Black Walnuts and what to do with them!

Tuesday night I finally was able to attend my Dyed in the Wool Spinners meeting for the first time since spring.  We meet once a month and the gals in the group bring their spinning wheels or other projects, and we all visit and share ideas.  I'm working on spinning up a latte-colored brown sheep wool into a fine, sport weight yarn for a shawl I saw on the knitter's website Ravelry.

I love the feel of working with natural fibers like sheep wool, alpaca or angora.  Wool doesn't come ready to spin, however.  When it comes off the sheep it's dirty and full of lanolin.  The first thing you have to do is wash it, usually in warm water and dish detergent.  It has to be laid out to dry naturally or it will felt up into a big mess!

After its dried it has to be combed out.  You can do it by hand with hand carders (which look like giant dog brushes) or by a drum carder which stretches the wool over a toothed round drum and combs it out as you turn the wheel.  Wool suppliers can also send out their wool to be processed, in which case it comes back as roving -- a big ball of fluffy wool that comes off the ball in a wide strip, ready to spin up. (See picture to the left).  Roving is very easy and nice to work with for both wheel spinning and hand spinning with a drop spindle.  I can make 400-600 yards of yarn from one ball of roving, which generally costs me about half the cost of a skein of yarn.  Hand-spun yarn can be knit up in its natural colors, or dyed to whatever color you would like with either commercial or natural vegetable dyes.




I'll be blogging more on hand spinning, but if your interested in giving hand spinning a try, here's a link to make your very own drop spindle from old CDs.  It's an inexpensive way to get started and see if you like it.  http://www.spindleandwheel.com/content/view/15/76/ 

Happy spinning!
Francine