So my usual illumination stuff for Monday nights got canceled today. Instead, I went to go hang out with the fiber arts people, who have been having fun with raw fleece.
I thought I’d be safe, since they’ve already washed the fleece and would be dyeing tonight.
I was wrong.
I now have a vat on my back porch (ok, it’s a bucket) full of barely washed fleece, indigo, and the water that we washed the fleece in – yes, the dirty stuff. I’m apparently to let that sit on the porch in the sun for 7-10 days, stirring daily, in order to create an organic fermentation/chemical reaction that will bind the indigo (a non water-soluble dye) into my fleece.
So I’ll have blue fleece.
Otherwise, I’ll have dingy fleece and a really smelly bright blue mess. We’ll see what happens. Come to think of it, right now what I have is dingy fleece and a really smelly bright blue mess. I have blue-ish fingernails too.
I also got some uncarded wool, which – at first glance – is going to be a lot of fun. My wool cards create small rolags (rolag = fluffy bit of carded wool in a little tube), and I’m trying to spin this at a thick DK/thin worsted weight off the rolags, spinning woollen. This means I get about 2 drops per rolag, sitting down. However – the hand washed, hand combed fleece really does spin a lot easier than the commercially prepared rovings, I think because it’s not so compact – the lanolin might help as well.
Also, I’m not having to spin from the fold, since the rolags are prepared for spinning woolen.
Spinning takes a lot longer when you have to card all the wool first.