The LocalSpun series is my attempt to share the process from fiber (on the animal) to finished yarn. Each is just a glimpse into a moment in the life of yarn and yarnmaker.

Remember these shy little Jacob’s from Rammings Farm?

Well, I bought one of their fleeces, brought it home and stretched it out on an old clean sheet in the middle of my living room (too cold outside!)

I was pretty amazed at how clean this fleece felt. Unlike the Coopworth, it wasn’t greasy at all ! In fact, it didn’t seem to have any lanolin! Since it didn’t feel sticky, I decided to test out washing it in just water and salt – no soap!

I split up the fleece into 3 different pots for washing. The pots were filled up with water and placed on the stove (I’d do this in my washer, but it’s only hooked up to  cold water).

After an hour of stewing (medium low heat), I turned off the heat and let them cool and soak for another 3 hours. After that, I dumped the water, refilled the pots with water, added 1/2 cup of salt and brought up the heat again.

After the second washing the fleece was super clean with no visible dirt, so I laid 1/3 of  it out for drying.

I took the other two pots, dumped the water, refilled it with clean water and some dye.

1 pot was dyed this minty green, the other was hot pink.

This is my first time working with a spotted fleece, so I wanted to try all of the possible combination of colors. First I carded JUST the green, then slowly mixed in some black and then I carded just the black.  My favorite combination is both the white (or dyed) and black in equal bits – it provides a lovely heathered effect!

I really loved working with this fiber, it is SO chushy and squooshy and SOFT.

If you want to get your hands on these batts, you can find it in the shop today!

Want to learn more about the Jacob sheep breed? Check out the Jacob Sheep Breeders Association.

What’s your experience with Jacob? Did you love it? What did you make with it?

Remember the cashmere from Rammings farm?

Jennifer had his fiber blended with a little wool (also from her flock) and it turned out to be a lovely, tweedy gray with just hints of brown.

This color was too rich to dye or card, so I left it natural and spun it with bright colors.

Prairie Sunset is cashmere spun with Hobbledehoy’s Kombucha batt, a fun mix of merino, ecospun and sparkle.

Silver Lining is cashmere spun with handdyed mill-ends (available in the Boutique tomorrow today!)

I have a smidge of cashmere left…what do you think I should do with it? Should I spin it with another color or try dyeing or carding it?

(want to read more about fiber? Check out Alpaca Girl’s Fiber Friday Carnival!)

You know that I love local fiber, right? And that I love sharing it with you?
Inspired by the awesome response to the LocalSpun line (I didn’t get to announce the yarn, it sold before I got the chance to tell you about it!), I’ve decided to make it a monthly event.

The LocalSpun Club is all about sharing my local fiber with you, in both fiber and yarn form. You can subscribe to either the Yarn Club or the Fiber Club.
Here’s how it’ll work:

• Each month I’ll visit a local farm, get a fleece (always a different breed!), take lots of pictures and get some info from the farmer.
• Each month you’ll receive 4 oz of fiber or yarn by the 20th. 1, 2 or 3 month subscriptions are available and you can tailor your subscription by telling me your favorite color and by choosing between batts or locks (for the fiber club).

Along with your subscription, you’ll also receive information about the sheep that produced the fiber, the farm where it was raised and access to pictures and videos of the farm visit!

Know a spinner or knitter who might love this as a gift? It’s not too late for the holidays!
Within 12 hours of your purchase, I’ll email you a personalized, pretty, printable gift certificate for you to give to the recipient! They’ll receive their package with everyone else, by the 20th of the month! That’s right – you can buy a subscription to the LocalSpun club right at the last minute, until midnight on December 23rd!

Yesterday, I announced this to my newsletter (if you’re not on the list, your missing out on finding stuff out first! Sign up here!) and they’ve pounced on it! There is only 1 spot still open for the Yarn Club and 2 for the Fiber Club.
This is my first time offering a subscription service and I’d like to know what you think! What would you like to see in a club? If you subscribed, what would you like to recieve?

