Wool

Recently I purchased some wool from etsy.  It was a 10 pack of 1 ounce each from different breeds of sheep.  There was a discussion on ravelry about how much you can spin from 800 grams of wool and I weighed in on the different masses of wool and that it would be impossible for anyone to estimate how much a perfect stranger who is not an experienced spinner would be able to spin from 800 grams and it would be impossible to judge for even me (I tend to know how much yardage I get from merino) because the person in question did not know the breed of sheep.  Some people did not think the breed would make any difference, so here is a photo of 4 of the tops I received to illustrate this fact.

From left to right we have one ounce each of: Shetland, Merino, Falkland, and Gotland.
There are other properties of these wools that will determine how much yardage you can obtain.  The most yardage will be from the merino because it will spin up the finest and next would be the Falkland.  The Shetland is very airy but also coarse, so it would be third and make a nice woolen yarn.  It too can be spun pretty fine.  Now the Gotland is very dense.  Trust me, it has the same mass as the Shetland.  The gotland can be spun fine if you have patience, but it will want to be spun thicker than any of the others and because of the density, there just is not enough fiber, no matter how fine, to come close to the merino.  I also doubt it would be even 2/3 of the Shetland yardage.
Having never worked with the Gotland, I would guess that it would make a great carpet yarn.  It appears to have a very long staple (length of the individual fibers) and very little crimp.

New Babies, the human kind

We have a new addition to our family, a little girl.  Since Dear let me go wild in the closing yarn store, I had to look for something to make for the "new girl."  My mother-in-law wanted me to make the same dress I made for another baby, but I wasn't really feeling it, I knit it twice before.  So, I found a cute little hoodie called Roo by Kate Gilbert. 
I decided to knit this in the round instead of pieces because I hate piecing knit projects.  Here is the progress so far.

This sweater is made from Debbie Bliss Rialto.  Rialto is a DK weight, 100% extrafine superwash merino wool.  The yarn is very "squooshy" and feels nice on my hands.  The stitch defenition is pretty good too.  I chose this yarn because it is wool, so it will be warm, and because it is washable.  I have some of this for sale in my etsy shop.  It retails for almost $9, I am selling it for $8 and free shipping.  I have a few more colors, but I am only adding new ones as the other sell.  If you are looking for a specific one, convo me at etsy and I will see if I have it for you.

Too much work and not enough action

I have so many things to get done.  My garden is huge (about 1/4 of an acre) and it needs weeding.  I sprayed it to kill the grass and that should help, but I need to get in there and pull the broad leaf weeds.  I also need to finish burying the potatoes.  I have 1.5 rows done and 5.5 to go.  It takes me an hour to do one row!  I need to put my netting up for the beans and peas, plant more peas, put in the stakes for the tomatoes, spread mulch around, and weed the grass out of the sweet corn areas.  I can't do any of that, 3 days in a row I have been grounded from working in the garden, because we had a really heavy rain and the garden is still wet (I have heavy clay soil and it takes a while to dry out.)  That is just the garden.  There is also lawn mowing, packing up everything on the first floor because we are having the floors redone, and sorting through fleeces.  I am feeling very lazy, I don't want to do any of it.  I would rather sit here and work on my knitting.

This is my Lily.  I am using Nashua Creative focus Linen.  It is a linen and cotton blend.  I wanted this to be a little more rustic and I want it done for early fall.  This yard is rough like linen but, like linen, it will soften.

Amanda's swallowtail is coming along, but I ran out of the hand spun I was using.  I picked up some more top to spin for this at the lamb and wool festival this year and I should get to finish it up after I get through all of the fleeces.  Fleece first, spinning last.  For the non-knitting / crochet crowd.  This will look 100x more lovely once it is blocked.  All knits look better blocked, but for lace, it is pretty much a necessity.

My reworking of Wisteria has gone really well.  I will have to spin up some more yarn for it, but again, not until the fleece are all gone through.  I added quite a bit of length to this sweater and knit a medium for the bottom and a large on top and it fits really nicely.  It is comfy, not fitted, and I can hardly wait to finish it so I can wear it this winter.  It will be a hot one.  The top came from my sheep and it is so soft it is hard to believe it is wool.  No itchy feeling with this sweater.

