Truthfully, I don’t know where to begin, but I know that if I don’t get something posted sooner rather than later, Donna is going to beat me about the head and shoulders and Margaret is going to send out the Spinning Mounties.  So, friends and neighbors, grab your favorite cuppa before you begin reading, for this promises to be a long one!

As of today, I’ve finished office hours for students, and have only a few exams and essays to mark or respond to over the course of the next month.  In other words, as of tomorrow, I suddenly find myself sitting here with a tidy amount of time on my hands, 50,000 things I want to do, and a bad case of ADD about which to do first!  Some of it will order itself according to deadlines—and the fact that I fly out for a visit home on 3 June, so some of it simply needs to be done before I leave.  I’m just not entirely certain which.

It’s about the same as putting a kid in a candy shop for the first time and telling her to choose one  candy.

And there is a lot of candy.

PLEASE click for bigger! I’ve set it to open in a different window, so you can take your time to check the notes and go to the larger sizes and really see the fleece.  Just to clarify, there’s a pound of each different breed, and some of it is simply stunning.  From back row to front, left to right:
Corriedale and Border Leicester; Babydoll Southdown and Cormo; Shetland lamb (with a bit of grey for contrast);
Wensleydale and Teeswater; Cotswold and Tunis; Icelandic and Cheviot;
Suffolk.

I’m dying to tell you all about each of these, but I reserve the right to do so at intervals as I work with each fleece—and thereby not add an extra 1000 words to this post!  But some of them . . . some of them are just absolutely gorgeous and I’m dying to get into them. Three of them are dirtier than the others and will need a little extra TLC in the washing  up, but most of them are clean, healthy, lovely fleeces.

And while I’ve not shown it to you (you’ll get it in the installment plan), that gives me a total of . . . er . . . Well, these:

1. Babydoll Southdown
2. Border Leicester
3. Cheviot
4. Cormo
5. Corriedale
6. Cotswold
7. Icelandic
8. Shetland (x2)
9. Suffolk
10. Teeswater
11. Tunis
12. Wensleydale
13. Gulf Coast
14. Finn
15. aussie Merino (i.e., not Delaine.  Presumably Peppin or Booroola.)
16. Targhee
17. Romeldale
18. Polwarth
19. Karakul
20. Rambouillet
21. CVM
22. BFL
23. Romney-Montaldale cross
24. Romney
25. Navajo Churro
26. Polypay
    plus:
27. llama
28. alpaca
29. mohair

I think I’m forgetting someone, but let’s face it:  you can’t tell.  However, I suppose I should admit that some of those are full fleeces.  The Shetland you already know about, and you’ve seen the Shetland lamb.  Otherwise, the Gulf Coast, Rambouillet, Romney, and Romney-Montaldale are full; the Polwarth, Tunis, and Navajo-Churro are partials.  The BFL and CVM may be full.

Can you tell what I’ll be doing over the summer?

I’ve been toying with the idea of saving out a half pound of each breed in single ounce increments for a sort of sample pack for my new spinners—or at least for those who want to do a bit of work with raw fleece (and who don’t mind paying for what it cost me).  OR, saving it for a course of my own in the fall.  I’d love to do the latter, but can’t provide wheels for a full class; new folks would be working with spindles and I don’t know if I can fill a class with spindles only.  Anyone have ideas or suggestions?

At the same time those latest samples came in, these arrived:

(er, not the clothespin; that’s just for gauge).  And:

The top combs are single-row and handmade by a gal in Sweden, and are both light and very nicely balanced. They’re perfect for rough combing. Remember this?–

Specifically, the brownish Romney/Romeldale cross in the lower left corner? Well, these combs turned that fleece into this:

(Ignore the sofa cushions; I was being lazy and couldn’t find an easy space to photo it all.)

