How Far Would You Go for a Fleece?

This was originally an article I wrote for a spring 2014 edition of the Ottawa Valley Spinners' and Weavers' Guild newsletter

I began spinning some six or seven years ago ... I think.  Time has come to do weird things in my mind these last years.  My life seems to have divided itself into three chunks: before I had kids, after I had kids, and when I was a kid myself -- not necessarily in that order, and the most recent chunk is the one of which my recollections seem the least clear.  But learning to spin came after I had kids.  And as time passes and I find out more and more about spinning and how much there is to it that I don't yet know, I kind of feel more and more like a beginner and less and less like I have any idea what I'm really doing, apart from the fact that I'm having a good time.

One of my very first skeins of yarn - alpaca with banana fibre

And like many spinners wending their way through this particular corner of the world, I have found that I really and truly enjoy the whole process, taking the fleece right from the sheep (well, right from the farmer who has taken it from the sheep) and going through the whole washing, dyeing, combing, spinning she-bang.  That's really the attraction, more so than the finished product.  People ask, "And what will you do with this when you're done?" and I have no sweet idea.  Okay, sometimes I do.  But generally that is never the point.  Give it, sell it, weave it, knit it, add it to my collection of handspun yarns that some day I'll do something with -- whatever.  I'm not someone who plans ahead.  I spin to enjoy the moment.  Here I am, the wool is in my hands, could life get better than this?  To others be the dry contemplation of the future.

Experimenting with solar dyeing - after spending a hot day on our sunny back porch wrapped in black garbage bags, the wool came out beautifully dyed

My discovery that there are many ropes to learn in the fleece-buying world will be news to no one.  Like everyone else, I've spent a lot of time looking in all the usual places for raw fleece I want to work with -- something that's not too harsh and not too short and not so awfully vm-y that it will make me cry.  It's nice to buy local; it's nice to buy cheap.  I've bought from near and I've bought from far, online and in person, and my children and husband are getting used to weekend drives involving stopping off at a farm somewhere and meeting the sheepies.  And I've made a lot of terrible fleece mistakes.  (Ah, the stories I could tell...) As I said, I'm still learning and I have far to go. 

Drying fleece along with the laundry - a purple day

Some years ago I came across Rupperts' Corriedales in Pennsylvania.  They've cross-bred their Corries with Australian Corries and they coat some of their flock for sale to handspinners.  They don't post pictures of their fleece online as some farms do, but you can write in and get on their waiting list and they'll send you a description of what's available when they shear.  Maybe three or four years ago I bought my first smallish fleece from them.  It was beautiful -- lovely long staple, on the soft side, and so clean and marvellous to work with.  It was my first coated fleece -- and you never forget your first coated fleece.  But that box of fleece got a major ding in custom service charges crossing the border, holy smokes.   Not custom charges, not GST, it was just a service for transporting it through customs.  Ouch.  Two years later, I bought two more fleeces from them, a Corriedale and a Cormo-cross, and this time they tried mailing it differently in hopes of missing the custom service charge -- no luck, again a major extra expense.  So even though those fleeces were amazing, even though they brought nothing but joy to my life, I had to come to terms with reality and I promised myself:  never again.  "Never again," I told my husband.  "Never again," I said to the Rupperts' Corriedales website.  "Never again," I told my empty bag of Corriedale fleece.  I just can't afford being fleeced for fleece.  Plus, I have a ton of fleece now.  A ton.  What do I need with more fleece -- even if it's irresistably beautiful and brings joy to my life?

Raw Cormo fleece from Rupperts' Corriedales - so clean and beautiful it hardly looks lived in

Then early this spring I got an email from the Rupperts telling me they'd done their shearing and I was at the top of their waiting list and had my pick of the crop.  Inexplicable surprise.  How did that happen?  There was only one explanation:  the fleece fairy had struck again!  I knew it was a sign from the Spinning Powers that Be, and one that shouldn't be ignored.  It's just not wise.  So I went and explained to my husband about the fleece fairy, and suggested it was probably his idea that we could drive down and bring back the fleece ourselves rather than pay that ridiculous custom service charge, and wasn't he clever to think of it in the first place. He agreed (he is a clever guy, that's why I married him), and Easter weekend we drove down to pick up the two fleeces I'd chosen from my glorious position at the top of the waiting list: one Corriedale ram and one Cormo ewe.

