Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Quick spun scraps

Quick spun scraps
This past year I bought a 1 pound bag of scraps of fiber. I never really intended to spin any of it in a serious manner. I bought it, instead, for when I go into our Preschool (and hopefully the Kindergarten this year) and talk about Wool. I spin a little and let the kids paw through it all and talk about sheep and all the cool things you can do with Wool. I capitalize "wool" because I did this for the past two years on the week they are studying the letter "W". (We also sing "Ba-Ba-Black-Sheep" and watch the Pixar short "Boundin'", which you should immediately go out and watch if you've never seen it!)

This year, we also made "felt balls" in the pre-K class. You take a puff of fiber and fluff it up with your fingers. Then get it wet with lightly soapy water and roll it in your hands like a ball of Play-Doh. In about a minute, you'll have something mostly ball-shaped. If you do it like making a Doh-snake, you'll get a little felted worm. The kids really enjoyed it.

But before that day, I was having a "blah" day, and I figured with an entire pound, it was unlikely that an ounce would be missed. So I grabbed out a random number of scraps from the brown and blue/green family and just spun them. This is the result. It is entirely random, woolen-spun, and very soft. For the most part I think the fibers are Merino, but there could be some BFL in there since I had to change my drafting a bit between scraps. I'm positive there's even a pinch of cashmere (the staple was extremely short and it was really wonderfully soft).

I think I'll knit it up into a little animal and felt it. But for what I wanted, just getting to sit down and spin something, fast, was perfect and I felt much better after simply for having completed a small project.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

That ended up really pretty. I really like the color combination!