fibre blending

In part of my effort to clean up and reduce the amount of stuff I have, I started blending together small bits of fibre then using my diz to remove the fibre from the drum carder into roving.  I make a pile of colours that I think look good together, then see what happens. There are some great results, and some I'm not too sure about.

Here is a brown and white, with left over bits of onion dyed orange.  It has wool, alpaca, suri, and llama.

This is my favourite so far.  It includes wool, silk, alpaca, llama...basically a mixture of mostly home grown fibres with bits of commercial roving for colour.

And here's another one, because I was getting braver.  This one is left in batt (the big flat fibre rectangle that peels off the drum carder) form instead of being dized into roving.  I'm not certain if I like this or not yet, so I spun up a small sample.  Still undecided.

I now have all this beautiful, colourful fibre ready to spin.  However, I have so much else ahead of it in my spinning que, I think I'll measure, photograph it properly and put it on my etsy shop for a while.

Right now I have my 3 fleece blend to finish spinning, plying, blocking and measuring, then I really want to work on Mr Brown's fleece because I'm getting requests to put more yarn in the local fibre arts store (does a little happy dance - people like the thing I make and express this like by asking for more!).  I'm partway through carding the fleece and I've decided to spin it as a worsted or aran weight, single (unplyed), lopi style yarn.  I know it doesn't have a huge amount of luster to it, but I think it would make a great outerwear like a spring sweater or cardigan.  The little bit of grease left in the wool will be great for repelling the rain we get in the spring and fall, but it will breath enough it won't be too hot to wear when the weather starts to warm up.

After that, I don't know.  Maybe I'll spin a bit of colourful something for socks.  Or maybe I'll get another request for specific yarn.  Really I need to do a bit of sewing for events later this summer.  But I can still get an hour or two of spinning done in the evenings.

Then again, there is a lot of llama and alpaca in the house, I'm slowly washing it all.  With shearing coming up in a few months, and with one animal alone giving over 10 lbs of fleece a year, maybe I should start focusing on that?

lovely clouds of fibre from beau

Oh, talking about etsy and my quest for a name, how do you like Trampled by Fleece?  Not a farm name unfortunately, but it ties in with this blog.  Then again, I can only change the name once, so I have to be absolutely certain.