Equally clean and beautiful raw Corriedale fleece from Rupperts' -- such a contrast in character from the Cormo

The farm is just outside Gettysburg, so to make it seem more like a family weekend road trip and less like spending a long weekend going to a farm really far away so Mum could satisfy her bizarre wool addiction, we decided to drive direct to the farm on Friday, meet the family, love the sheep, get the fleece.  Then Saturday morning would be an educationally satisfying exploration of Gettysburg, and Sunday a visually stimulating scenic drive up through the Adirondack mountains.

Washed Corriedale locks - it doesn't come out well in the pictures, but these locks are more lustrous than the Cormo, and although they're wonderfully soft for Corriedale wool, Cormo is especially super-soft

Washed Cormo locks - soooooo soft and fluffy

Alas.  Although we'd counted on a certain delay crossing the border, we had no idea it would take so long just to get through the toll booth to cross the bridge to get to the border.  ("What, you don't have sheep in Canada?" asked the border official.)  We didn't arrive in G'burg until 8 pm, after dark.  It wasn't an unpleasant entrance: the main street is all quaint historic buildings and lined with pear trees which happened to be in full majestic blossom, lit by old-fashioned street lamps, so we had a spectacular drive around town.  But the kids were tired and wanted to stay at the hotel, claiming they'd seen enough sheep farms for one lifetime, anyways.  (Ha!  dream on, my pretties.)  So my husband and I bravely set off in the dark and picked our way through complicated country roads with few road signs and no lighting to speak of and somehow managed to find the farm.  Clearly, the fleece fairy was still smiling kindly down on the expedition.  Didn't meet the sheep -- didn't even meet most of the family because they'd had to go out -- but there were my fleeces, all bagged up and ready to go.  Mummy's here, my darlings!

Combed top ready to spin - Cormo (left) and Corriedale (right)
You can kind of see that the Corriedale top is shinier than the Cormo

And the rest of the trip?  Well, it happened.  And whatever was going past our car windows on the outside, inside my brain was the constant refrain, "Beautiful fleece, all mine, all mine!  Beautiful fleece, all mine!" And then at some point we arrived home again.

Spun and triple-plied - Cormo (soft and stretchy) on top, and Corriedale (soft and lustrous) on the bottom

Corespun Yarn with Ribbon Rose Inclusions

One thing I like about corespun yarn is how easy it is to include small items like beads or flowers.

Today it's about flowers.  How decadent, to have these little beauties interspersed throughout your work, whatever your fibre art of choice happens to be.  Being in the mood for reds lately, I combed out a selection of red fleeces into some lovely top.  

So what's the story on this selection of top?  This past summer when I was down home in Nova Scotia I bought a lovely Romney x Lincoln Longwool fleece at Aspen Grove Farm outside Bridgewater. Very lustrous and curly.  I dyed it mostly in different reds and one fuchsia because, hey, how can you not dye something fuchsia?  It took the dye beautifully.  This skein includes all those reds and pinks from the Romney/Lincoln fleece, plus a bit of Corriedale.  So it won't be a soft and fluffy yarn, but it will be lustrous and textured.

Because I didn't want to blend all those lovely reds together (although in these photos they seem to look more pink than red - you'll just have to trust me on this) but wanted each colour to speak its own voice in some random fashion, I prepared my top for spinning by laying out a strip of each colour on my lap ... 

... and drafting it out into a long cord (strip? I'm not so great at the proper vocabulary, here) of top.  So there is some colour intermingling, and some striping of one colour after another.  

Next for the flowers to include in the yarn:

I buy these ribbon roses from Laurl on Etsy.  This small size fits easily through the orifice on my wheel and doesn't get caught in the hooks.  There are larger ribbon flowers available that can be fed through the orifice with lots of care and patience, and although I have at times in my life had sufficient emotional wherewithal to calmly, gently, and successfully ease large ribbon flowers through my wheel workings, this is not something I reliably have in vast quantities, nor do I want to spend it all on my yarn in case that means I'm going to have a complete meltdown later in the day when I burn supper or break my favourite mug.  We live our lives and do what works best, right?  For me, sticking to smaller, more easily dealt-with flowers is the road I have chosen.  My advice is, before starting a project like this, make sure whatever it is you're spinning into your yarn will fit through your orifice and hooks, and consider how willing you're going to be to nurse the yarn along if it's a close fit.

