Wool

My wooly projects are still ongoing. These pictures span a time period from about two months ago to the present.
I borrowed a drum carder from my mum. It's definitely a good idea to have the same hobbies as your mum! These things are amazing, they produce so much more wool for lots less effort than hand carders. I guess that's where the industrial revolution started, taking the drudgery out of hard labouring work, but perhaps that's another story.......

 As a result of this fabulous 'machine I now have huge piles of carded wool everywhere. Here is a box full of carded mule wool. This was a fleece I snaffled last year when I was fleece rolling for the farmer I work for. Mules are a hybrid and often have Bluefaced Leicester in their parentage, which have lovely wool. So while I was rolling I kept an eye out for one I thought looked long and crimpy and shiny and asked the farmer if I could have it. It would have been churlish of him to say no as they are worth very little to large scale farmers, so he said yes!

 I also have trays full of all sorts of other wool that I've scrounged and bought from various sources, including black and white Jacob, North Ronaldsay, Zwartbles and a mongrel black/grey sheep.

I'm now busy sinning my way through it, and on a cold and rainy day (ha ha) I lit the woodburner and boiled up some lichen

Strained it and threw a couple of balls in then boiled it some more.. (oops, bit blurry this picture)

And they came out like this. they haven't taken the dye very strongly, I think partly because the wool hasn't been thoroughly washed, but I don't mind, I like subtle.

and I've finally done some knitting. I loosely used a pattern (ahem). The brown is Shetland wool, the white is mule and the yellow is, I think dyed with onion skins. You can't really see the yellow, which is a bit of a design fault!

 It's a bit small for me, I like hats to come well down over my ears. But I knitted it on the boat and that was all the wool I had, and I wanted to wear it as I was cold.

I'll do another, make it bigger , and put the nice yellow wool somewhere where it can be seen. I'm on a steep learning curve here.