Episode 1: Introducing Tizzie

I have recently purchased my very first Sheep Fleece!

It comes from London Wul farm off a Shetland/Jacob sheep named Tizzie. She is about 5 years old and I'm looking forward to meeting her. Hopefully I'll get a picture of her to go along with her memerable fleece.

This is the fleece in it's entirety. It's 3.5 lbs after it was skirted.

Isn't it just beautiful! I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but it has a carmel color to it, which is what made me pick this particular fleece. There were many beautiful ones to choose from. I had first pick this year because Heidi is so very thoughtful (might have been because I kept harassing her, hehe). This one just called to me.

I decided to try to separate the colors as best I could. I started with taking out all the darkest bits, then all the whitest bits, and bundled up all that was not the darkest or the whitest. I will blend those together to make the main color then I'll have dark grey and beige to use as accents. I'm hoping to make a sweater (someday!).



I'm going to make sample skeins and swatches of each of the colors to see how they spin up and knit up. I started with the mixed bag and picked out the vegetable matter and washed it up in my sink. I dried it on a sweater drying rack after running it through the spin cycle of the washing machine. That worked really great!



Stay tuned for the next episode of Tizzie!