I spun a small sample skein just to see how the colours would play out with the whole hand-drafting the top together method, and also to help me pick what colour flowers I wanted to use.  I think any of these would be nice, but I wanted the flowers to stand out.

Here's my practice skein still on the wheel -- you can see drafting the top as I did worked just fine, and I have random sections of different reds all throughout my yarn ...

... and here are my rose colour choices.  Sadly, the light pink one didn't focus very well, but I think it will stand out best against the reds, and that's what I'm going with.

First step is to thread the roses onto a spool of strong nylon beading thread.  This thread will be strung alongside my strong cotton core in the yarn.

The roses are sewn together across the back, making an ideal spot to run the needle to thread the roses onto the nylon, i.e., between the "leaf" ribbon and the "blossom" ribbon, within the bounds of that stitch.  I took some fabulous shots of the pink flowers being strung onto the nylon.  What in the world happened to them?  I have no idea.  But they've completely disappeared so you're just going to have to use your imagination here.

Now I'm set up for spinning.  Next to me I have a bin with my cotton core (embroidery cotton #10), and another bin with my nylon beading thread.  My comments on this set-up are as follows:

1. You don't need to use two cores.  You can thread all the flowers onto the cotton core.  However, it's a thicker thread and not as slippery, so you have to take more care putting your roses on and sliding them along as you're spinning -- which is okay, I've done it successfully and it's not a terrible drag. It's just easier and smoother with nylon.

2. I thread all the flowers on at once, sliding them a few metres down the thread.  Then I spread out the first five or so flowers where I want them along the nylon.  They tend to stay where I want them, so it's a convenient way to keep track of how far apart they are in the yarn.  I've tried spacing all the flowers out at once, and wound up with a gigantic tangle of nylon in the bin, so just doing a half-dozen or so at a time seems to be the answer for me.  You can see in the photo above, one pink rose hanging on the nylon thread, making its way up towards the wheel to be spun into the yarn.

3. One of the best online tutorials for corespinning yarn that I have seen is by Esther Rodgers of Jazz Turtle.  This is a good video for showing how to start your corespun yarn and introduce the core threads to get going.

4.  Why do I use these ugly plastic bins?  I know.  They're not at all handmade or attractive or anything inspiring creativity.  Here's the thing.  Handmade baskets are tremendously beautiful.  I love them.  But they catch and pick at my materials as I'm spinning, which is not only frustrating but can cause damage.  There are lovely felted baskets which wouldn't do that, but the reality of my life is that I use almost exclusively handprocessed fleece in my yarns.  That means I'm doing a lot of combing and carding, and no matter how much vacuuming and sweeping I do in my craft room, there's always a film of VM (dried crumbs of plant matter) on my floor.  I don't want to even think about what that would do to a lovely felted basket.  Plus I need bins for tons of reasons, including holding uncombed (VM-laden) fleece.  And the ugly plastic ones wipe out easily, are stackable, and sturdy enough that they can hold that huge cone of embroidery cotton in the same place as it's rolling around.  So I forego the aesthetic qualities of more attractive baskets as worktools in this particular situation.

So here we are, corespinning along.  I've just lifted my thumb back to show how I keep the core threads stable in my hand by running them under my ring finger.  My pointer finger smooths the wool around the core as I'm spinning along.

When I get within a few inches of a rose, I stop spinning and slide the flower up the thread to meet the end point of my yarn.  Here I'm holding the two core threads (cotton and nylon) separate, just for the sake of the picture.  When I'm actually spinning, I hold them together.

Fit the rose right up against the wool, treadle once ... 

... which wraps the wool around the back of the flower ... 

... and spin on down the core.  Keep an eye on the rose as you continue to spin.  Hopefully it should feed easily through your orifice and onto your wheel, but depending on your wheel it may need a hand -- you'll know right away, because the yarn will stop feeding onto the bobbin.  Just stop spinning, ease the flower through, handwinding it onto the bobbin if necessary, and continue on your way.

Here's a photo of the final yarn, which, taken in my homemade lightbox, shows something much more RED than the pinkish colours above.  It really is these reds, and not those pinks, which teaches us all something about how unreliable cameras are for showing us what anything actually looks like.  Now that's deep.

See this yarn in my ETSY SHOP

Here are some other ribbon rose yarns I've spun - this first one corespun with uncarded locks dyed green, so there's lots of texture and curl.

