My Plan To Get My Groove Back

Since closing the yarn shop I've been on a hiatus from knitting and all things fiber related. I used to be passionate about spinning and knitting but once you turn that L-O-V-E into another four letter word, W-O-R-K, it can suck the desire right out of you. Instead of creating something because you WANT to, you do it because you HAVE to. It's not the same. But how to get that passion back? I know...I'll make something from the ground up. I have a garage full of fleeces. I can scour and spin those and knit a sweater. Something I've always wanted to knit, a Cowichan style sweater. I have a pattern (somewhere) for one with a Thunderbird design. One of my favorite cars is the T-Bird. I use to have a '64 Bird but sold it to finance my yarn shop. That and my '54 Hudson Metropolitan. Ugh. I miss my classic cars. But anyway, back to my project. I went to the garage and grabbed the first black plastic garbage bag of fleece. I had no idea what was inside. This is one of the fleeces that a fellow gave me. That's right, FREE fleece. I opened the bag to discover a lovely silver gray fleece. There was a piece of paper in the bag with a name written on it. Rosie. That was the sheep's name. Obviously a ewe. And what a big girl she was. This fleece is huge. It looks to be a cross of maybe Romney and Lincoln. I adore gray fleece. So many possibilities. You can leave it natural, lighten or darken it by blending with another natural colored fleece, or over dye it. Gray fleeces dye up so pretty. Here is Rosie's fleece which will become part of my new sweater. It wasn't skirted but I couldn't be bothered. I wanted to scour this fleece, and I wanted to do so NOW. I picked off the good bits and scoured up about 1/4 of the fleece. Here it is drying.

And after being picked open, by hand.

This loosens up the fibers,

preparing them for carding.

Since I want to totally immerse myself in this project I am going to do everything "old school". I do possess a couple of drum carders, which would speed up the process but I am going to use hand cards, instead. Here I am carding the wool, which straightens and aligns the fibers so they can be spun.

Once the fibers are carded they are rolled up into rolags.

And here is my basket full of prepared rolags, all ready to be spun into yarn. And the remainder of the scoured fleece that is yet to be carded. Now to get some time to spin. Maybe tomorrow?