Cleaning fleece

Since I last posted, I succumbed to the lure of the raw fleece, and bought a BFL fleece. I figure that every spinner should try the experience at least once. With it being shearing season there are quite a few on offer, so I thought why not? Well, I can think of a few reasons now which didn't occur to me at first. I didn't expect it to be so much work to get it clean, endless rinses, and the potential felting risk. Yes, I did matt a bit of it, but it will tease apart. Then there is the sheepy smell, which lingers even after washing. But the main thing is the time it's going to take to prepare it for spinning. I don't have a drum carder yet, (I'm working on it), and the fibres are too long for hand carding, so I'm having to tease out the locks with a small carder and spin from the lock.

Some of the fleece having a soak

A couple of teased out locks

So far, I've spun a miniscule amount of very fine singles just to try to see if I can produce laceweight. When I've got the same amount on another bobbin, I'll see what the 2 ply looks like.

No, this isn't it, this is the white alpaca I was spinning before. Sadly, it's a little bit too thin to go with the other colours I already spun, although I might get away with it. I'll have to swatch.

I have done a bit of knitting, mainly on Mystic Meadows which is now 3/4 done, and the Goddess Knits mystery is about 2/3 though the third clue. There are still only 288 stitches for a while yet, but I can tell that after the next increase round it's going to grow very slowly.