Available in my ETSY SHOP

In my ETSY SHOP

 In my ETSY SHOP

This was the last skein I spun using larger flowers.  They do look marvellous, and maybe someday when I get my dream larger-orificed Country Spinner, I'll go back to including these flagrant beauties...

Two Art Yarns (with Grannie Stacks) from One Batt -- Colour Matching

Because I often get different ideas for yarns as I put colours together for a batt, I enjoy carding a few batts with the same colours and then spinning a couple of my ideas to see how they'll turn out and compare.  I can never spin ALL my ideas, but maybe that's a good thing. 

Sometimes it's fun to start a story at the end, so here is what I got from this particular set of batt ideas.  One ply from each of these yarns has been spun from the same multicoloured batt.  I chose different colours for the second ply, creating two completely different looks:

If you look closely, you'll see that each of these yarns has intermittent "grannie stacks,"
or piled-up twists of yarn, throughout.  These add concentrated colour, texture,
and definition to the yarn, and they just make me happy.

I was in the mood for yellow/peach/orange/pink, and I assembled different wools from my dyed stash and combed and carded them up.  This is what I came up with -- I didn't use a whole lot of the darker orange, in the end.  I'm hoping the picture reveals not only the colour differences but suggests the texture differences as well.

Fibre includes Cormo, Corriedale, Mohair, Merino, Romney x Bluefaced Leicester,
Border Leicester x Bluefaced Leicester, Lincoln Longwool,
and a bit of BLFxSilk top that I had leftover from another project

All spun up into my first single, it came together something like this:

Naturally, and true to my general way of doing things, I next forgot to photograph my lovely assembly of purples from which I spun another single to ply with the first.  And a "single" or "singles," dear non-spinning friends,  is one single strand of yarn made from twisted together fibres as is, without wrapping anything around it, just on its own.  For this yarn, I'm taking two singles and twisting them together, or "plying" them, to make a two-ply yarn.

I did manage to remember to take a photo of me making the second single, though, and you can get some idea of the different purples that went into it from the carded batt I'm spinning from -- well maybe if you enlargen the pic by clicking on it.

Here are the two singles before plying.

This yarn -- my inspiration for the two yarns I'm talking
about now -- is from a previous blog entry,  HERE
and you can find it in my Etsy shop HERE

What I decided to do was spin two-ply yarn with beehive grannie stacks, similar to the yarn on the right, but instead of those long even coils of colour, there would be stacked-up coils, and instead of using the multicoloured single for the stacks, I'd use the solid-coloured one.






So here I am plying the two singles, or twisting them together (in the opposite direction to that in which they were first spun).  I hold the two singles tautishly out ... 

... and then slide my hand up, allowing the wheel to twist them together.

After every three lengths of regular plying, I put in a grannie stack.  This is wrapping one ply (in this case, the purple one) around the other in the same small area, creating a little stack, and then continuing to ply normally.  So here I'm getting ready to make my stack, holding the purple single out to the side ...

... then I let the wheel spin it around in the same spot, angling my purple ply up and down a bit to spread out and stack the yarn.  I'm holding the other single way back with my other hand, because as I twist and wrap the purple single around the other single, the other single is untwisting, and if it untwists too much it will pull apart.  By holding it further back, I'm distributing the "untwist" over a greater length of yarn.

When I'm happy with my little grannie stack, I continue plying normally.  

Here it is on my spindle

My high-tech lazy kate is there on the floor.  A lazy kate is a contraption that holds your spindles
full of yarn and allows you to unwind them as you ply.  There are some
very gorgeous ones out there that you can buy.  This one is made from a cardboard box
with a couple knitting needles punched through the walls.  My spindles fit perfectly
on the needles.  The biggest trick is remembering WHERE the needles are when you want
to knit something with them.

And all finished.  The little stacks will make little purple shouts of colour in whatever it's used for.

You can see this in my Etsy shop HERE

For the second skein, I wanted to ply with yellows.  I used the same yellows that were in the multicoloured single - here they are again:

Carded into a batt and spun in the same way as the other yarn, this time with yellow grannie stacks, it came out like this:

This is also in my Etsy shop HERE

Changing the colour of the second single really makes a big difference in the overall look of the yarn.  If I'd had enough of those multicoloured batts, I would have plied another skein with peach/orange, and yet another with pinks.  Ah, so much to do, so little time...

Check it out in my Etsy shop

Check it out in my Etsy shop