Preparing for Sheep to Shawl
April 19th, 2006 at 9:41 pm (sheep-to-shawl)
We’re getting underway with preparation for Sheep to Shawl. At this point it consists of having woven a sample; and now spinning the warp yarn. We are using a beautiful grey fleece for the warp. We drum carded it in order to get a more consistent color. Two passes through the drum carder did the trick and gave us batts of about 1 ounce each. Here you can see us all spread out:
We had separated the fleece by color. Dark (which we didn’t use at all), Medium and Light. We tried to intersperse the light and dark while we were carding. So far it’s working quite well and the yarn is a nice grey color:
This is just the very start of my bobbin. (The brown peeking through in the middle is my leader). The bobbin is now about half full a few days later.
It’s very different spinning a recently shorn fine fleece with very little processing versus a prepared roving. There is so much bounce in the fleece vs the deadness of prepared roving. Using a carded batt is different too. I spend a bit of time picking out some noils and uncarded bits. The next fleece I drum card I will pay a bit of attention to how I’m feeding it in to the carder to see if I can avoid those uncarded bits more.
Off to spin some more!
Aunt Teresa said,
April 20th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Hey, I have one of those sheets at my house too. Isn’t that funny.
Mom said,
April 20th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
Grandpa Del also has one those sheets. That makes three in the family. =)