I'm Back ......It's been such a long time.

It's been such a long time since I blogged here, I lost my craft mojo for a long while as I had other, personal things to deal with. I'm slowly getting back into the swing of knitting and spinning again.

So, here are a few things I would like to show you that I've been working on over the past few weeks:
Firstly what's on my wheel right now:

This is a bag of merino fibre that I bought on a recent trip to England. The colourway is Yorkshire Rainbow. I will call it the green green grass of home.

I'm spinning it very fine using my Ashford Traveller wheel. This will be a 2 ply yarn when finished, it's fairly slow progress but I'm enjoying the it! I love the greens, interspersed with tiny hits of black and white here and there.

I've been having a massive clear out of my craft room and in the process I found this fibre. It was half a carrier bag of unwashed fleece and I seem to think it came with a spinning wheel I bought. I washed it, combed it and spun it into a worsted weight yarn. I think it's Romney. My finished skein weighs 160g and there's 260 mtrs. It will become a hat for my husband.

I rediscovered a lot of things I had forgotten I had.

This is Ashford's merino/silk blend in the pomegranate colourway. I love the sheen and softness of this fibre. The finished skein weighs 115g and is 460 mtrs, it's a nice fingering/4 ply weight. Spun on my Ashford Traveller wheel.

This is some Jacob top that I received in a swap package almost a year ago. I had been wanting to try Jacob for a long time. I've decided I don't really like it as the combed top was full of very coarse kemp hairs which I tried to pick out as best I could while spinning but there's still a lot left in there. It will be used ~ I have started collecting skeins to knit a hand spun blanket.
100g
260 mtrs
2 ply
Ashford Traveller.

I bought this fibre in England recently. It was pre bagged and sold as merino so I couldn't fondle it in the shop, but I don't think it's merino, it feels and acts more like a fine corriedale combed top.

I bought it because I loved the colours in it ~ it's called Renaissance. Hard to see on a photograph but there are multiple shades running through it. I really enjoyed spinning this:
160g
638 mtrs
2 ply yarn
Spun on my Ashford Traveller wheel.

Finally, while emptying the loft I found a very large brown paper sack. It contained a very large, very dirty compressed fleece. I do not know where this fleece came from as I have only ever bought a white half fleece and have already washed and spun that ages ago, so unless they are multiplying up there I have no idea of the origin of this particular one.

It was the dirtiest thing I have ever seen and I almost threw it all away. I test washed a couple of locks and they came up nice and clean, surprisingly the locks felt soft and fluffy. So I picked out the best 2 kg of fibre and threw away a further 4.8 kg so it must have been a big sheep that grew this one!

I had to give the fleece a very good soak, in fact multiple soaks but the washed fleece came up very clean, white and bouncy. Some parts of the fleece have a bit of yellow staining on them but that doesn't matter as I'm going to dye this when it's spun anyway.

The picture shows from back to front ~ unwashed locks, washed locks and combed nests. This is something I'm working on when I get the urge to do something different in between other projects. Sometimes a bit of fibre prep is the only thing that cuts the mustard for me.

So it's been a few quite productive weeks for me. I have also knit something out of my hand dyed yarn, but I can't show it here just yet as it's for a Ravelry swap.

I'm very happy to be back here after such a long hiatus, doing my normal things ~ enjoying my crafts and making plans for what I will do next.