Spinning Singles
Way back when I did my initial research into this breed, I was forewarned that due to its short staple length, this fleece is usually blended with other longer fibres to make spinning easier. While I’m quite happy to experiment with blending, I’m keen to explore how each fleece works on it’s own where possible, so pressed on with spinning it ‘pure’ from the batts I carded during Tour de Fleece.
When working with a new fleece I’m often tempted to start spinning using a shorter draw until I’ve felt how the fibre behaves, but with such a short staple this proved more challenging. After some trial and error I found the best way for me to spin was tearing the batts into three sections and use a supported long draw (woollen) technique; as long as there was enough twist travelling up the yarn I could spin a relatively thin single. My biggest challenge was maintaining consistency. After two passes through the drum carder my batts looked pretty good, but small clumps where the tips were sun-bleached still managed to slip through, and as the strips I was spinning grew smaller the fibres weren’t held together as well so were prone to clumping up. Slubs aren’t an aesthetic problem for me, but with the short staple length any sudden changes in yarn thickness would risk fibres separating, and on several occasions I re-joined my fibre to give a more gradual variation in diameter and hopefully strengthen the yarn.
Plying & Setting the Twist
This was fairly straightforward and I opted for a simple 2 ply as this was a small fleece, so I wanted to maintain as much length as possible to ensure I had enough for a final project. Lots of the coarser fibres fell out during spinning, less so during plying and washing, and what’s left doesn’t seem to be poking out too much. Despite having carded it well, this was probably the dustiest fleece I’ve worked with so far – my carder, spinning wheel and floor were covered in a layer of dust and it was still coming out during winding!
In all, this fleece gave me a total of 1,106m of 2-ply yarn, but around 1/4 of that is made up of yarn with more of the coarser fibres. I’d initially planned for this fleece to be turned into a jumper from a pattern I bought at EAYF, but I will need to swatch to see if it feels too scratchy for a next to skin garment. If the less coarse yarn will work then I could use it as the yoke and use another yarn as the base so I have enough, but if it’s too coarse, it is quite a stiff yarn (it sort of crunches when squished), so I reckon it would also work quite well being woven.
Happy Spinning!
Loose Ends 