I found I hadn’t washed the fleece quite as well as I’d thought I had; a little experience makes a huge difference when you can look at things in hindsight!  So I warmed the fleece to make it easier to handle, and rough combed it.  It was a bit of a challenge since it had been very dirty and full of VM, and now still had a bit of the lanolin residue and far too much VM.  I’d known it was rather a lot, but I never understood how much until I worked with the Stonehaven Farm fleeces. The tips were a bit sun damaged, and nepped a bit in the processing.  For the first few nests, I rough combed and then fine combed, but the fleece was a bit too rough for the four-pitch combs in their full configuration, and out of curiosity, I decided to let the neps remain and see what the final result would be.  The fleece was free, and it made sense to take advantage of every bit of experience I could get—and it’s been more than worth the weight of a paid fleece!

For fine combing, I turned to the four-pitch combs.  They’re hand-made by Jürgen Schönwolff (http://www.wollwolff.de/) and are lovely to handle.  The stand is very stable, has a solid weight, and comes with a clamp to reinforce that stability.

The stationary comb can be locked in place in the usual upright position:

or turned sideways, although I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know whether Mr. Schönwolff drilled the extra hole for the sideways position because I asked for it, or because it was something he’d already planned for. I’m afraid his English is less than brilliant, and my German is absolutely no better. (One does lose what one does not use.)

But the combs are also unique. Look:

See that red strip? Take another look:

Each row of tines is indivually placed and fixed. And, each row of tines can be individually removed and replaced with a spacer bar to change the combs from four- to three- to two- to single-pitch combs. The tines are 2mm, and with all four rows in place, the combs have a solid heft. An individual comb weighs in at 415 grams each, but it’s actually not overly heavy. The balance is good, and the handle is comfortable. While my hand was tired at the end of the day, my wrists did not hurt—and given the deQuervain’s, that’s significant.

While I didn’t use the Schönwolff combs on much of the Romney, I did test it on a bit of Shetland. And in combination, these two combs were brilliant. I ended up with a lovely combed top with no neps and, much to my surprise, nearly no waste—the latter of which I think is as much a reflection of the fleece as anything else!

But wow!!  What a difference a good set of combs can make in transforming raw fleece into a lovely bit of spinning fiber!  And yes, I’ll show you the Shetland eventually.  (Patience, patience!)

Oh . . . I almost forgot.  The Rustic RomneyX?

The color is a light coffee, the yarn is a true worsted (combed top spun worsted), but I cannot tell you how squishy it is! It’s surprisingly soft, and I’m dying to test it against the true Romney to see how it compares. I still have the white Romney from the free fleece (the earlier photo), which is in a similar condition to the brown. It’ll need to be combed to get the VM out, but if it wants to nep, I’m inclined to let it do so and run it in the same thick-thin rustic type of yarn and pair the two into a single project, like mittens or a hat.

However, it’s not all fleece. There’s been SOME spinning as well. There was this:

Four ounces of South African Fine, in Spunky Eclectic’s “Think Spring,” spun thick-thin and plied with heavy thread, feathers, and silk roses, for about 46 yards.  With a little luck and a bit of grace, it’ll help show a group of teens that handspun yarn can be as creative as they want it to be.

The other four ounces turned into this (thanks to Amelia of askthebellwether.com):

There’s 40 yards, spun thick-thin, plied with heavy pink thread, then chain plied. And it fascinates me how the thread creates a visual line that looks as if the yarn has a line of stitching down the middle of it.

And just for the sake of creating a not-so-funky yarn, I finally finished this:

It’s soysilk, dyed with Jacquard acid dyes, and I was glad to get it off the wheel! I find I prefer bamboo to soysilk, although part of my frustration was because I’d intended on beading the yarn, and changed my mind at the last minute. I did manage a small beaded skein for sample purposes, but I had tried plying with a beaded thread—and I gotta tell ya that is NOT my favorite method of adding beads. I much prefer to add it to the single itself as I spin it.

Fiber: Soysilk, kettle dyed with Jacquard into a lavender-rose.
Weight: 7.5 ounces
Yardage: 244
WPI/TPI: 16 and 9

But it feels simply loverly.

Whew.  And that’s enough for now.  Next up will be a bit more novelty yarn, and a rather massive amount of dyeing, and  some fleece work.

Come with coffee.

Just sayin’.