Created from one local fleece, the LocalSpun line celebrates the unique properties of a breed while honoring the sheep that produced it. I’ve visited the farm, washed the fleece and laid it out in the sun to dry. The line includes dyed locks, handcarded batts and handspun yarns. Every item is one of a kind and once sold, can never be recreated.

Today the batts are in the Boutique, with locks to follow this weekend and handspun yarns on Monday (along with a video showing how I spin these batts here on the blog).

The names for these batts are inspired by John Keats’s poem “To Autumn”. It’s much too long to include in it’s entirety in the shop descriptions, so I’d like to share it here, along with the batts inspired by it. Serendipitously, today is Keats’s birthday!

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Next week there will be yarns from the same fleece, with names from this same poem (unless someone suggests another Autumnal poem!).
Happy Autumn!

The LocalSpun series is my attempt to share the process from fiber (on the animal) to finished yarn. Each is just a glimpse into a moment in the life of yarn and yarnmaker.

Most everyone knows that fabric comes from yarn or thread which comes from cotton, sheep or synthetics. But how does it really GET there? From farm to cloth? In the next few week’s I’ll be working through and documenting this process. Today: The Blending.

The one question I seem to get most often when doing spinning demonstrations is “How do you get the wool like…that” with a gesture to the roving I’m holding in my hand. Most everyone understands that the wool comes from sheep and the fleece gets washed and dyed…but what takes it from a pile of fiber to the fluffy batt in my hands?

The fiber can be combed or carded to make it more spin-able and I chose to card this fleece with my brand new drum carder! (still so excited about it!) You can absolutely spin fiber right from the lock, but I wanted to card it, to make it fluffy and separate the locks. I want to keep some of the inherent “sheepiness” of this yarn, so I’m not carding it until smooth, just until nice and airy, with some of the little curls still intact. What I end up with is a batt (you can read the defintion of fiber terms like roving and batts here) – a pile of fluff with a lot of air and most of the fibers parellel-ish.

Since it’s a simple process that’s sort of hard to explain, I’ll show you how I do it in the following video.

If you’re unfamiliar with this step in fiber processing, the video gives a quick rundown of the general idea. If you’re very experienced with drum carding, I’d love to hear your feedback, as I’m brand new at it!

The batts I’m carding will be available in the Boutique this Friday, October 31, along with the dyed locks (pre-carding). Next Monday I’ll share a video on how I spin these batts and the yarn from this fleece will be available Monday, November 3. The locks, batts and yarn are part of my new LocalSpun line – a collection of yarn and fiber that all come from the same, local fleece. I hope to produce this line each month using a different local fleece, which I’ll wash and dye by hand, share the process and offer the fiber and yarn. Each month I hope to use a different breed of sheep (or alpaca or goat) and share what I discover about the farm, the breed and the process.

Any questions about drum carding?
What else in the process would you like to see?
What breed should I look for next?

The LocalSpun series is my attempt to share the process from fiber (on the animal) to finished yarn. Each is just a glimpse into a moment in the life of yarn and yarnmaker.

Most everyone knows that fabric comes from yarn or thread which comes from cotton, sheep or synthetics. But how does it really GET there? From farm to cloth? In the next few week’s I’ll be working through and documenting this process. Today: The Color

After the fleece is clean and dry (although, really, I don’t see why it needs to be dry), I dye the fiber. This is hardly the only way to do it. In fact, it’s time for a digression on the creativity of the process.

