purple and I just could not resist buying this fab purple Wensleydale top from Yummy Yarns UK in shade "Anemone", yeas another Anemone!.  I could have left it as it was but I decided to tone it down a little by blending it with the white Wensleydale that I got from Griffiths Mill.  I also decided that I wanted to try to make a gradient yarn as I was seeing lots of fantastic gradient yarns showcased by others spinners.

I started with the purple and separated out the colours as best as I could given that due to the staple length of the fibres, most were more than one colour.  I combed the fibre to loosen it and fluff it up a bit and then arranged the fibre into gradients and re-blended some of the fibre where necessary, as you can see in the long photo below.

I then blended some of the White Wensleydale into it and pulled the longest of the fibres off my combs, laying the shorter fibres to one side and then spun the longest fibres as a single and set the twist.  I got a skein of yarn weighing 117g and giving me 417m. 

I made this sweet small shawl, with simple beaded lace edging with the yarn, but I only used about half of so I have the other half to use on something else.

The remaining, shorter fibres I hand carded together and used to make a thicker, bulkier yarn of 78g and 41m, which I used as part of a scarf.

"Mule" fleece - The first fleece.

I saw a bargain on Ebay and thought I may as well give it a shot, it will give me a lot to practice on.  If the fleece is rubbish, I've not lost a lot, if the fleece is good and I mess up, I've not lost a lot and if the fleece is good and I do a decent enough job then I may just get some usable yarn.

So, my bargain?  5 "mule" ewe fleece, weighing around 12kg in total that had been stored together for a couple of years.  A "mule" ewe is the result of mating a Blue Faced Leicester ram with a hill breed ewe, such as a ewe from the Black Faced Mountain family, the Cheviot family, the Welsh Mountain family or the Clun Forest family.  In this case the ewe used to produce the mule is unknown.

None of the fleece had been skirted, so that had to be done and then I started working my way through all of the fleece, washing them one at a time.  Most were thick with lanolin and had a lot of "orange" stuff stuck in it.  I think that this was possibly some kind of sand, maybe building sand, and it all washed out very easily though and turned the water an orangey-red colour and left me with fairly white fleece.  They are not the softest of fleece, a little coarse in places, but I guess that's the hill sheep element showing through..

The First Fleece

The first fleece that I have chosen to tackle started out at 2.4kg before any washing or preparation.  After being washed and combed there is 1176g of clean combed top ready to be spun.  Its very bouncy and quite crisp and some of it is definitely on the coarser side of OK.  I tried to keep the coarsest fluff together so that it could be spun together and not "contaminate" the nicer fluff.  I got a lot of different skeins from this fleece over a long period of time between 23rd August 2012 and 9th January 2013, and I spun some as single ply, some as 2-ply, some as traditional 3-ply (3 singles spun together) and some as Navajo plied (3-ply using loops made and spun from a single ply).

Skeins A, B and I have been used up in small non-clothing items as they were the coarsest of all the skeins and not suitable for wearing due to the scratchiness of them.  All of the other skeins will eventually be used to make pretty shawls, either left in their natural colour or dyed.

Skein C was knitted into a pretty but simple kerchief/small shawl but due to the natural variations in colour of the yarn I was not happy with the end result, it looked dirty and unwashed, quite "yellowish" in places so I decided to try dyeing the finished item.  I dyed it using some Greener Shades dye and I am now happy with the finished kerchief.

Polwarth again, are you green with envy?

I've been shopping at The Fibre Fairy and bought a few things but instead of showing you all of my purchases I will just show them to you as I spin them.  I know, I am such a meanie.

I bought 150g of Polwarth top in shade "Emeralds Kiss".

I spun it as a double knit weight 2ply yarn and got 425m from my 150g.