How to Make Yarn: Options, Options, Options

After Pecan's fleece was dry, I flicked it.

Flicking

 I sampled.  I carded a bit of it (more on carding later) and spun it.  I didn't like it, so I tried spinning some directly from the locks.  It's the perfect option for a silky-feeling fleece like Pecan's.  It might seem close to being done, but it's not.  I need to finish spinning, ply it, and give it yet another wash.  (It's clean--the final wash just plumps up the yarn.)  And I actually need to work on it instead of being distracted by Yeti's fleece.

Pecan on a spindle, with some flicked locks

Yeti is very distracting.

I skipped a few steps while prepping Pecan's fleece.  The first is sorting.   I (almost) always sort.  Sometimes I do it before scouring; sometimes I wash a whole fleece, then sort it. Sorting is dividing the fleece into separate, similar parts.  Shetlands usually have variation in their fleeces: spots (like Opal), double coats (like Elvira), or slighter differences in length or crimp.

Recently, I sorted Marble's fleece.  There's very little variation in Marble's fleece: some darker and lighter grey.  Instead of washing it in a big hunk like I did with Pecan's, I washed the fleece in little tulle bundles. (It keeps the locks aligned.)

Marble: sorted, wrapped, and ready to wash

Marble, freshly washed

A little side note: the white on the bottom of Marble's fleece is called "the rise."  Shetlands and a few other North European short-tailed breeds (like Icelandics) naturally shed their fleeces.  It's nice in theory:  you don't have to shear them; you can pluck their fleeces off by hand.  (Of course, when you have thirty-one Shetlands,  it would be difficult to do.)  Marble was sheared when she was "in the rise."  The white part on the bottom of the locks is denser than the rest of the fleece, so it's not easy to pull a flicker or hand cards through--or shears.  When a sheep is in the rise, there are always a lot of second cuts.  The good news is that Marble's locks are long enough that I can cut off the white bits at the bottom.

Next in the "How to Make Yarn" series: carding Marble's fleece.  Unless I get distracted, of course.