Sheep of the Week: Polwarth

You won't find many Polwarth Sheep in North America and it's a pity because I am smitten with their wool.  In South America, they are called Ideals, which sums it up pretty succinctly.

To me, they are ideal because I relish anything soft and fluffy and petable, not to mention easy to spin, a sponge for dyes, and plays well with other fibers.

These guys came into being in the 1880s in Australia, Polwarth County.  The breeder had Merinos that didn't fare well in the rainy climate of South Australia.  So he crossed his Merinos with Lincolns (3/4 Merino, 1/4 Lincoln) to give us the heartier dual-purpose Polwarth with long, soft fiber and lean meat.  They produce a 13-15 pounds of fiber (that's a ton of fiber gold!) with an average staple length of 6 inches and micron count of 23.  Polwarths don't have a lot of wrinkles under those wooly sweaters of theirs, so their fleece is very consistent.

The fiber is a dream to work with, easy to prepare and gentle to the hands. Spin it worsted to enhance its natural brightness and sheen and to lend a nice drape to the fabric.  Work it up into knitted, woven or felted items like hats, cowls, scarves, baby sweaters where itchiness can not be tolerated.   Blend it with other luxury fibers like bunny angora, silk, cashmere, kid mohair, baby alpaca for a truly numinous fiber experience.  

Word has it that Polwarth ewes are good mothers.  How hard could that be if your baby looked like this!

Puddles!  Photo courtesy of Shirley Browsky.

This little guy is from the flock of Shirley Browsky, a fiber artist in Ottowa, Canada.  Contact her if you are interested in fleeces.  Maybe Puddles is ready to be your next project.

Photo courtesy of Shirley Browsky.

Here's a new colorway I mentioned a few posts back.  I'm calling it Hill Country Morning because it reminds me of sunrises in the Texas hill country, where I spent time growing up, camping with my family, splashing in Canyon Lake, sneaking illicit sips of beer at the Wurstfest in New Braunfels while my parents polka danced.  Good times.

And here it is spun up two different ways.  The first is spun then plied using Navajo plying, a.k.a. chain plying, but Navajo sound more romantic.

The second is done in what is called Fractal Spinning, which I learned when I took Felicia Lo's Spinning Dyed Fibers class on Craftsy.  What a great online class!  She does remarkable things with plain spinning of bright colors and I really learned a lot.  It was worth every penny.  Fractal spun yarn will knit up in a self striping pattern.  Which, obviously I have not managed to accomplish yet.  So stay tuned.  Part of the problem is the fiber.  This is Romney, and let's just face it, it's scratchy.  So I'm not sure what to do with it.  If it can't be a hat or a scarf or a sweater, what can it be?  The ball is in your court, yarn.  Speak to me.

Meanwhile, back in the dye studio (a.k.a. my kitchen), I've cooked up another colorway--Cedar Key.  The fiber is 50% merino/50% silk from Ashland Bay and it's downright gregarious.  It keeps me up at night suggesting what might become of it.

Sheep of the Week: Merino

Word has it that there are over 450 breeds of sheep throughout the world, and most enthusiasts agree that the merino produces the softest wool of all, some of which rivals cashmere in its luxuriousness.  So luxurious, in fact, that the keepers of these sheep have been utterly stingy in the past.  So stingy, it’s a wonder we even have merinos 

in this part of the world.  We do have a few, but even 

now it’s difficult to find true merinos in the U.S.

Before the 18th century, King Ferdinand of Spain cornered the market on merinos, known then as Escurials. (We have a rooster named Ferdinand, a.k.a effing Ferdinand, bastard chicken from hell.  Only we don’t say “effing.”)  Anyway, remove a sheep from Spain and effing Ferdinand would have you executed.  I told you they were stingy!  He gifted a few to his cousin in Saxony, Prince Xavier, and the Saxon Merino was born.  Eventually, war came and the flock was all but annhialated.  What survived was dispersed to the four corners.  Those that made it to America were selected for meat, and their wool suffered.  Those that went to Australia were bred for their wool, and they ate something else.  So fine that someone got stingy again and it wasn’t until 1986 that the Aussies allowed sheep to be exported.  Rams only.  Good luck with that breeding program.  

Ever resourceful, ranchers in America bred those rams with well-chosen muttons, and now we do have a few farms that produce lovely merino fleeces.  Alas, none are local to Western North Carolina, but we can still hope.  (Someone please correct me if I’m wrong!)  Merinos have been crossed with other breeds to add softness to potentially scratchy wools, so when you find Cormo or Polwarth or Rambouillet, you’ll have a nice next-to-skin fiber to use in your spinning or knitting.

I am a huge fan of merino fiber.  One of its characteristics is loftiness.  Another is warmth.  Once spun, the yarn is puffy and bouncy, light weight, yet warm.  It does not wear hard, so it will eventually pill.  But honestly, it's worth it.  Look how pretty.

This is hand spun merino plied with bamboo in my Reed colorway.

Fun fact:  Merino sheep carry up to 10-25 pounds of fleece on their 80-175 pound bodies.  I bet they’re frisky on shearing day.

