16 Months In The Making...
To my great joy, a box arrived from Twisted Sisters custom mill in Alberta! My Llama fiber!! The white was blended with 50% merino fiber and the black was blended with the black Clun Forest X wool from Val at Wooly Wool of the West.
I had sent it to Twisted Sisters instead of A & B because Twisted Sisters has de-hairing equipment and let's face it - Llama is hairy fiber - at least the fiber from my Llama is!
Now I realized that the equipment will not remove all the hair - and it didn't - but there's enough gone to make it very pleasing to spin! In fact I hustled off the bobbin of wool on my wheel I was spinning to spin the white immediately! There isn't a lot of the white, maybe a pound or so. I'll know approximately once it's on bobbins and once I've made it into yarn and weighed it I'll know exactly (d'uh!). There's at least 3 times as much black so I'll spin that later... maybe next spring?
I also congratulated myself that the time I spent cleaning up the fiber before I sent it, pulling out dirty hair and shaking out the second cuts and vegetable matter was totally time well spent! It is SO clean! There is so little veg in it I would say it is comparable to commercial top! Hooray!
I just couldn't suppress that little thrill of excitement from handling fiber I had sheared myself! It is quite soft and I promised myself I would not try to pick out every-single-piece of hair! I am pulling out any noticeably coarse ones but the reason I'm leaving the rest is because I intend to knit myself some socks from this and I expect the hair will make it somewhat tougher than wool-only yarn. And of course the Llama fiber will make them extra toasty! That's why I'm actually spinning it fairly fine - I'm going to make it a 3-ply and I don't want chunky weight yarn when I'm done! I want nice warm socks, not arctic explorer grade footwear!
In other news, I have finally finished blocking Comments on the blog posts the spammers seem to love so I'm hoping that will be an end to the deluge of sewage... Our internet seems to be total garbage after 6 p.m. and I've had a lot of trouble getting either of my blog interfaces to load in the evenings (assuming you've noticed the scanty posts the last month or so) so I'm going to try blogging during the day (squeezing it in somewhere between making lunch and business stuff). Things load quickly and easily <shock!> so I'm thinking this may be the way to go for now. Cheers all!
I had sent it to Twisted Sisters instead of A & B because Twisted Sisters has de-hairing equipment and let's face it - Llama is hairy fiber - at least the fiber from my Llama is!
Now I realized that the equipment will not remove all the hair - and it didn't - but there's enough gone to make it very pleasing to spin! In fact I hustled off the bobbin of wool on my wheel I was spinning to spin the white immediately! There isn't a lot of the white, maybe a pound or so. I'll know approximately once it's on bobbins and once I've made it into yarn and weighed it I'll know exactly (d'uh!). There's at least 3 times as much black so I'll spin that later... maybe next spring?
I also congratulated myself that the time I spent cleaning up the fiber before I sent it, pulling out dirty hair and shaking out the second cuts and vegetable matter was totally time well spent! It is SO clean! There is so little veg in it I would say it is comparable to commercial top! Hooray!
I just couldn't suppress that little thrill of excitement from handling fiber I had sheared myself! It is quite soft and I promised myself I would not try to pick out every-single-piece of hair! I am pulling out any noticeably coarse ones but the reason I'm leaving the rest is because I intend to knit myself some socks from this and I expect the hair will make it somewhat tougher than wool-only yarn. And of course the Llama fiber will make them extra toasty! That's why I'm actually spinning it fairly fine - I'm going to make it a 3-ply and I don't want chunky weight yarn when I'm done! I want nice warm socks, not arctic explorer grade footwear!
In other news, I have finally finished blocking Comments on the blog posts the spammers seem to love so I'm hoping that will be an end to the deluge of sewage... Our internet seems to be total garbage after 6 p.m. and I've had a lot of trouble getting either of my blog interfaces to load in the evenings (assuming you've noticed the scanty posts the last month or so) so I'm going to try blogging during the day (squeezing it in somewhere between making lunch and business stuff). Things load quickly and easily <shock!> so I'm thinking this may be the way to go for now. Cheers all!
Posted by Gloria Patre at 11/22/2011 11:19 AM 
Categories: Spinning, Fiber
Tags: white llama fiber black llama fiber llama spinning fiber
Categories: Spinning, Fiber
Tags: white llama fiber black llama fiber llama spinning fiber
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