Making Yarn

For Christmas, I was gifted some wool from a flock of sheep in West Virginia. The flock consists of a Conservancy Breed of sheep known as Leicester Longwool, which sheep are known for their production of fiber. Their wool can grow to eight inches (20 cm) or more in a year.

This particular fiber had been washed, seemingly once, as it still had a bit of lanolin in it. It had also been overdyed, so that in what is essentially a brown fleece has bits of yellow, red, and green dyed over the lighter browns in the fleece. Subtle, but a very pretty effect.

The photos below don’t show me spinning – that is documented elsewhere (and I rarely have a camera operator available!), but show the resulting singles, which are spun in the first step at the spinning wheel.

Here I can be seen plying three singles into yarn, which is balanced and will knit nicely. Notice three bobbins of singles on the floor, sitting on what spinners, for some reason, call a Lazy Kate. While I spun the singles on my Kromski Sonata, I am plying on my Ashford eSpinner 3, because it has a relatively huge bobbin ( 8 ounce v. 4 ounce on the Kromski). I find I get better control of the yarn’s twist using the Sonata. (Just as an aside, the Kromski Sonata can be seen in the top photo, to the left of the laptop. The spinning wheel behind me as I ply is a Leclerc E351, circa 1975 or so, one of eight wheels I currently own. Know anybody who needs a spinning wheel?

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Here is a closeup of the finished yarn, and a picture of four skeins of yarn that have been finished by washing in hot water and rinsing.

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I’ve documented the processing of this fiber into yarn, plus I ventured off into processing a Border Leicester fleece that I purchased and washed last year. I should post something about washing fleece. Another project!