From sheep to shins

This evening on the drive home (with Adam driving, not me) I finished the leg warmers I made from the yarn I made from the carded wool I made from the pound of the fleece from the sheep known as Little Debbie, owned by a member of our spinning guild, Essex Spinners. (Yeah, I know that's a run-on sentence; it was a run-on experience, too, so that grammar fits.)

A bunch of the guild members bought the fleece together divided the fleece amongst ourselves; I got a pound. After washing it was about 14.5 oz. (Yes, that means about 1.5 oz of lanolin/sheep grease and dirt! And it wasn't very dirty.) Then I carded it by hand over many evenings while watching TV. Then I spun the carded fiber into singles over many additional evenings. Then I plied two singles together, and plied those together again for a 4-ply, this construction also being known as a cable-plied yarn.

Even though I washed the fleece a couple times, I could still feel a lot of lanolin left on the fiber; it's probably the first yarn I've used where my hands have felt softer after working with it! I had about 450 yards of it, I guess. I have it written down, but unfortunately my notes are scattered around.

Here are the finished leg warmers:

I used a free pattern from Classic Elite Yarns, "Waterlily Leg Warmers," by Andi Clark. For once I didn't do any (intentional) modifications, although I found a couple mistakes in my cabling, which is pretty rare for me. Actually, it's not that it's so rare that I make a mistake, but I tend to be a perfectionist and I usually will rip back to the mistake, one way (several whole rows, if it was pretty recent) or another (a few columns of stitches if it's far enough back), and redo it. But this time I just thought, do I really need to rip back SEVEN repeats of the cable pattern in order to be all perfect about it? Nope!!

For fun I wanted to see how they looked with rain boots:

and with cowboy boots:

 

Baba's got a brand new blog!

I've started a new blog that is meant to complement this one, specifically devoted to dyeing yarn and spinning fiber. I've long wanted to spend more energy and focus on dyeing. I have been working on improving my own abilities, and I am fascinated by others' beautiful products too. Probably more than by my own, truth be told. So I decided to branch off a new blog from this one, and it's called Baba's Fiber Dyeing Workshop. I just made the first post (about Hedgehog Fibres on Etsy), so it's truly nascent, but I'm really excited about it. I have a bunch of big ideas I hope to put into it as time goes on.

I hope you'll check it out and give it some love!