Friday, February 12, 2010

New fiber

Last week I received some more roving in the mail that I bought off of Etsy.com.  It is six ounces of bliss, otherwise known as plain white corriedale.  I was immediately impressed by the slight sheepy musk emanating from the mass.  It feels a lot different from the silk/merino mix I had first--it is slightly rougher and drafts much more easily.  I am able to get this yarn more consistent because (aside from the experience I gained from my last fiber batch) it's easier for me to draft it out more uniformly.  I think the difficulty from the merino/silk was that the silk fibers seemed to be much longer than the merino fibers, which created more resistance to my pulling.  Of course, this could be all my imagination. I have already spun a spindle-full.  I want to ply this batch and have as little left over as possible.  I rigged up a second spindle exactly the same as my first one so that I can leave the first batch on the spindle while I spin the second batch.  I think it might make it easier to estimate when I have equal amounts to ply.

I'm lovin' the pure whiteness of the corriedale--I am positively humming with excitement about dyeing it.  I don't know what color.  I might dye it with Kool-Aid.  Definitely not cherry.  In high school I dyed my hair with cherry and the nauseatingly sweet smell lasted through more washings than you can imagine.  Also, the color lasted a LONG time.  Even after the red wore off you could still see touches of pink in some of my blonder strands.

I also hope that people are right about wool being warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  I'm having a blast creating all of these woolen wearables.  I don't want to give them up when it gets hot here.  Otherwise I will just have to learn how to spin cotton, or knit/crochet lacy things and handbags.

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