Randomness

I won!

I donated to Claudia's MS Ride, and won a skein of dk alpaca from Knot Another Hat!!

I'm one of those people who never win anything. Your chances of winning in any particular lottery or drawing go up for every entry I make.

Apparently Claudia didn't know that. In her totally random drawing (you have to read about how scientific it was on her blog) she happened to pull out my name. Apparently she didn't know that about others, either.

Now I guess I can't say I never win anything.

Fiber

I've been playing with some of the wools I received recently, and never posted photos of. And I'm finding I need combs. I have two gorgeous fleeces (well, parts of them, anyway) that look beautiful together and have similar staples and lots of curl. They're both in varying shades of greys and beiges, one darker, one lighter. And I have no idea what kind of sheep they're from.

At first I tried carding them together, and got lots of neps and knots. And they overblended, as well. I was hoping for a tweedy/mixed sort of look. I got plain grey. And it spun like I was trying to draft polyfiberfill. Navajo-plied the sample, as I was hoping to make a 3-ply yarn for a sweater out of this fiber. Interesting. Definately has that primitive "handspun" look about it.

OK. Let's try again. I had sampled these in lock form in the grease and got beautiful laceweight. Why was I getting thick, chunky, neppy, nasty yarn at the wheel? I pulled of a lock of one fleece, and dug out the flick card. Fluffed it up and spun from an end. Laceweight. Smooth. Fine. Thread. Too fine, almost. Spun and spun and spun for very little yarn on the bobbin, all from one lock. So fine, I couldn't ply it. I tried, but didn't do a good job of geting it lined up to ply from both ends of the sample, and ended up with a mess of twisted singles.

I think I need to comb it. I don't have combs. The staple is about 4-5", so I should have known better than to try to card it, but hey, we all make stupid mistakes sometimes, right? Blame it on my newfound love of processing wool myself instead of buying it already processed. I have to try everything. Just because you tell me it won't work doesn't mean I won't try it. I'm a scientist in my other life. If you don't give me enough evidence and support that evidence, I'll go experiment for myself until I'm satisfied that the hypothesis is valid.

So for now, I'll continue to flick it. It comes out pretty well. I'm happy with the smooth result of the yarn, even if I was going for worsted and got lace.

Can we bow to the desire of the wool?