This fiber is from a Jacob sheep. Actually, it's from two different Jacob sheep (a mother/daughter pair) owned by a friend of mine from our gym. My penchant for bringing in hand-knit and hand-spun goods prompted her to offer her fleeces to me this last Spring.
I'm afraid I'm rarely one to turn down "free". At the worst, I'm told icky fleece makes awesome mulch. At the best, you can get something amazing. And this, in my opinion, is as close to "the best" as you can get.
Jacob is considered an "unimproved" breed of sheep. Unlike Merino, they haven't gone through a huge amount of selective breeding. They have horns (2, 4, or 6, which go in every direction) and are sturdy sheep. Their wool is two-toned. white and brown/black. You may recall the
'splody sheep. This is those fleeces. They came back
lovely and ready to spin. Now I've finally finished about six ounces of the fiber (three white and three brown). Since I spun two full ounces in the month of December, and the Spindler's Challenge theme is "Inspired by Music", this little skein kept me humming "White Christmas". Nothing else in my stash leaped out as a song, so I think that'll be appropriate for December!
I kept trying to spin fingering-weight yarn. I really did. I sampled and kept my single taped to a card for reference. But it always ended up drifting back to sport (maybe just from being nicely springy and fulling up in the wash when I finished). At any rate, I've found a lovely sport-weight pattern for it, and I'm ready to get started knitting very soon!
1 comment:
Lovely. Just lovely.
Fingering is overrated. My fingering looks thin, then during finishing, it turns into sport. It happens to often, I've decided I'm ok with it.
patternwhisperer on rav
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