Fleeced
or maybe not.
I'm still a neophyte in the raw fiber world, so the condition of the one I bought off eBay may be how it should be. So I'm certainly not giving her bad feedback. Plus, I love a challenge.

Taking a cue from Mythbusters, who always do things in miniature first, I took a handful, stuffed it in an organza gift bag and washed it in the sink, per instructions off the Net. With a smidgen of Dawn, that gets grease, or lanolin, out of your way.

(Oh, Internet, how I love you! You tell me how to make a fat suit out of two T-shirts and fiberfill, or how to make Kung Pao Chicken, or find me that quote of Newman's on Anglicanism. Or how to process the fleece I bought on eBay.)

Once it was dry, I carded it, sort of, with the dog slicker brushes, spun it, plied it and solar-dyed it with a blend of Orange and Lemonade Kool-Aid. Now it smells quite tasty and not like a barnyard.

Since that worked out adequately, I ordered some actual carders and washed up a much larger batch in the bathtub, which I dried out in the garden on a bath towel. My using the kitchen colander to scoop the loose wet wool out of the tub will be our little secret, okay? I washed it really, really well afterwards.

Natural Dyeing
While V. took Bubs to the park yesterday morning and MJ had a nap, Nini and I wound a skein of yarn on the niddy noddy and cooked up a pot of onion skin dye from husks collected from the natural foods mart. She liked tearing up the skins into little bits, but found the one-hour simmer and one-hour steeping steps a little boring. We used the rest of the white fleece spun from my spinning lessons- one large skein and one small. The big one got the whole process, the smaller one and an orphan skein of my eBay fleece got the second go-round.
Remember when I said that that yarn wanted to stay natural? Should have listened- it did NOT like the dye. I'm trying to come up with a Martha Stewart-esque color description for how it turned out. "Dirt Dobber" is about the best I can do.
The others are lovely shades of rust, though.

Snippets

'Fan Target's' boyfriend is in town for 2 weeks, so we had Family Dinner on Saturday. She wanted to share the tradition of Marshall's Bar-B-Que with him, so we picked up a couple of family packs. And we ate off the Fort Worth Centennial plates I inherited from my grandmother and which are only used for family and honored guests.

While Sissy, Miss O and I cleaned up the kitchen before game playing and dessert, Marge and Davy fed Morgan Jane her dinner. "Let's just stuff her under our shirts and make a break for it", he said.

They are going to Arkansas this week, so he can meet college friends and see her school. She is a little apprehensive about this because strange things happen on trips to AR, but maybe if he's there, nothing odd will occur.

There is much progress on the toilet-training front, but people have threatened to quit reading if we don't quit writing about poop.

I finished my spinning lessons and have ordered a wheel of my own. Not the Cadillac design, more of a Hyundai, but with the potential for add-on's. I would be going through spin withdrawal, but I have to wind (and/or untangle) all the skeins I've made so far and wind them into balls, which keeps me busy. And I want to catch up on the sewing and clear my decks, to be able to spin guilt-free when it arrives.

Ro has gone to Austin to see the boyfriend in his roomates's movie at South by Southwest. It must be a sign of the times- everyone now has a movie that they edited in their bedroom, instead of a novel. She made them a cake, decorated to look like a wheel of Swiss cheese, a gigantic kitchen-wrecking project, but very cute. It seems the film is about a goat named Artois and goat cheese. As far as I can tell.

She got free show photos from "Rumors" because she was nice to the photographer, who appreciated it. She is 'jus' adorable' as the Tiny Cop. The other actor is about three times her size- no wonder they get a nice laugh.

Turning the back yard into my little mini-farm is one of the smartest things I've done lately. It's practical, it's exercise, it's soothing manual labor, it's meditative and prayerful and it's good stewardship.
Alas, many of the groups you turn to for advice, products, philosophy or fellowship are fanatic ecologists. Even the Catholic Bishops Conference for Rural Living has drunk the 'climate change' kool-aid. So, the winnowing of useful knowlege from hysteria is time-consuming, but worth it.

In Which I Strike Off On My Own

Several years ago, when I first thought of taking up spinning, I bought a sack of roving off eBay. Roving is cleaned, carded wool formed into ropes. I dug it out, postponed my assigned homework, popped an empty bobbin in the flyer and spun it all.

It took about 3 1/2 hours, or one episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, one of The Andy Griffith Show and all of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. (Yes, I don't watch TV during Lent, but stuff you've seen at least 10 times doesn't count. So much.)

Then I unwound it off the bobbin onto something called a niddy noddy, tied it with a figure 8 in four places to make a skein, soaked it in the sink in warm water and a little detergent, rinsed it well and hung it in the bathroom to dry.

It was gone in the morning- brief alarm- but Ro had moved it to the sewing room so she could take a shower.

It looked like this:

I briefly considered dyeing it, but decided it wanted to stay natural. I wound it into a ball and am now knitting a scarf out of it.

I probably shouldn't be impressed by accomplishing something billions of people have done for thousands of years, but I am.

It's a little like being The Magician. There's the same element of effortless concentration- or at least I can see the potential for it- and the transformation of one thing to another form. It's like knitting, but at a higher level.

Rumplestiltskin, look out

Had my first spinning class today here. It's about an hour's drive from home, but so worth it.

The beginning spinning class is taught one-on-one and the first session is about three hours. Then you're turned loose at home with the class handouts, a drop spindle, two bags of wool roving (grey and white) and a spinning wheel, the model above, to practice for a week, until the next class.

Spinning, it seems, is all about using physics to put twists in fiber. Which explains the puzzling captions in Spin-Off magazizne about 6:1 ratios, etc. All the motions are simple, but co-ordinating them is the trick. But the teacher assured me that, just like knitting, it will all come together once the muscle memory is established.

It was a little hard to pay attention to the lesson, since the store is a treasure trove of everything fiber: wool rovings for spinning and felting, 'blank' yarns of various weights and all sorts of fiber for dyeing, dyes, spinning and weaving equipment, handspun and hand-dyed yarns, home-made soaps, two looms and a kitchen area for dyeing.

My major assignments: learn to treadle the wheel as slowly as possible to be consistent. And to practice drafting, which is drawing out a thin bunch of fibers from the larger mass, on the drop spindle.

And possibly spin on the wheel. But I'm in no hurry.