Flagel Knitting Files

Mom and I have been very careful.  Groceries are picked up after someone else has done the shopping (Instacart employee), no gatherings of any kind are attended and if family stops by we sit outside physically distancing.  So there have been no runs to the LYS although some of us might argue yarn is essential.  Nor is there a need for more yarn or roving on my part, there is in my stash more than a lifetime supply.  And of course I still have about 1.5 sheep´s worth of fleece to spin anyway.  Having said that I needed a break from the sea of white that I´ve been working on for the last several weeks.  So I picked something with bold colors to distract me for a short time. I did bring with me a lovely merino wool that I had spun very early in my spinning career.  I know it is merino by the feel of it and its shorter staple even though the label that would give details is missing.  It was the colors that attracted me to it.  The ball of yarn I made is pictured below and as you see the sp

This is it the last post in the current four-part series.  The fleece we are working on is washed, picked, carded and spun.   Here is a photo of how I used some of the yarn in a project I am making. The first 50 yards or so of white; not my best spinning And here is what my oldest grand-niece knit with her approximate 160 yards of yarns. She did such a great job with this hat. And although it is a lovely white I thought it might be fun to dye a few of those mini hanks being made to see what happens.  Again starting a new process took a certain amount of research to learn what items needed to be purchased to dye.  And of course a few new words needed to be learned along the way.  The first step is to mordant the yarn.  This means one adds a naturally occurring metallic salt to a bath of water and plunge the wool in it.  The water with the yarn in it is slowly brought to 190 degrees F for 30 minutes and kept there for a additional hour.  For protein fibers like wool I used potassium alum

We will discuss the whole nep/noil thing but first a tale about selling rolags. With two full sheep´s worth of fleece to spin there will be far more yarn than either the kids or I can use which was pretty clear from the start.  That idea however was merely knocking around in my head without any type of action plan in place.  It seemed there would be plenty of time to figure out that situation later. As I mentioned Mom and I sit outside in the morning and evening in the shade.  During the morning that puts us right next to the driveway.  Mom gets a daily paper so for six of seven days of the week there is a person delivering it. Deb is the name of the delivery person, and she is one who wears dread locks, short cut-off jeans and flowy, colorful kaftan tops.  Remember I am in a rural part of the state where the largest city in the county has a population of just over 16,000.  Someone still dressing like a hippy is rare.  She may not be the only one in the county but odds are good one cou

Before I move forward on the wool processing there needs to be a bit more information about the rabbit hole I went down searching for information regarding the sheep-goats.  Those who spin like to know the breed of sheep the fleece comes from to better spin it.  No one knew much about the breed of sheep so I contacted the local university extension animal husbandry person with the before and after photos from yesterdayś post to see if he could tell me anything.  I am still waiting for an answer but then I might have been asking an impossible question.  Photos are not very helpful when trying to determine a breed, I spent hours looking at images of different breeds with no luck in finding anything that looked like Daisy and Oreo.  Then my nephew shared that the sheep were a St. Croix breed.  (Perhaps I should have started there!) Note the ewe´s coat You can find more photos of St. Croix sheep, both the bearded rams and the ewes, on this website.   Finally the long, narrow faced sheep I

Recently Mom has had quite a health scare with a heart not working as it should.  In fact I moved in with her just before the pandemic hit to help her with minor things like cooking, cleaning and laundry; I am still here.  Fortunately, she received the surgery she needed at a major university hospital in her state in the midst of the wave that hit hard in April and has made quite the recovery.  At 91 she is able to move around, care more for herself and even learned how to use FaceTime to chat with family members.  She more recently has had cataract surgery and recovered from shingles.  To say the least, 2020 has been very eventful for her. It has been a gift to be able to spend so much time with Mom.  We have done a great deal of ¨. . .remember when . . .¨ and ¨. . .what was the name of . .. ¨ ?  Although we both read and knit a great deal the last several weeks have been filled with other activities that have lead to this: Meet Old Wine Cork, approximately 52 yards of yarn in a fing