One of the things I really like about this sweater is the hand spun.  It is more softly spun in areas and it creates a lovely texture.  It definitely is not an off-the-rack look, nor does it look like a home ec project.  I love it.  I think it is my favorite so far.  I have tried it on and every time I felt so snugly I did not want to take it off again.

I also have to fix No-No's sweater.  It will only take me a couple of days, so I am holding off for a bit, hoping I finish some of my real work first.

Just sheared

We were able to get our sheep sheared.  I have lots of fleece sorting to do the next couple of weeks so I can send off the fleece orders I have and get the rest ready for sale.  So far, all of the colored fleece and one white one is sold.  There are 7 other white ones and one suffolk hamp cross to sell.  The white merinos will be micron tested and sold for $27 a pound (sorted into locks, not just skirted) and the suffolk is $5 a pound (as pictured, just skirted).  Suffolk is a downy, medium wool.  It works great as quilt batts.  I have 3 suffolkX that I am sending to be turned into batts for either comforters or quilts. The quilt batts should run:
crib $10
twin $15
Queen $30
King $45
Comforter batts will be double that price because they have double the wool.

The suffolkX for sale has a very long staple and many colors.  I will post pictures of the other fleece, but here is the suffolkX and the 3 batts (the rolled ones) I am sending for processing.

Nostepinne

A nostepinne is an old tool used to wind balls of yarn into center pull balls.  They cost around $20 and up.  A wooden spoon is a common household item that can be used as a great substitute.  I got this idea from a You Tube video, but for some reason I can not get the code from that video to load here.

Here are the results of my nostepinne:

a little more than 850 yards, 165g, 5.8oz of handspun, 2 ply, merino from my flock. 

I think the spoon worked well, slow, but well.

More bands

Osip, Button and Kodiak's little one, has also shown a fleecy sensativity to feed changes. You can see there is a grey-brown section at the tip. That was fleece from when he was eating hay in the barn after he was born, about 4 months. Then there is a creamy section that is when he was on pasture, about 6 months, then there is a new grey section from now, in the barn, eating hay again. Strange sheep I have!

Reworking Wisteria

I am almost done with the yoke. This is looking even better than the first time I did this.

Dyeing

For Christmas my mother got me 2 dye kits:

I am excited to get going on this new project soon.

Merry Christmas!!!

I made a couple of purse for our middle child. I love how the felted yarn looks like sandstone.

Here is the middle child making Christmas breakfast for us. Notice the pancake in her mouth. Such a cutie.

I received a Pulse SmartPen from Dear this year. It looks really neat. I wish I had it when we went to the Lamb and Wool Seminar last month. Paper for it is fairly expensive, so I will have to be very careful about using it and make sure that each notebook is being used for a good purpose. I plan on getting the small flip note pads to keep barn information on. This will be very nice for us. It also records up to 400 hours of audio! Amazing. Here is a page I wrote and how the pen loaded the page to the computer. This is not a scanned image.

I hope you all had a great Christmas. We will be snowed in here for a few days.

On and Off the Needles

Owls, I am working on a sleeve and have the body complete to the point of cabling. The yarn is Cascade Eco Wool, very economical.
Wisteria, completed, knit from Mary, Na-Na, and Cindy Lou roving processed by Zwool and spun by me. This is sooooooooooooo soft. The softest wool I have ever touched.

Another purse for felting. This one will have lots of pockets and compartments. The yarn is hand spun by me from Ashland Bay merino roving in Daffodil bought at Paradise Fibers.

My Orenberg lace shawl. I decided to switch to my one ply hand spun. I pinned it out so the pattern was more visible, but when I block it, I will not stretch it as much. I really like this pattern, but at the rate I am going it will be done by the time my last child moves out and gets married. He is 8.

Lots of projects, but I have found that I need to have a variety of things to work on. The purse is pretty much just knit in the dark in the passenger seat. It is amazing what one can get done in short drives and waiting rooms. People who tell me, "oh, I could never find time to do that, I am far too busy." are so wrong, they have no idea how much time they waste just waiting and doing nothing. The Owls sweater is really for me, but it may fit my daughter better, I will have to see. It is a very simple pattern that can be knit while having a conversation. I think this will come with me to Christmas parties. The lace, however, take a lot of concentration and focus (for me, at least).

Finished purse

This purse was knit and then folded over in the opposite direction of the knit. I do like the results that crochet gives much better, but this is really cute too.

