Fiber fluff: Cold processing fleece

Dear friends,

I am way behind on the spinning guild's sheep study program. I have a laundry basket full of sample fleeces waiting to be washed. Today, I just tossed two samples of fiber (that just happened to be unlabeled) into buckets of water. Now I'm going to let them sit in a place that's a bit sheltered on the back deck (under a table) for a little while to see if this suint fermentation method actually works to clean it.

I have two samples I need to prep for spinning. One is Dorset and one is Finn. The Dorset is a white fiber and the Finn is a rich brown color. I'm going to spin them on my Ashford student spindle, as I did the other samples. When I'm done spinning them, I'm going to ply them with white size 10 crochet cotton. This way I have a standard to gauge how the ply for each sample is different.  I'm going to try to make some time to borrow the drum carder that my mother-in-law has to get this stuff prepped.

I'm tempted to try spinning one of the other fleece samples in the grease. Before I do that, however, I have a ball of Icelandic roving to finish spinning. I need to ply the remaining yardage of the 4 oz of merino/bamboo/silk top that I finished spinning earlier this week. Approximately 2 oz of this has been spun and plyed together. It has to be wetted and hung to dry to set the twist in it. When I do this, I will measure how much I have. The second 2 oz is going to be plyed with silver sewing thread. The stuff that I just finished spinning singles of is in a dark grey, black, white color way. I think that the silver thread is going to look really cool with it.

I have a finished yarn where I first attempted the plying with the thread. It worked up pretty cool. I wasn't in love with the colorway of the fiber. The fiber was some random dyed fleece in a colorway that I wasn't thrilled with. I gave most of it away. The small bit I had left I spun up to relive stress at some point last summer. Plyed with the thread, the colorway is much improved. The murky grey came out looking like steel and the rest of it has a sparkly shine that pops up and makes the colors look less haphazard and muddled.

Total yardage spun/plied: 119 yds
Goal for the year: 1 mile / 1760 yds