Not really knitting either but we’ll get to that.

I’ve given up trying to think of things to do with the roving I have, so I’m making my own.  I had some clean Romney fleece that I think needs to be a February Lady Sweater so I’m working on that.  Before I washed the fleece it weighed a little over a pound but now that all the oils and grease and dirt and VM are gone it only weighs about 10oz.  I need a little over 1000 yds of worsted weight yarn, which according to this handy chart is 900-1100 yards per pound, the Romney alone isn’t enough.  So I dug up some pretty white merino, a couple ounces of cashmere and a couple ounces of angora and if I blend it all together, it should give me enough fiber to spin up enough yarn for the cardigan.  If not, I’ll make it shorter, or a little smaller, or shorten the sleeves, I’ll make it work.

This picture shows the Romney before and after I picked it.  I’ve heard that if you pick a fleece it’s easier to card and takes a lot of the VM and little waste pieces of wool out which makes it easier to spin and gives you a prettier, VM free yarn.  The pictures are crap, I took them yesterday and it was dark and raining and I had to use a flash but you can see a huge difference between the washed locks and picked clouds.  Here’s a video, from YouTube, of someone using a real picker, I did this all by hand, just taking the wool piece by piece and fluffing open the locks, it was very tedious.  

I picked half the fleece on Monday and half yesterday and then yesterday afternoon I started de-hairing the cashmere.  You want tedious?  De-hair cashmere.  OMG, it took forever.  I spent around four hours yesterday and three today on just two ounces of fiber.  I put all the fiber in a fine mesh bag and stuck it in the dryer for about ten minutes.  This gave it really bad static but a big portion of the guard hairs stuck to the bag, so I could skip picking those out.  I just sat in the floor, dumped the fiber out on a towel and picked up little clumps of fiber that I would fluff up and pick the guard hairs out one at a time.  It was not fun, but it’s done now and I’ll never do it again, the cashmere just isn’t worth it.

After that nightmare I don’t feel like doing anything fiber related today but I’ll be back to it tomorrow.  I still need to divide all the fiber in half, by weight, and start carding and blending the fiber.  I have a feeling that is going to be an ordeal, too, it’s a good thing I really like doing this.