We’ve been really really busy lately and look like headless chickens running around. My house is in a TOTAL MESS and it’s been affecting my mood.
No.. it’s not that I got lazy with housework. I’ll explain it in the next post, I promise.
I’ve been frantically working on spinning this yarn for the past few weeks and it’s finally all done!
This single (unplied) yarn weighs 190gm and I have not measured the yardage yet. It’s somewhere between a lace and fingering weight (2ply to 4ply).
It’s made up of 70% West Australian Merino wool (about 22microns) and 30% Mulberry silk.
Let me show you how it all started:
This is fleece bought from a sheep farm in Yallingup. We took a trip down quite some time back and I bought this fleece. It was sheared from a single sheep. Kinda looks like the red plastic bag is vomiting the fleece out doesn’t it?
Sheep fleece is VERY grimy and dirty. It has natural oils (lanolin) and veggie matter (VM) and faeces (shit) stuck to it. Not at all like those cartoons where you see white fluffy poofy cutie sheep happily bounding around.
The white bits you see are the undercoat. The top is usually dirty brown and black.
I pulled out the longer parts (I believe they are called ‘staples’, please correct me if I’m wrong) and lined them up facing in one direction. I threw most of the shorter fleece away.
This is actually my second time washing fleece and I didn’t do this step for the first time. It was a disaster.
Then when I collected 200g of staples, I lined them up in 2 rows per laundry bag. I have 2 laundry bags here with all the fleece facing in the same direction.
I poured warm water and wool scour detergent into a tub and submerged the fleece into it. Used my hands to press the fleece down.
Look at how dirty it is!
I think it took 5 soaks before it was clean. I would recommend using HOT water instead of just warm as not all the lanolin came out, even with special wool scour detergents!
When I scoured for the first time, I didn’t have the wool scour detergent so I used Morning Fresh (dish washing liquid) with SUPER hot water and that came out lanolin free! 
Anyway, this is how it looked like when it was clean and dry:
It looks matted but you can still pull out the staples like so;
I then dyed the fleece in 2 colours – purple and pink.
Sorry for the horrible photo – my kitchen is usually dark.
Then I carded the fleece.
Carding is a process where you make all the fibre face the same direction by using a drum carder. Drum carders are very expensive BUT can last you a lifetime if you take good care of it! It’s just like a spinning wheel I guess. My spinning wheel is the same age as I am and still working fine!
See the white bits on the carder? That’s the Mulberry silk. No, I didn’t grow my own silkworms. Not now, at least. I bought the Mulberry silk from EGMTK. 
(Mandie has excellent customer service and very fast shipping!!)
Blending two kinds of fibre together on the drum carder is called…………. taadaaaa! “Blending”. Kinda no-brainer ain’t it?
What you pull off your drum carder is called a ‘batt’.
I rolled them into this shape to save space but they should look rectangular after you pull it off the carder. Now I mentioned this is my second time doing this. The first time, I didn’t pull out staples from the raw fleece before washing it and therefore I had short fleece as well as slightly matted ones go through the carder. I got tons of nepps from that!
The next photo is of the batt from my first try:
See the parts circled? Those are nepps. I know they may seem harmless but when there are a gazillion of them, it makes the yarn spun from it VERY rough and ugly. That was the saddest part for me as I had spent so much time with my first try at washing and carding fleece. That’s why I did better this time!
So when the batts were ready, I spun the yarn!
And the end result:
This is going to be knitted up into a very special gift for someone. Someone who, obviously, likes pinks and purples. 
But then again, MOST people I know love pink and purple…. I end up dyeing or knitting with a lot of purples and pinks!!!!!! Which isn’t so bad because if it were blue, I’d be tempted to keep it for myself… Hehehehe.
I hope to update again soon because I already have the pictures ready for the next post.
I still have more than half a bag of raw fleece left! These sheep have so much wool. Lol.
