Finished Simple Skyp Socks...

I finally finished these yesterday and they will be winging their way to Dunedin tomorrow as they are a birthday gift:

The pattern is another pair of Simple Skyp Socks
and the yarn is JohnQ Earthwear, which is a blend of recycled possum and nylon. The yarn is listed in the Ravelry database as a sport weight yarn but I felt this was more like a regular fingering weight/4 ply yarn.












I started spinning some of Radar's Chocolate fibre that I cleaned and combed last year. I'm going for a lace weight yarn so I haven't got very far with it:

It's beautifully soft and fluffy, no set plan on what I'm going to knit with it yet but I'm really enjoying spinning it.

Still knitting bed socks, onto my 5th pair now :-)

More Spinning

Well it's already the last day of the month, I haven't been doing much in the way of crafting really but I have been doing a little spinning:

Fibre: Ashford's 70% merino 30% Alpaca
Colour: Rosehip
2 ply yarn
4 ply weight finished yarn
skein: 92g/ 355mtrs

Fibre: Halfbred combed top
Colour: Light Fawn
3 ply ('N' Plied)
Sport weight finished yarn
Skein: 254g/565mtrs

More Fibre & Silk & Fleece etc....

While having a sort through when looking for the Suri Alpaca fibre I found these:

65% Alpaca

15% Merino

20% Silk

135g

Beautifully soft carded fibre.

Multiple batches of silk hankies (mawata) that I dyed a very long time ago.

What a nice feeling to find things I had forgotten about as they have been sitting hidden in a box in a cupboard for so long. I've always meant to get around to having a go spinning the silk hankies ~ maybe next week.

I spent a leisurely hour in the sunshine working on the Gotland fleece. I washed it a few days ago, it was extremely dirty ~  think it had 4 or 5 scours in total. Using really hot water and some wool scour, I divided the fleece up into multiple batches of 100g or so then put it in small mesh bags. The water was filthy in the first 3 scours. I also rinsed it in hot water then laid it out to dry on an airing rack.

Afterwards I read up about Gotland fleece and found out that it felts easily and not to use hot water lol! Mine survived the washing process, but I don't agitate the fibre when washing ~ just letting it sit in the hot water for 5 minutes is enough, then lift out the bags, repeating the soaking process until the water is clean. It's now all clean, dry and ready for combing:

A few locks that I've combed to sample the fibre. Looking forward to seeing how it spins.

Spinning Suri Alpaca...

65% suri alpaca
20% hand dyed merino
15% hand dyed silk
125g

A beautiful fibre blend that I'm spinning as a fine single and will possibly 'N' ply it. The Suri and the silk both add a lovely sheen. Looking forward to finishing this one!

Carded Alpaca Fibre......

I got my alpaca fibre back from the carders just before Christmas but I haven't had time to look at it it until recently. I'm really happy with it. This is the rest of little Saturn's fleece, I had it blended with 30% fine merino fibre:

It's wonderfully soft and fluffy, just like clouds. There's 1.6 kg.













This is the rest of Chantalini's fleece, I kept this one as 100% alpaca. It was a deep fawn with white patches so the white fibre was blended in together with the darker and it's come out as a mid fawn, much different to the fibre (from the same alpaca) that I hand prepped and blogged about here. It weighs 3kg and is also lovely and clean and soft:

The shearer came last week so now there's 4 more fleeces to contend with but they shouldn't take me as long to clean as the last 4, they are much cleaner to start with. I learned my lesson, I now rake out their shelter every 2 weeks which cuts down on fleece contamination with the dreaded V.M. I'm still working on cleaning Radar's chocolate brown fleece from last year, and am about halfway through it, 4 bags of it washed and dried today as we have superb weather and I have a rare day off work.



I'm going to clean up Caesar and Jupiter's fleece and get them sent off to the carders, but I would like to do Saturn's and Radar's myself again. I just wish it wasn't so time consuming. But, I enjoy it and love spinning hand combed fibre, for me there's just nothing that compares to it.