Orenburg lace

Orenburg lace is a fiber craft from Russia. Traditionally these lace shawls are made from goat (cashmere) fibers. Many people in the English world referred to them as wedding ring shawls because the knitting was so fine the entire shawl (normally quite large) could be pulled through a wedding ring.

I decided to try my hand at a warmer version of the Orenburg lace shawl and knit one in light fingering yarn. I found this shawl in the 2009 May / June PieceWork magazine (an Interweave Press periodical) at the local library. I spun some of my merino and after I plied it it was a light fingering yarn, not really suitable for most of the sweaters on my list. So, since I now have a suitable yarn with the correct yardage, I decided to go ahead and try this one. Wish me luck.

The photo above is from Interweave press. They have great magazines: Spin Off, Hand Woven, Interweave Knits...so many to choose from.

Bam Bam won his first prize!

While at the Lamb and Wool conference we had the opportunity to enter in the fleece contest. All we needed was a small sample and they would micron test it for us for free and the finest sample won. Well, out of all of the samples, BamBam won. He had a 16.8 micron sample with very little variation in fiber diameter. The next best was a 21.7 micron. His prize was $50 (about what his feed costs are for the year) and the honor of being the finest. We congratulated him as soon as we got home. It was dark, but I think he was pleased.

Unfortunately, the tester's printer was not working. I will have to wait for him to print off the data and mail it to me. Untl then, here are his parent's tests results from this last shearing:

The CV is really just the amount of variation in diameter of fiber. It should be under 22% or it will be downgraded. Mary's CV is bigger than PeeWee's because she had a pregnancy, birth, and lactation cycle. Even so, her fiber remained remarkably consistant.

The comfort factor is the percentage of fibers under 30 microns.

I will have one or more new lambs from this pair in April. We are very excited.

Some Pigs

Since I posted last we have had a lot happen. Our sheep were sheared and we are in the process of skirting our last 2 fleece. We skirted and shipped out all of our white merino fleece. There was a lot of illness. I lost feeling in my pinky and ring finger for a few months, my pinky is still numb. My mom and her husband both had heart issues, one of them major, and the other somewhat serious. So, sorry I have not kept up here.

One Thing we did accomplish was a home for our pigs. We get rejects from the hog "factories" about once a year and this year we wanted to give them a better home. So we set to building an enclosure that we hoped would contain them.


We chose this location for a few reasons: it gets a lot of shade so the pigs will not get sunburned, it is shaded by oak trees and pigs love acorns, it does not get a lot of grass so it will not take valuable pasture from the sheep, and it is not going to stink up the house or yard (not that they are really al that stinky when they are outside.)

We had to dig a lot of holes for the posts and then tamp them in carefully. We also put a line of barbed wire about 1" from the ground to discourage them from digging under the fence. Dear liked to give them a large mud puddle (it is sunscrean for them and keeps the flies off of them).

But, a nice storm, like we had yesterday, turns the whole thing into a mud puddle. It will be dry in a day, so the pigs better have their fun now. They loved the storm.

We throw them apples, cabbages, tomatoes, weeds from the garden, and watermelons. They love it all. We only have 2 weeds that are dangerous for pigs and we all know what they look like. The pigs are pretty happy and dirty, but at least they are muddy dirty, not poopy dirty.

