Fragment Friday - The Road to Mittens

A photo essay on the steps to creating mittens, Part I, starting with the wool.

3 pounds of Coopworth fleece, fresh off the sheep. Coopworth is a breed of sheep developed in New Zealand. The locks of wool are crimpy,(wavy) and about 4-4.5 inches long.

A bag of Icelandic sheep fleece, both white and brown. Icelandic sheep are a Northern European breed, very cold hardy. The sheep is dual coated, with a longer outer coat and a shorter, finer inner coat. The outer wool is coarser, the inner wool finer. Not much crimp in this fleece, and the locks are about 4 inches long.

Raw Icelandic fleece, unwashed. Notice how yellow the 'white' appears. That's from the lanolin in the fleece, which I want to wash out so my yarn isn't 'greasy'.

Clean Coopworth fleece drying in the sun. See how much whiter it looks with all the dirt washed away. You can see some of the crimp in the locks.

Washed Icelandic wool, ready to card. Look how nice and white.

Coopworth wool on handcarders, teased out and ready to roll. It's like using dog brushes to straighten the locks and align all the fibers. I should be using wool combs to do that on locks this long, but I only have carders, so carding it is.

Coopworth rolags - wool bundles rolled off the hand carders and ready to spin are called rolags.

Icelandic rolags. Notice how white the white wool turned out, and the nice shade of brown. The brown is not quite as soft as the white.

Now it's time to spin the rolags into yarn using my Lendrum spinning wheel.

Yarn slowly fills the bobbin on the spinning wheel.

One bobbin with single ply yarn. When I get three bobbins worth, I will spin the yarn together and have one three ply yarn instead of three separate one plys. It will be stronger spun together.

More washing, carding and spinning is in my future if I want to get enough yarn to knit mittens - or anything else. I also have some Shetland sheep fleece in a lovely shade of brown (what else) to spin into yarn. There's even some camel fiber in my stash, but that's for another day.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

One of the things I did with my suddenly copious free time was teach myself how to card and spin wool. Why? Because I obviously don't have enough hobbies to occupy the two to five free minutes in my life . . .

39 gallon trash bag with an Icelandic sheep fleece

It's Linda's fault. She taught me how to knit. Being an enabler, she also turned me into a yarn snob. If all that wasn't bad enough, she left a 39 gallon trash bag full of an Icelandic sheep fleece in my garage. It was intended to be washed and felted, perhaps made into boots. That was the plan, which, as all good plans sometimes do, it fell by the wayside.

Raw fleece

I opened the bag, got a whiff of sheepy goodness (dung, sheep, vegetable matter) and it was like fiber crack. I took a small amount of the fleece - several ounces of white and a few of brown, washed it, and got rid of the little twigs and grass bits, not to mention that farm fresh smell.

Washed and fresh smelling fleece parts.

Since I wasn't sure if I was going to make this a full time hobby (more than 30 minutes worth of time), and I didn't want to invest money in something I may actually come to hate, I purloined the dog's brushes to act as wool carders.

Max and Merlin's brushes (shh, don't tell)

Since I know enough about processing wool to fill a Dixie cup, I called Linda to ask, "What now?" After receiving instructions via cell phone, I proceeded to card my washed wool. And card. And card. It was sorta like teasing the hair up for a very resilient sheep.

Rolags

For such a small piece of fleece, I ended up with bags full of rolags. (the rolled fiber pulled from the carders) About four bags of white, and four of brown . . . and I hadn't washed even an eighth of the whole fleece.

Gallon bags full of rolags

Now on to the fun part, spinning. I had a drop spindle I bought over a year ago - yes, there was forethought and premeditation. But procrastination delayed me. Until now. I played with the spindle, and some roving I bought at the same time, read about how to spin, watched a few YouTube videos, then set out to conquer my rolags.

Ashford drop spindle

It was a disaster. I was getting thick and thin yarn, inconsistent enough to frustrate me into thinking of wearing polyester. I called Linda and whined. We determined the spindle was all wrong for what I wanted to do. Much too heavy. A trip to Hobby Lobby (280 miles. Talk about suffering for your art.) and I had several wooden car wheels, some doweling, and eye hooks, enough to make myself four drop spindles.

Homemade Drop Spindles

I sanded everything, stained three of them (the fourth was already in use) and all of the sudden the spinning was smoother, easier, and more consistent.

Drop spindle with CD add-on

Me, being me, couldn't leave well enough alone. I played with the parameters of my spindles, securing a cd to the bottom in hopes of increasing the amount of time my spindle spun. (I sacrificed an old, self burned copy of Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason. I think Roger Waters would approve . . . .)

25gm balls of homespun Icelandic wool yarn

I'm getting better at drafting the wool and pulling some consistent yarn. Linda has threatened to teach me how to use a spinning wheel. But for now creating my own yarn from sheep to finish has been a fun project. I'm trying to keep it from becoming an obsession. It may already be too late. I've brushed the dogs and gathered up a LOT of undercoat. After I wash it, I'll card Max and Merlin fur into the wool, and spin it up. One of these days I'll be posting pictures of my very own Corgi-wool chapeau. And you know what? When it's all blended together, nobody can tell what part of the dog it came from, although referring to it as my bunny butt fur hat might be a dead giveaway.

South end of Corgis going north

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