Merino Finished (finally!)

This is the first yarn spun from fresh fleece that I actually finished spinning all of it. Does that make sense? I've bought several fleeces, but haven't managed to get all of any single one completely spun up. Until now! This fleece is a merino/romeldale cross that I bought from a lady in Montana. Unfortunately, all the contact info is on my old dead computer. Here is approx. 1800 yds of soft, springy, fingering wt. yarn. There was actually more, but I gifted some of it. Originally, I had carded the cleaned fiber, but it ended up full of neps. Those are tiny balls of fiber dispersed all through the batts of fiber, which if left in will eventually turn into pills onto finished knitwear. So about halfway through spinning, I bought some Indigo Hound 5-pitch combs and combed all the remaining batts to get the neps out. This created a lot of waste fiber, but it sure was easier to spin! So I learned a valuable lesson about merino - check carefully for second cuts, then comb, don't card. I have really been working hard to finish this because I'm dying to start on some beautiful alpaca that is calling my name. Now I don't have to feel guilty!


merino x romeldale handspun yarn

Cool Yarn!

At the June Tall Pines meeting, I bought some really interesting pencil roving from Upstairs Studio. Unfortunately, in my enthusiasm to spin it, I forgot to take a "before" photo. It was kind of hard to describe, but I'll give it a try. Think of a 2-ply pencil roving in which each ply is space dyed in different colors. When you spin it, you get a barberpole effect. And when you ply that, you get...


If you look really closely, you can see the striping in each ply.


I haven't weighed it on the McMorran yarn balance to see how much I have yet, but I'm hoping to have enough for a pair of mittens. That's about all I've been up to lately. Still plugging away on the Frosted Ferns doily and the Victorian shawl, both of which are in that "bag of string" stage where they aren't really very impressive to look at. I suppose I should concentrate on one or the other and actually finish.