Last week I made a trip to Rumney, NH and purchased two ewes to join my small spinner's flock. Some time in the next week or two I'll go pick them up, after they've been bred. Cookie is a 7 year old dark gray Shetland/Corriedale cross ewe, and Buffy is her 3 year old daughter (3/4 Corriedale) with a fantastic variegated fleece. Both will be bred to a black Corriedale ram. We should have lambs in April!
I have been busy with Christmas projects this week. I've had a tremendous case of start-itis, so I thought I'd get going on gifts.
The Berga Ullman loom has a waffle-weave warp on it that's been sitting for months. I was unhappy with the shed on the loom, and very unhappy about breaking warp threads. One thing I've considered for some time is replacing the string heddles with Texsolv ones. It occurs to me that replacing them with slightly shorter heddles might improve the shed, too. This is a countermarche loom, which means each treadle will pull some shafts up, and the rest of the shafts down.
Today my heddles arrived. I ordered them from The Woolery on Monday. Great service, and free shipping!
While waiting for the heddles to arrive I did start winding a warp to go on the Harrisville 4-harness jack loom. That one will be orange-and-white log cabin towels. I got about 80 threads done, of a 440-thread, 10-yard warp.
I've also been washing fleeces this week. So far I've washed a small amount of a CVM fleece (I think that one was the neck fleece and "seconds" as it's a little uneven in length and on the short side, but gorgeous colors), and an incredible black and white fleece with a great staple length.
I was thinking this may be a Jacob fleece, but I'm not certain; there was a tag in the bag that said "Elderberry", but nothing else. It has quite a silky handle to it. The locks are actually variegated, though, with a really dark black on one end (very little brown) and white on the butt ends - as if the sheep was changing color or going gray. Interesting.
Today I washed a CVM fleece. Great crimp, great staple length, great color!
It was big enough that I had to split it in half to wash it in the machine. I had to get a "before-and-after" picture of this once I had the first half out of the washing machine. It got much lighter, showing off the gray, and very fluffy once washed.
This is a close-up, showing the crimp in this fleece. There are a few sections with darker brown coloring, too.
I would so dearly love to find a CVM ewe or wether to join my growing little spinner's flock!
I went through the basement to see if I could find any other unwashed fleeces. I found two. One is a small amount of unidentified dark brown fleece, and the other is a fleece in shades of gray that I bought in Rindge, NH in 2001. About time that one got washed, I think!
I'm also working on a couple of baby sweaters. I'm doing one in a DK weight yarn in pastels (in my Ravelry queue, for those on Rav) in a child's size 3. This one is being done top-down. The yarn and pattern were acquired during the North Shore Yarn Crawl in Massachusetts last March. I have one other child's sweater to knit after that, with yarn & pattern bought during the same event. The current sweater has only taken me 3 days so far, and might get finished up tomorrow. This one, the child's sweater, and a pair of purple variegated socks are all slated for Christmas gifts, as well as something from the loom and possibly a few corn heating bags.
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