Another fun fact (and probably TMI):  Did you know that you can buy merino undies?  Wool panties.  Sounds awful, but, again, I am a huge fan.  Every try to pull up a pair of sweaty wet cotton panties (after peeing in the woods) when you're backpacking up a mountain on a 90 degree day.  Wool panties will change your hiking life.  Trust me.

Effing Ferdinand...Bastard Chicken from Hell

New WIP and New Yarn

Just what I needed...another WIP (I'm at 7 and counting).  But I couldn't resist casting on for a hat on our drive down to a Hot Springs Thanksgiving yesterday.  The yarn is Urban Gypz's delicious one of a kind hand spun, so soft and so interesting to knit.  I love the surprise of every unique inch of yarn as it unwinds from the ball.  Good thing, since I screwed up the gauge count and had to start all over again.

And here is a little something I finished this week--hand painted merino in Reed plied with hand painted bamboo.

Sheep of the Week: Jacob

One of the hardest parts of spinning fiber into yarn is choosing from among the oodles of materials.  You can't always tell from the way a fiber feels in the store how it will feel once it is spun and washed, its twist set, then knit into something yummy.  In a cruel twist of fate, fiber that is soft enough to swaddle a baby (think Merino) generally will be more delicate and likely to wear out sooner.  And what is durable and sturdy (Wensleydale, anyone) is what that itchy scarf is made of.  You know the one.  It's on the floor in the back of the hall closet the last time you checked.  And as I search for materials, either in my local shops or on online, I find that there is an information underload.  So I am trying to educate myself about various breeds of sheep by both researching and experimenting first hand with a variety of fibers.  Each week, I will study a breed and share my findings.

First up, the Jacob.

I stumbled across some beguiling fiber at a local shop, The Asheville NC Homecraft Shop, which carries many locally produced products, including rovings from Hobby Knob Farm, just up the road in Weaverville, NC.  This stripey madness is what I spied:

When the lady in the shop told me it came from one sheep with 4 horns, I knew I had to investigate.  I also bought a Jacob batt, when had been well blended to a uniform gray, and which I dyed in my Carolina Sunrise colorway---purples, indigos, coral and red--and spun into a textured yarn for which you'll just have to stay tuned.  

Until then, let me introduce you to the Jacob.  Does this look real to you?

Octavia, from Hobby Knob Farm.

From Hobby Knob Farm. I only see 2 horns.

They're like the panda bears of the sheep world!  Only with horns.  And hooves.  And I bet they reproduce more easily.  Anyway...they believe that these sheep come from the Middle East, through Spain and Portugal to Britain.  Its wool is of medium luster and is best when spun into a thicker yarn, either worsted or woolen.  It is not a next-to sensitive skin wool, so save it for knitting into outerwear and outdoor garments--hats, mittens, sweaters, vests.  

I decided to use some of my top to practice the second lesson of Art 101--the Autowrap.  I carded some gorgeous mohair with a little sparkle to serve as my wrap, plopped that in a bowl at my feet and started treadling.  Now, I'm not much for brown yarn.  I'm just not much for brown, period.  And the mixing of the brown and the white of the fiber is a little obscured by the mohair which, I grant you, could have been spun a little finer.  But the more time I spend with my little skein of Jacob, the more enamored I am.  You decide.

Art Yarn 101: The Racing Stripe

Now that I've been spinning a while and getting a little more familiar with fibers and the sheep that produce them, I've decided to delve a little farther into the making of "art yarn," or as master spinner Jacey Boggs, aka Insubordiknit, calls them...textured yarns.  (The point being that there is an art to making every yarn, from the thinnest, most evenly spun lace yarn to the chunky thick & thin, crazy-carded, multi-fiber yarn with all kinds of crap thrown in like skull beads and nuts and, I don't know, twigs & leaves.  You name it, it's been thrown into the yarn soup.)

So Jacey has a book called Spin Art, which is just exploding with ideas and photos of beautiful textured yarns she has spun.  Bonus!  There is a DVD so you can spin along with Jacey!  She wears a pinafore!  So worth every cent.  I do hope she will come to Asheville for a course.

  

The book is organized into lessons, and I started working my way through those lessons earlier this week.  First up--Racing Stripe, whereby you hold a second spun fiber in your drafting hand as you draft and spin a singles yarn. I chose some really pretty ugly merino I plucked out of a length of top I'd dyed.  It was hideous and perfect for practicing a new skill. I didn't have high hopes for this practice.  I striped it with a lace weight linen Euroflax linen, which I also dyed green.  It was gonna be ugly!

Here's what I love about making yarn, though.  Through the magic of spinning, these two elements came together into something that is actually pretty beautiful.  Look!

The linen gives yarn a nice sheen and a nice drape, and I'm a little sad that Euroflax is discontinuing their lace weight line.  Oh well...it was fun while it lasted.  For me, there is no end to the yarn fun.  I love this job!

By the way, Jacey is teaching a course, a retreat, really, at the John C. Campbell Folk School, way out in Western North Carolina.  It's in April.  I'm saving my pennies 'cause I really really really want to go.