Feed and Fleece

Button is a colored merino with a very fine fleece. From the top of the photo down you can see the results of different feeds and minerals. At the top she was getting a grass hay from Colorado and I am not sure what minerals she received. When she arrived at our farm she was placed on pasture that has a higher legumes and she was given a mineral block. We did not like the block as much so we switched to a mineral that comes in a tub and has molasses mixed in. When we bred her we moved her to a different pasture that is mostly grass. As winter set in Button was moved to the barn and fed an alfalfa hay and given the same mineral tub. When the tub was emptied and she was ready for grain, we fed her a grain mix that is fortified with minerals and also has molasses added to it because the sheep really like molasses. All of the changes, although gradual, had a huge effect on her fleece color and it is heavily banded. My mother said it looks like tree rings and I have to agree.
I have begun to be careful about what I put into my body. I buy organic dairy now because I do not want the growth hormones in my food. But, all of this makes me wonder. Button's fleece shows clearly what happened to her feed throughout the year. It is a good, strong fleece, but you can see the color variations. If switching feed like that causes those changes on the outside, what is going on inside? What is the food I eat doing inside of me? We have problems with obesity, we have much higher cancer rates, more acne, and other odd illnesses. We have salmonella poisoning in our food and come to find out that many of our grains and seed have salmonella at the DNA level of the seed. Who put it there? Monsanto is probably the largest contributor to the genetic modification of our feeds and seed. Unfortunately they are allowed to continue to play with our food and sue anyone who has their seed even though the Monsanto poison seed actually infected the other person's crop through natural pollination. Now Monsanto wants to plant seed that has a "termination" gene in it. It would grow one season and all seed produced from it would be sterile. They said we don't have to worry about that seed crossing with other seed, but is that really true? Would this planet go through a massive famine because the Monsanto seed crossed with other seed? So far our government has allowed Monsanto to sue farmers and backed Monsanto's "right" to patent their seed. Something needs to be done. Imagine if Monsanto patented a grass seed and your neighbor, 10 miles down the road, planted that seed. When your grass was ready to be pollinated, wind and animals carried the tainted seed pollen to your grass. Now you have Monsanto genetics in your yard. Those genetics are patented and they can sue you for patent infringement. That is exactly what is happening in the farming community.

Just some of the boys

This is Pee-Wee
My 7 year old boy neamed these two. The one on the left got a bottle for a little bit and is friendly so Friendly is his name. The one on the right (not the brother of the left) is Cutie-Pie. After hearing the names, my husband turned to the boy and said, "Are you a boy?" He giggled and said, "Yah!" Dear appreciates the gentleness of the boy, he was just teasing him.

The 4-Ply Cable Yarn

The blue yarn pictured is very soft, 100% merino from Ashland Bay in Baltic.

This is the yarn I am using for one of the sweaters I am making. To create it, you first spin 2 full bobbins of singles in one direction (S). You then ply them in the opposite direction (Z). Then you ply your 2 bobbins of 2 ply in the original direction (S). There it is, S or Z makes no difference, as long as you alter the direction of spin as I stated. It is pretty simple.

My singles are very fine here. I can spin 5-10' of one-ply this fine in 1 minute. Each bobbin has a little more than 4 oz on it and about 1700 yards. At a rate of 100-200 yards an hour 4 ounces of that one ply takes me 9-17 hours. The plying takes hardly any time, though. Thankfully!

This is the prime reason hand spun yarns are so expensive. They are great to work with if done correctly, but the cost of labor is high. I would charge $10 an hour plus the cost of the fiber (about $3-$4 an ounce). A lot of handspun is bulky weight for this reason as well. Bulky takes less time to spin. I have a difficult time spinning fiber in different diameters than it "wants" to be spun, however. Each type of fiber has different characteristics that call your hands to spin in a different way. The handspun from Kodiak (picutered in the banner) is about 1/3 as fine as this yarn. If I try and spin contrary to what the fiber wants my yarn gets uneaven.

I got misty eyed

My new Strauch Drum Carder came last week. I actually got a little choked up.

I had to try it out right away.
Oh my goodness, this was like cotton with one pass through! I love my sheep! I love love love my sheep!

Knitting update

Locks from 2 of my merinos. The brown is a 16.7 micron. I have not tested the white, but it is finer than the brown. The white will be spun and died orange for a sweater I am looking forward to doing soon.

I am finally ready to begin the v-neck part of this sweater. It is looking really nice. I think it would make a great tank dress for one of the girls, but I am putting 3/4 sleeves on it and it is made for me. Sorry girls.

This is the yarn I am going to use for my next sweater project. I am going to ply this 2-ply with another 2-ply so it is the right diameter yarn. It is 100% merino Baltic roving from Ashland Bay and I spun it very fine and plied it once only to find out that it needs another 1/3 in thickness to be able to make my next project.

Knitting along

The basket weave shawl made from my hand spun merino. It is so soft. My son wants me to wear it everywhere.


A few years ago I tried this pattern and I had a terrible time. I was too inexperienced at reading patterns. Finally, I feel I conquered this style of pattern writing. I am using a commercial yarn that my mother bought me for this sweater.

The hemlock ring blanket is so pretty. I am knitting mine up in some single ply 100% alpaca that I spun. Alpaca is a strong fiber and this particular alpaca had a long staple, so single ply works really well. It has a slightly fuzzy halo. I really like it.