Knit Sisters

On Saturday Rob and I went with his family over to Jamesport, MO to do a bit of shopping and a bit of sightseeing.  While the rest of them looked at antique shops, I spent a happy hour at Wool Ridge, a lovely little knitting/spinning/weaving shop, where I poked around in the wool and talked to the equally lovely owner, Geri.  Of course I couldn’t leave without a purchase (or two or three) and so I acquired this naturally-colored brown wool:

 

And this black wool:

 

This stuff is very cool; it has reddish-brown highlights, as well as some grey strands that Geri told me were the next year’s wool growth coming in before the sheep was sheared.  I couldn’t resist–I already combed up a little bit of it:

 

I also (somehow, I just don’t know how it happened) acquired some raw white wool that I’m not picturing here today because, let’s face it, pictures of white wool are kind of boring.  But I have big plans to dye it, and I’ll keep you all posted about that.

In spinning news, I made some progress on the butterscotch wool and also did some hard thinking about what to ply with it.  Here’s what I came up with:

 

This is a Brown Sheep mill end roving that has been in the stash for a while.  It’s interesting because there are so many colors in there:  pink, red, light blue, yellow.  This gives the spun yarn a kind of richness that you just don’t get from solid-dyed rovings. 

 

The two singles side-by-side:

 

I started out thinking that I was going to make this yarn a 3-ply, and I even briefly considered making this the third strand,

 

but I really think that it’s asking to be a 2-ply.  (Besides, that lime green just looked too yucky next to the golden beauty of the butterscotch.)

Who am I to stand in the way of a yarn’s true destiny?  Sometimes you just have to get out of the fiber’s way.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2006 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Spinning, Wool gathering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.