But first a few announcements…

I will be updating the shop tomorrow. Border Leicester, Merino/Tencel, Finn, Wensleydale, and SW Merino.

I’m heading up to Canada with some college friends on Sunday to Friday of next week. Any orders placed by mid-day Saturday, will go out Saturday. Any orders placed after that will be held until I can get them out when I’m back, next Saturday.

I have written the first page of my dissertation. This doesn’t seem like much (it’s likely to be a 100+ page document) but the first page is in many ways the hardest. Because you have to get something, anything, on the paper to help lead into writing the rest of the thing. So that’s done.

We’re looking to get my paper out for review (this is the published paper, which will be the central chapter of the dissertation) today/tomorrow I believe.

Ok, and now…

The Great Fleece Adventure, Part II
(Or part III if you include carrying 40 lbs of fleece across NHS&W with the Tsocktsarina part II)

So, you might remember, the Great Fleece Adventure Part I where I picked up a billion and twelve fleeces, brought them home, skirted them, etc.

I dropped most of them off with a mill for processing into roving. All but two, in fact. The mill is almost done processing those, so I suppose it’s fitting I finally got to the two I kept to process myself.

I’ve been waiting for a good weekend to do this at my parents’, when the weather was ok, there wasn’t super important things to do there, and I had the weekend to spend if I needed it. Well, this summer has not cooperated on the weather front, so I settled for the second two and a passable day.

It was muggy and hot, but not too too disgusting. The yard ended up smelling a little, as my hyssop retting experiment failed (making very nasty stinky water). Looks to get those fibers out (I know they’re there, we’ve seen them) I would have to go with a lot longer dew/snow retting method. ::shrugs:: No biggie.

Anyway, the first thing to do, of course, was make hot water. Luckily my parents’ hot water heater makes water almost too hot to put my hands in, and Mom has 3 very very very large buckets (which we use for all sorts of things from weeding to dirt, originally for toys). So I put the buckets right out back of the kitchen so I only had to carry water about 15 feet. This is good, since it takes one metric ton of water to fill these things. Ok, so only 3 trips with a 5ish gallon bucket. Still, a lot. And add a bunch of soap. Mmm soap.

Here are the fleeces in their first washes. Note that this is about 5 minutes after first putting them in their baths. And the water on the edges of the dark one especially are already brown as brown can be. The dark was a larger fleece to begin with, and I gave away less of it. There’s probably… 6ish pounds or more? And it was dirtier. Vera (the white one, and my Great Grandmother’s name) was apparently a pretty clean sheep and after giving away much of it is probably 2-3 pounds, but stuff still came out, of course, beyond just lanolin.

They soaked for a few hours in this wash, soaking out dirt as well as lanolin. Then they were transferred to another hot wash, and sat for a few MORE hours. Then, because there was still some crap coming off, I put them in a final hot wash.

You can see the water’s much clearer now. Much of the remaining fog is soap. Vera’s fleece went from this into a cold wash, without soap. Cocoa’s fleece (the brown one) being so much bigger and dirtier, went into Vera’s still hot wash for a little more hot soaking. From there, Cocoa’s fleece followed Vera’s through 3 cold water soaks to get the soap and such out. Vera’s was done after 3, but Cocoa’s got a 4th cold water soak (since there had still been some residue in #3).

Here’s Vera’s fleece in the last cold soak. It was too late for a photo of Cocoa’s by the time that one went in. You can see there’s almost nothign left in the water.

The tips are still slightly “antiqued” but that’s not actually lanolin still built up, but staining from the fleece sitting (2008 fleece). More about that in a bit.

The next question was, how to dry close to 10lbs of soaking wet fleece? And by 10, I mean 10 dry, full of water it weighs a lot more than that. Well, luckily, being an old farm, we have a lot of random things. My first thought was an old window screen or screen door. No such luck… BUT we do have a bunch of old fencing we used for making mobile duckling/chick fences. While up getting those, Dad found these old boxes, screened on 4 of 6 sides. I’m not sure what they were originally for. But they worked great for this…

I pulled out one lock of the white and dried it indoors overnight (the fleece was still quite damn, being in the humid outside). In the morning, I flicked it open with an old cat-comb I found in the drawer.

Yeah, that’s an 8 inch staple right there of shiny antique white fluffy, soft, lustrous, wavy border leicester. You can see that the “antiquing” visible on the tips in the water is almost invisible once opened up.

The drying fleece got moved to the garage, so they wouldn’t get rained on, and are drying there this week.

The lock, I spun, because… how could I possibly resist? Spun up on my Bossie midi.

Mmm single… A little underspun, I’ve never spun from the lock before. So I wrapped it up into a little plying bracelet, and plied it up. Of course I had to overply a little to make a “useable” yarn, all 3yds of it (yeah 3yds of 2ply from one lock, not bad in my mind).

Yeah, it’s overplyed and underspun enough that in the “miniskein” it basically becomes a super cabled yarn. ::chuckles:: But still, nice, fine, shiny, laceweight sample!

I’m pretty happy. I can’t wait for it to dry. That’s a lot of fiber. Fiber I think I’m going to have to spin myself. Eeep!

Aaand that’s about it for today. Back to writing.

~The Gnome