Mama Goes To The Mill

Remember Mama? After washing, I had hand processed a small bit for a spinning sample. I was finally able to get the rest of her fleece to Ohio Valley Natural Fibers last week.



First it gets picked.



Then headed on to the drums (I switched sides of the machine for this photo).



Around and around from drum to drum.



And the last step turns it into a long tube of ready to spin wool.



Look how pretty.

Here's a video (not Mama) that shows more of the process.



This is Mama.





Guess who this is? Well, you'll never guess, so I'll tell you. It's Renny!



Huge, smushy Sherman. That's one fleece. I think it might become a huge, smushy blanket that I can keep forever.



Messy Boudreaux. At the last minute I decided to take his awful (too bad to show you the pictures!) fleece just to see what would happen. While I sure wouldn't try to sell it to anyone, it's clean enough that I can spin it. Would be nice to get something outta the boy. He can't really help it; the chickens are sabotaging him. At least that's his story... ;-).



This is a lovely (clean and washed like they all should be) Border Leicester lamb fleece from one of B. Willard's cousins. It's running in the first video above.



Lined up ready to go home. Renny, Willard's cousin, Boudreaux, Sherman (how they smushed all that into the bag is a wonder) and Mama. I waited on these to run and left several others for later pick up.

It's almost time for the Kentucky Wool Festival!

Spinning Mama

So I called my roll of ready to spin fiber a "danish" the other day. It's actually more of a "cinnamon bun". Obviously some donut research is needed ;-).

In the meantime, I've unrolled my "pastry", thinned it out some more by gently pulling it thinner (This is really the hardest part of learning to spin I think - drafting - and a video would really be helpful :-/). This drafting is what determines how thick or thin your yarn will be.

I'm sure there are videos on youtube showing how to join the loose roving onto a leader thread (and how to draft ;-) to begin spinning... I may try to do a specific "how to" post at some point, but for now, let's just enjoy looking at how Mama spins up and if you want to know more, just ask :-).



Yarn is basically just twisted fiber. And that can be any fiber. And you can choose any number of methods to add twist. I'm using a spinning wheel to speed things up, but you can use just your fingers and start twisting your wool, flax, cotton, dog hair, musk ox... In the picture above you can see the difference between the loose fiber and the twisted fiber.



Or this might show it better.





Blossom and I spent an enjoyable afternoon spinning up about a half of a bobbin of Mama. She has lovely wool and it was easy to spin.



I then wound the freshly spun yarn (a single ply) into a center pull ball so I could put the two ends together to ply (sort of re-spinning) them into a two ply yarn. You can see how the yarn naturally wants to do that on it's own.



Again, the wheel speeds things up and I end up with a bobbin full of two ply.

I completely forgot to take any pictures of the yarn being unwound from the bobbin onto a niddy noddy (a hand tool to make a skein) so you'll just have to imagine that part. Sigh.



Blossom, modeling the skein of Mama's yarn.



Pretty yarn even with it's spinning inconsistencies due to too much "Aw, look how cute Blossom is napping/sitting there/sniffing the yarn/checking out the wheel/chasing the chickens/mugging me for Cheerios... Wait! I should take a picture/video of that!"


iPhone



Today we spent a nice afternoon together knitting up a fun sample. Actually I knit while Blossom napped ;-). There are some cute pictures of her on my Twitter feed.

I hope you've enjoyed "meeting Mama" as much as I did. I'll be spinning the rest of Mama to send back to Miss C and she's got a fun project in mind. Stay tuned!

Mama's Day At The Salon

Mama is all washed and looking sparkly white. There was still a little hay and dirt mixed in her clean wool, but with a little fluffing (pulling apart the big locks/clumps of wool), she was soon on her way to the carder.



I love having a screened table to do all this so the dirt falls through and collects on a plastic sheet below. Fluffing/picking outside works just fine as well though, especially if you have a slight breeze to help carry off the dirt.



I run everything through the Louet drum carder first. Hard to get a working picture of this by myself (Blossom's good, but not that good...yet ;-), but just imagine I'm putting the picked/fluffed up locks under the lower drum and using a handle on the side to turn everything so it ends up brushed out on the bigger drum.

Disregard that straggly piece of wool on the top of the small drum. Nothing behaves on this farm ;-). The wool actually goes under the small drum and up between the two drums to wrap around the bigger one.

After I've loaded up the big drum, I use an ice pick sort of tool to slip through that groove to loosen the wool and then peel it off (you can sort of see that in a picture below).



I ran Mama through one time, pulled it off, separated out the batt (what comes off - looks like a fluffy pillow) into four pieces, pulled the pieces out into thinner/longer strips (wouldn't it be nice if I'd included a video to explain this garbley gook?) and then ran it back through the Louet carder a second time.



I repeated that and then ran it once more, this time through the finer (wire teeth closer together) Strauch carder.



Here's what it looks like as it peels off. Again, not a super informative photo, but hopefully you get an idea.



I separated the batt out into thinner strips, rolled them into "danishes" and Mama is ready to spin!*

*Disclaimer - this is just how I do it and may not be the "right" way. Feel free to jump in any time with some clarification or corrections. We're all here to learn!

The Day I Met Mama The Sheep*

It's been a busy several many days. Hickory and I have had the wonderful opportunity to ride with a fantastic dressage trainer while she was in town for a couple weeks, so we jumped on it. We fit in as much riding as possible, like being at horse camp. So fun.

However, I've been running as fast as I can and still not keeping up. Blossom's doing great, but it seems like she's still such a baby and needs so much time and attention. I think "This may be your last bottle lamb, crazysheeplady. You apparently don't have the energy for this anymore."

As I (and Comby, Iris, Weaslie, Hank, but no Betsy as she was locked in the house for bad bird behavior!) was sitting out in the front field last night letting Blossom have one last run around before bedtime, I was talking tired with a friend who pointed out that by now Ewenice would have taken over many of the momma duties.

Oh, yeah.

What am I going to do without Miss Ewenice? While I kind of like "being a sheep", I can't be a momma sheep forever. At some point I'm going to have to come back in and clean up this house.

In the meantime, breath deep and inhale some wool fumes. It will all work out.



This is Mama*. From Celi at thekitchensgarden. Disclaimer: that is probably not Mama on the picture postcard, but it's such a funny face I set it on there. It shows Celi's love of her sheep.



She sent me a box of Mama and Hairy McLairy and some beautiful "farmy" postcards. Which I could have spread out and taken a picture of...but the brain was too scattled. Her blog is full of them though and the accompanying stories make them that much better.



So, I am washing these two fleeces and spinning some yarn for her. Celi has a wheel on order and I have a feeling she'll be an easy convert, especially after she sees how lovely her wool is. After it's clean. Well, it was lovely before too (I love the smell of a freshly shorn fleece :-) but this is a scoop of the first soaking water ;-).



Here is Mama after two washes and three rinses (following my normal washing procedure).



How pretty and soft.

I can't wait to card and spin some. Maybe that would be a good job to do this afternoon while I'm sitting out playing momma sheep in the barn.

Sorry this post is kind of rambly/wonky. I've been trying to get it posted for two days, if for no other reason than to let everyone know things are okay and Blossom is growing like a weed and (along with everything else) keeping me really busy and away from the computer. And vacuum, stove, grocery... ;-).