Skirting and sorting fleece the feline method....

Cat sorting fleeces with the 'zzzzzzz' method!!
Now you know what I've been doing this weekend, I sheared my last sheep (I couldn't catch her!) on Friday and yesterday I spent the day skirting the fleece and picking out the vm so I could wash it up. The assistant is named Blue (for his blue eyes), he's about 17 years old now and though he loves to help around the farm he does take union naps often.

Kitsap County Fair 2008

Well, another year of fairs is almost over for us! We always help in the Kitsap Weavers & Spinners Guild booth, that's me and my youngest daughter doing a spinning demonstration. We didn't do the whole fair this year, just the afternoon shifts for three days. With milking and feeding the goats we can't do more than that for awhile.I managed to skip posting here last week because of the fair so I made a promise to myself to post twice this week to make up for it!



The next photo is of my daughters blue ribbon yarn. She harvested the wool from her Angora Bunnies, mixed it with some wool, dyed up bunches (see previous post about dying) of wool and angora, then carded it together, and finally spun it up. I got a second place ribbon with my black n'brown wool that I Navajo plied (first try).
50 Ways To Weave Your Color
Here you see that I FINALLY finished my warp off from the class I took two years ago! I decided to do finger towels with the remaining warp, it's 8/2 cotton and the colors are lovely. Now I just have to dig out the sewing machine and sew the hems - I don't think it will ever get done if I try and finish it off by hand!

Mystery Loom - 4 shaft floor loom

I picked up another loom today! This one is a 25" weaving width floor loom with 4 shafts and 6 treddles. There are no distinguishing marks so I've no idea who made this little compact loom. It's got a strange way of lifting shafts, I figured out that it's a Jack style loom, what I thought were double lams were not! So I've got a nice little Jack style 4 shaft that is REALLY sturdy! Look at all those bolts!


I picked it up in a rummage sale to benifit the local community center for a very small amount, so I'm tickled pink!!

Here in this shot you see the bottom of the shafts just above the rockers which are just above the lams that are shown in the photo below.











In this second picture you see the bottom lams that are tied to the treddles.




Since it's a 4 shaft I think I'll try some double width fabric and see if I can do some mohair throws. And a few mohair shawls should be rather easy on a loom like this. nice and easy and small enough to fit in the livingroom so I can weave and watch tv with the rest of the family.

Angora Rainbow - dyed Angora fiber

For the last couple of weeks my daughter and I have been dying up several pounds of angora fiber that we have collected from our herd of angora rabbits (no animal is ever hurt while being shorn, it's a necessary and helpful process to the rabbit as they might get wool block and die if the coats aren't thinned or cut off). We have 15 adult angoras, three reds, 8 white, 2 chestnut and 2 black.

Today we dumped it all on the coffee table and put three skeins of her newest blends on top of it all with one bat and the yarn spun from it on the left. I didn't realize we had so much fiber!!! It's going to be fun blending and spinning it all up!