Tizzie Episode 3: Mixed is Spun

For those that have not been following the Tizzie episodes you can read back here and here.

All of the Tizzie fleece has now been washed.

The next step was to start really spinning it. The mixed colored (medium grey) was first on the agenda. It was carded first, by hand with dog slickers. Next came the fun part, spinning! I spun all of the fiber into 8 single ply balls and labeled them as I went. They were all very close to 50g so that when I plied them I would not have much waste. I then plied the first with the eighth, the second with the seventh and so on. I did this so that if I had veered off from the ply I wanted it would blend in better to make a more consistent yarn. I have no idea if this really worked but it seemed like a good theory.



Here is all the medium grey fiber spun up into a 2 ply worsted yarn. It is about a worsted weight as well. I have not counted the yardage yet but there is 382g in total of this color.





Back to carding the white fleece now.

Tizzie Episode 2: Getting Started

Tizzie's fleece is well underway to being prepared for knitting. I've continued with the washing and completed a sink full of each of the colors: mixed, dark, and white.

Here is the white drying.


And here is a basket full of the dark. Believe it or not this is the 'dark' but when dried like this there is a lot of lighter grey in it.



Before continuing with washing the rest of the fleece, I decided to spin up a sample of each of these colors to make sure I had washed to get the best spinning enjoyment I could. Since this was my first time washing fleece I didn't want to take any chances and ruin the WHOLE thing.

Most of the staple lengths are about the length of a pen as seen here. There are few sections that are about half that lenght (not many) and I'm putting those aside and will card them later.


I carded with dog slickers from the dollar store. I only recommend this if you are stubborn like me and don't want to purchase the really nice big cards that would probably make this job so much easier. I do enjoy the carding though, even with the dog slickers. I wouldn't be surprised if I gave in and bought real cards before I've completed this project. It could get tiresome, but for now they have worked well enough.

Here's a sneak peek at the yarn to come...

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!