According to The Field Guide to Fleece, the breed was developed in the 1950s in New Zealand as both a fleece and meat sheep. Reading other sources online, I found out that the wool has a medium staple length of around 6” but that the crimpy bouncy fibre spins up into a lofty yarn, full of air, regardless of how much of a worsted draft you use. This bothered me, as I prefer the smooth, sleek look of worsted spun fibres to the fluffiness of woollen spun yarn. Also, my friend challenged me to spin a laceweight yarn from it.

That last point was what captured my imagination though. For all that I loved the blue tones of the fibre, I had no idea what to turn it into. Could a fibre that tended towards a haloed soft-textured yarn make a laceweight yarn that woeful give me the clean lace stitches I like? If I could spin it thin enough, it might.

The braid has various shades of blue, from sky blue through to navy, but not dyed as a gradient. For yarn for knitting lace, I want a 2-ply construction, and that gave me an idea. I decided to open up the braid and split it all the way down the middle lengthways to give two identical lengths of fibre.

Each of these bumps of fibre will form one singles of the final 2-ply, but if I spin both in the same way I’ll just be recreating the original braid and I wanted something that would really accentuate all those beautiful blues. Instead I’m spinning one half from the top end down to the bottom, and the second half in the other direction so the two resulting bobbins will start from opposite ends of the fibre when I come to ply them. I am hoping that that reversing of the colour sequence will result in some areas where the colours of the two plies match and others where they don’t, blending to form new shades.

I have already started spinning, at my wheel’s highest ratio (19:1), aiming for a very thin singles. The fibre drafts beautifully and a very fine yarn is not proving hard to produce so far. And just look at those blues!

A quick ply-back test already shows the slight fuzziness inherent in the yarn produced by this Perendale fibre though. I’m very pleased with it so far, small quantity though it is, and it is taking all my self-control to finish my knitting project instead of throwing it aside and spending hours spinning this gorgeous fibre!

So with less than 48 hours of the 2017 GiftAlong remaining, I am calling my GAL knitting done. I have completed a total of seven projects, three of which were gifts.

The gifts are wrapped and under the tree, the children are asleep, stockings hung at the foot of the bed, Muppet Christmas Carol has been watched on TV so Christmas is here!
Whatever holiday you celebrate, or none, I wish you a peaceful festive season. Time now to sit back with family, enjoy a glass of something cold, and relax with a WIP, a gift to myself. This is the last of the GiftAlong projects I cast on last month.
Season’s Greetings to you!

As well as knitting this month, I’ve been working on my first spin which required a degree of preparation and planning (rather than my usual method of throwing the fibre at either spindle or wheel and seeing what results!).
The fibre came from a fibre club at Fibre Hut in the West Midlands. When I first opened the parcel I must confess it was not a fibre I would have chosen myself. The colours are not ones I would usually be drawn to, and the fibre itself is quite rough at first touch.

The 100g braid is Masham (pronounced “massam”) wool. The Masham sheep is a crossbreed, from a Teeswater ram on a Swaledale ewe. Both these breeds produce a long, strong fleece. I hadn’t spun anything that could be called a Longwool before, and drafting it was interesting at first. I also hadn’t spun a multicoloured dyed top without intentionally preserving the colours before but I wanted to try mixing this one up.
I decided to try a fractal spin. This method involves stripping the length of roving or top lengthwise, and then dividing those strips into progressively narrower strips. Because this braid was quite narrow to begin with and I wanted a 3-ply, I was limited in how many times I could divide it.

I started by stripping the braid into three lengths. The first piece (centre top) was left as it was, and that became my first ply. The second piece was divided in half lengthwise (lower left) and the two sections then spun one after the other end to end, starting from the same end of the braid each time to become the second ply. The original braid had been cream at one end and yellow-brown at the other, so I just spun from the cream until I reached the end, and then started again with the cream end of the second piece. The third piece of the braid was split into quarters lengthwise (lower right). The four pieces were then spun one after the other, cream end first, to form the third ply.

I had intended to make a traditional 3-ply yarn, but of course the best laid plans of mice and men and all that... I guess the spinning mice must have had a hand (a paw?) in this one, because of course two of the plies turned out to be almost exactly the same length, running out within inches of one another, but my third bobbin still had a substantial amount of singles left. (The third ply, if anyone’s interested!). Waste not, want not, so I chain plied that last bit into a mini skein.

The colours in the original fibre were really quite analogous so really it shouldn’t be too surprising that the final plied yarn has a fairly uniform overall colour, a light spring green. The yellow and pale turquoise in the fibre combined together would appear green, and there was light green in there too. You have to get really quite close to the yarn to see that actually many of the strands have at least two different coloured plies. It’s also interesting to see how the chain plied mini skein has brighter colours than the traditional plied main skein. Avoiding mixing the colours in the plies keeps them truer and the darker greens and browns don’t dull the yellow sections.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this knits up. It has softened up a bit in washing and finishing but it isn’t soft enough for a scarf. It should make a good hat or mittens though.
I’d use this technique again. Maybe I’ll try it on a fibre with more colour variation next time.

December seems to be getting away from me somewhat! Between knitting, designing, Giftalonging (giftingalong?), preparing for Christmas and for my younger son's birthday which also falls this month, things have been rather hectic in my house! 

So far I've managed to finish four GAL knitting projects, with two more on the needles.

The other two projects are a pair of socks, and a cowl. Unfortunately progress on those is slow. The socks are being worked two at a time from both ends of the same ball of yarn, which unfortunately decided to completely collapse on me! I ended up having to break it to untangle it, and even then I wasted two hours sorting out the massive yarn barf.
The cowl is behaving itself much better, but is currently my work lunchtime knitting, and since I only get 30 minutes and I have to eat my lunch during that time too, I'm lucky if I get much more than one or two rounds done at a time.

Finally I've been working on a spinning project. The final result of that is below, and I'll post again in a few days to give more details of how it was produced.

How's your holiday prep coming along?

Today saw my last pattern release of 2017.

Earlier this month I released Busking Cowl, a superchunky cowl which works up fast for those last-minute gifts. Make it in a neutral colour as shown, or brighten up a dull day with a mad multi! It would look great in a thick-and-thin handspun too.

And that final release for this year is this pair of stranded colourwork mittens with an afterthought thumb. Square Cut Diamonds use fingering weight yarn, ideal for using up part skeins of sock yarn, and only use two colours on each round. A small amount of duplicate stitch adds a third colour in a couple of places. I wore these to the ice rink and they're really cosy!