Flute Celeste

Over the past few days, I've been washing a gorgeous Shetland fleece from a little sheep named Flute Celeste.  I bought it from Stonehaven Farm in Halfway, Oregon, and I can't say enough nice things about the farmer and the fleece.  The wool is top quality, a perfectly soft and springy honey-brown.  It's a fairly low-grease fleece and washes up easily, and there's no cotting and hardly any VM.  The farmer has been great to work with, sending me samples and working with me to find the colors I want.  I combed (with little waste left on the combs) and spun up a sample and came up with the most springy, well-rounded yarn.  I'm thinking of making a cuddly warm hap shawl and perhaps a pair of knee socks.  I'm ordering at least one more fleece from them soon.

Extra lease sticks from the loom support plant trays full
of drying fleece over the bathtub.  Six trays could easily
 dry at once this way - as long as no one needs to take
a shower!

I now have 6 fleeces awaiting processing, so I clearly need to pick up the pace!  I just discovered a great fleece washing device - plastic mesh nursery trays.   Now I'm washing in the kitchen sink, which is sparing my achy back and also keeping the locks in better shape than scouring in the top loading washing machine.  I've switched over to Kookaburra Scour from dish detergent, with a little synthrapol if the fleece is extra greasy.  It has been working great for me, but then I don't take in super greasy merino fleeces, so I don't know how it works on the more challenging wools.

I've also been working on my combing skills in anticipation of this weekend's first Sheep to Yarn class at People's Co-op.  For the first time, I used a spray bottle with water and a few drops of conditioner to keep the frizz down, and it works wonders on a couple of difficult, yet gorgeous, Shetland fleeces I've been hesitating to process.  One of them has around an 8" staple length, and a bit longer in parts, and almost no crimp.  It's too fine and long to card, and I've been nervous to even use the flicker on it.  The problem is that there are a lot of trashy bits at the butt end of each staple, which makes me think that the sheep was about to molt, and that there's invisible scurf hiding in all that white wool and making things stick together.  Once I comb it out, though, it's the closest thing to silk you'll find coming off a sheep, so the results are worth the extra effort to process it.

We're making progress on fixing up the room that will eventually be my studio.  I'm hoping to have classes in there starting in mid-June.  I pulled out my wool stash and thoroughly labeled the mystery buckets, then put the lot of it into storage in the garage, save a few things that I need to sort or that I'm currently processing and spinning.  I also dyed some curtains today, although getting the right depth of color was difficult.  I think that I will make some bands on the inkle loom to accent the curtains.  I need more rugs, so my first thought, of course, is that I should finally build my Navajo loom and start making them myself.  I wish I had more time!  But I am so grateful for the time I have.