The warmer weather was here......and now it's gone hiding. the past few days have been cold and rainy, the temp is only 48 degrees as I sit to write this morning. It is June right?

Life got busy again and I have missed the last 2 weeks. My Mom has been very ill and has been living with us for the past 2 months. Lot's of adjustments to life here and plans for what will happen in the future are all going on. After 6 months of myself being so ill it feels like life will never be normal again. I guess we are trying to get used to the new normal.

The kids have all been so busy and most of it related to animals of some kind. We have a new kitten that Elaina brought home and the chickens are all getting so big. Emily is off in Canada riding for the month of June. Elaina has been taking Hannah Grace to ride on her horse Cash. I love seeing her pass on her passion to her younger sister! Hannah Grace loves watching her sister ride and especially jump. She keeps telling me that she will be jumping horses soon.....hmmm....we will see about that!


Between my Moms hospital stays and doctor visits I have been getting some knitting done. I finished the sock blank socks. These were fun and I will be knitting more in the future.


I also cast on for a Hitofude. Finally! I have been wanting to do this ever since Karen over at Pumpkin Sunrise knit hers. What an enjoyable knit and pretty fast too! I only have 2 more charts on the body to finish. This one will be a gift but I know I want to make one for myself as well! Such a clever construction!


There has been spinning and I am still washing fleece. I did a post the other day on how I am processing my fleece if you are interested in that you can find it here I will be doing another post this week on hand combing. I am really enjoying my hand combs and love the way it makes fluffy clouds out of the fiber.

Junes glow colorway on BFL handspun

I also brought home a new fiber toy this week. It is my son Christopher's fault....yes we will blame it all on him.  He has been weaving on a small wooden loom and really enjoying it. While at Maryland Sheep and Wool he was able to sit at a floor loom and actually weave on it. He got up and told me he really wanted a floor loom. I smiled and thought ok maybe sometime in the way future.....where in the world would I put that!!  I love that my 11 year old son has a passion for fiber like I do! He has been my tag along at every fiber festival this year! I told this story to a dear friend who proceeded to tell me she had a floor loom she needed to find a home for. And so this past week we brought home our new addition. (and it was amazing how easily it found a spot in our family room!) So we are now learning all about weaving and are hoping to be warping next week! Do you weave? If you have any great tips or articles or videos to help us I would love for you to share! We signed up for a Craftsy class on weaving and I know a few of my spinning guild members are amazing weavers and we can get help from them if we need it.

Nilus Leclerc loom

I have not been reading a lot lately but the kids and I are planning our summer read alouds. One we will start with is Swallows and Amazons. We read this series when my oldest were young and fell in love with it. I am looking forward to sharing it with our younger ones now.

Joining Ginny for todays Yarn Along! Happy knitting everyone!!

I've been spinning for over 2 years now and have been wanting to process my own fleece for a while. I guess it was a natural progression and the next rabbit hole to go down in my fibery pursuits. I searched the web and read many accounts of how others wash their fleeces, I talked to my fellow guild members and they shared their opinions and I also watched some youtube videos  and all of these thing were very helpful. So I gathered some supplies and just decided to go for it.



I had purchased 1 lb of corriedale from a seller on etsy a few months ago. It was washed and the pictures showed an amazing color. When I received the fiber it was washed but still had a lot of lanolin in it and so I decided to wash it again. It was a coated fleece and had no VM (vegetable matter) at all but I did not want to spin in the grease so more washing was necessary.

locks aligned and ready to wash

With this fleece I decided I wanted to preserve the lock structure for easier combing. I began making piles of locks all aligned with the tips pointing the same way.

I then placed these locks in neat piles inside mesh laundry bags. I filled a large plastic tub with hot tap water. Our tap water gets really hot and so I did not need to boil water to get it above 120 degrees. I squirted Dawn dish soap into the water about 1/3 cup and then placed my mesh bags into the water. I left this to soak for 25 minutes (approx. as I got distracted with other projects a few times)

soaking

After 25 minutes I took the bags out and gently squeezed the soapy water out of them. I then placed them into another tub of hot water to rinse. Another 25 minutes went by and then I repeated this procedure with another rinse soak.

When they were rinsed well I laid the bags on a towel and rolled them up to gently squeeze the water out of them.

I then pulled out my locks and laid them on wire shelves to dry in the sun. It was very breezy and they dried really fast.

A couple notes......water temp is important and must be kept high to melt the lanolin. It also must be kept constant or the cooler water will make the lanolin hard again and very difficult to get out. I only needed one wash with this fleece as it was already pretty clean....other fleeces might need more. Do not agitate the fiber in the water or it can felt.

washed locks

One benefit of working with a raw fleece are super soft hands from the lanolin!

I enjoyed this process a lot. I am really happy with the resulting fiber and can  not wait to process it. I will have another post on combing and spinning it.