A pretty BIG ‘Kodiac Moment’…
Ah yes… it’s been butt in the air, nose to the grindstone for me since my last post - I was shocked this evening to see how long it’s been since I last wrote an entry!
This is due a number of rather large projects I have undertaken, and my days and evenings have been spent in the kitchen with my dye pots (that’s a whole other post just for that), in the bathroom with my salad spinner and oven racks, and in the living room with my spinning wheel. Or should I say spinning WHEELS because a new addition arrived from Holland just recently, a pre-owned Moswolt with bobbins so large they will make your mouth water in anticipation of the huge skeins of yarn that these guys will hold (again, a whole other post for THAT, too).
One of the biggest projects I undertook recently was the hand processing of an entire fleece for my friend Rachel Gsellman of MaRachel’s Alpacas of Ohio. Earlier this year, right after she and Matt had finished shearing their herd of alpacas, she mailed me this fleece, compressed and stuffed in a smallish box. I laughed out loud as I pulled the bag from the box, because once exposed to the air it took an almost audible big puff of it, and sat more than quadrupled its size, on my living room floor. It was a gorgeous white fleece, the first shearing of a part accoyo boy by the name of Kodiac Moment, and it was soft, lofty and sported an oh so long staple length. Rachel later wrote, saying it was probably very sinful for her to have stuffed it into such a small box, but I shrugged it off. After all, it was just fiber, right?
As Thanksgiving approached and I was making a list of all the things I needed to do in my fiber world, the processing of the fleece took priority. I had been communicating with Rachel about my first delvings into dyeing, and she requested that I do some colours as well. She wanted the yarn specifically for use with the Knifty Knitter. Ooooh! My chance to create bulky yarns!
Although I’ve been spinning since March and have delved into just about every bag of fiber that is stacked around a large bale of cedarwood chips in my unused shower, this was the first time that I’d be doing someone’s ENTIRE fleece. It was an eye opener, seeing a big fleece reduced to a pile of skeins that seemed impossibly small in comparison! I also had a moment where my alchemy in the kitchen was not quite working and the fiber that I was dyeing black turned into a hotspotch of black staples sporting bright green, blue and purple tips. Argh! How on earth did THAT happen? Once carded and spun it was the most beautiful eggplant colour with bits of purple and green here and there. I guess I could have dyed it a second time, but I was reluctant to put the wool through another heat process and run the risk of truly rendering it useless.
Every bit of fiber that has come from Rachel’s farm has been immaculate when it comes to cleanliness. At one point I was envisioning her frantically cleaning and picking out vegetable matter before sending it to me, but her pastures are so clean and she blows her animals out extremely well. What a difference that makes when it comes to processing it! However, it did become clear very quickly that indeed the compression of had not been a good idea. It had disturbed the structure in which the staples pack together, turning some of it into loose handfuls of fluffed up fiber which were a downright pain to comb any second cuts out of. Another valuable lesson learned *grin*.