There are 1000s different way to move fiber from animal to yarn. I’ve been showing how I did it, for this one fleece. If you’re following along, planning for your own fleece, just keep in mind that there are a zillion little chances for creativity. You can dye the fiber in lock form (like I’ll demonstrate), once it’s carded or once you’ve spun it into yarn. You can card it or comb it or send it out to be processed by a mill. You can mix all different colors together into one batts or spin rovings of different colors together. This process is full of little decisions. Don’t get confused or bogged down in choosing one or the other. A fleece is a lot of fiber, plenty to play with, so experiment! Split it up into 1 lb sections and treat each section differently. With this fleece I’m leaving a pound undyed and dyeing the rest in 2 oz (or bigger) sections, then carding together the different colors (by the way, I’m creating a limited edition line of yarn using only the fiber from this one fleece, it’ll be in the Boutique in late October). When this is fleece, I plan on doing it all over again (documenting and sharing it here, of course) using different dyeing, carding and spinning techniques.

Ok, now on to the dyeing.

When it comes out of the microwave it looks like this:

I know I say it a few times in the video but by all means, leave it alone and let it cool!
Once the fiber is cool and has been rinsed, I put it back outside, on a rug, to dry.

Oooh, such pretty colors! ALL of them from Easter Egg dyes! I’ve achieved different depths of color by pouring off some of the dye liquid into another glass jar and adding water.

Once dry, they get carded and spun, tune in next week for carding!

The Localspun series is my attempt to share the process from fiber (on the animal) to finished yarn. Each is just a glimpse into a moment in the life of yarn and yarnmaker. Most everyone knows that fabric comes from yarn or thread which comes from cotton, sheep or synthetics. But how does it really GET there? From farm to cloth? In the next few week’s I’ll be working through and documenting this process. Today: The Fleece.

I purchased the fleece from Hobby Knob Farm, during my last farm visit.

It’s a Coopworth, shorn just last March from one of Elizabeth’s herd. It’s around 7 lbs and I loved the locks, even dirty:

When I was ready to wash it, I spread it out on my back “porch”. My cat was fascinated:

I was a little nervous I’d ruin it, so I gathered all the bits around the edges that were dirtiest and washed those first. The fleece had already been skirted, which means all the dung tags (uh, poop) and really dirty stuff around the edges had been removed before I bought it. But I found the dirtiest, shortest locks and put them in the washing machine.

Here’s where my fleece washing differs from everyone else. Usually you fill the washing machine up with the hottest water, but, well, my hot water line isn’t hooked up to the washer (we always wash with cold water), so I had to get a little old-fashioned. I took my big dyeing kettle, filled it up with hot water and put it on the stove. When the water got really hot, I added it to the washing machine. It took about 2 kettles to get enough water to fill the washing machine, so I only washed the fleece with hot water once. I added a shot of Dr. Bronner’s shampoo (all natural, organic ingredients!) and then left it alone for 2 hours. I came back later, drained the water, filled it up with tepid water and let it sit again for 2 or 3 hours. After these two rinses I couldn’t believe how clean and white the fleece was!

No dirt, no grime and so much brighter white than I expected.

I put the fleece back outside, on an old, clean rug to dry.

After it was dry, I brought it in and dyed it, more on that next week!

The Life of Yarn series is my attempt to share the process from fiber (on the animal) to finished yarn. Each is just a glimpse into a moment in the life of yarn and yarnmaker.

Most everyone knows that fabric comes from yarn or thread which comes from cotton, sheep or synthetics. But how does it really GET there? From farm to cloth? In the next few week’s I’ll be working through and documenting this process. Today: On the Farm.

Specifically Hobby Knob Farm in Weaversville, NC. This is one of the first farms I visited in my search for local wool and it continues to be my favorite sheep farm. Elizabeth is always generous with her time and information. That’s her (and my mom) you can hear in the videos. The sheep on this farm are bred for their fiber and conservancy. The flock includes colored Romney and Cotswold with a focus on Jacob’s, since they are a rare heritage breed that needs conservation. You can read more about Hobby Knob’s history and conservation efforts on their website.

On this visit, I purchased 2 beautiful cream fleeces which I just washed last weekend. For that adventure, tune in next Fiber Friday!