Just Enough Knowledge To Be Dangerous

When I was combing wool for the Sunday Stills - Hand Tools post a few weeks ago, I kind of enjoyed working with the combs and that wool, but was kind of beating myself to death doing it and once again thought "maybe this wool combing just isn't for me". 

I have a couple friends that are combing fools though so I figured, as with most things, I either didn't have the right tools for the job or didn't know how to use them correctly.  I happened to see a combing workshop at the Fiber Event in Greencastle just the next week so I signed up and hit the road.

The class was taught by Nancy de Caprariis of Sheep Street Fibers.  Not only was she an enjoyable and knowledgeable instructor, but she also brought a bunch of different sizes, types, brands... of combs and we tried them all.  That's exactly what I needed.  I ended up coming home with a smaller, lighter weight set of two pitch combs and a better understanding of how to use them.

This is a very special fleece I've been saving for several years.  It was from a dear Jacob lamb that was not with us very long, less than a year.  We had to have her put down when her kidneys finally failed and after the vet left I decided to shear her so maybe I could make something from/for her.

I divided her fleece into three main piles - mostly black, mostly white and some of each.

It was short to begin with and sheared through many tears, which didn't help matters any.

Under normal circumstances, no one would have thought to ever use this fleece.  I knew my only hope was combing.

Here I'm making a light gray blend.  I picked out what I hoped was the right color combination and placed it on the new combs.

Being by myself, I can't think of any way to show you exactly how the combs work so we'll just leave it as you use one comb to comb through the fiber on the other and the good fiber ends up sticking on the second comb...

...and the original comb is left with the ratty stuff, which you discard.

After a second pass through.  See how nice and neat and smoothly blended?  There are still some funky bits on the other comb so I discarded them and made one more pass.

Then, and I have no idea how to explain how/why this works, but you stick a tiny bit through a hole in your fancy handmade wooden diz that you can't find so you make a temporary one out of an empty plastic beer cheese container lid and start pulling and out comes a long piece of ready to spin "top".  Magic.

Did I mention the beer cheese container was empty?  Just checking ;-). 

Here I'm making a medium gray.

See all the bits and pieces and scraps of hay that's removed?  This would card terribly, but combed out...

...beautiful.

I mixed different amounts of black and white together and ended up with six different colors all from one sheep, Sunshine.  My plan is to spin this for a Kate Davies Sheep Heid hat.  I think the Jacob sheeps can give those silly Shetlands a run for their money ;-).  Ideally I'd like to have the yarn spun in time to enter it in the skein competition at the rapidly approaching Kentucky Sheep and Fiber Festival, but we'll have to see.

Speaking of the festival and different breeds of sheep, Deb Robson, one of the authors of  The Sheep and Fiber Sourcebook (yes, that awesome big red book) is teaching a two day workshop this year.  Talk about  some inspiration and better tools in your tool box! Here is a link to her class and several others interesting offerings. 

Sunshine