Recently I felt an urge to make a sweater from scratch, yarn and all, so I designated some time in the evenings to work on it. To begin I headed out to our barn in search of my wool roving stash that’s been languishing in totes for over a decade. Upon discovering it I buried my face in it taking in the yummy smell of sheep’s wool. Not just any wool but the wool of our old flock of sheep.
My trusty old Kromski Polonaise
Since I haven’t spun a sweaters worth of yarn in many years I wondered if I may have lost my touch, but to my surprise I spun a nice yarn I was proud of.
Spinning a sweaters worth of yarn is no joke and the pattern I chose (Polina) called for 1200 yards of fingering weight. I set a goal to spin a bobbin per evening for two days and ply them together on the third day. I stuck to this routine for 15 days total and in the end had 4 skeins of gray yarn from our CVM sheep and 1 skein of white from our Corriedale sheep.
A very happy feeling when a sweater’s worth of yarn has been spun.
Our CVM sheep were white with black markings and when their fleeces were processed into roving at the mill the black and white blended together to became a silvery gray color. This gray color is beautiful on its own but I especially love the colors that can be achieved when it’s naturally dyed. It’s always difficult to decide on a color when I have so many homegrown dye flowers to choose from but in the end I dyed the 4 gray skeins with rudbeckia flowers and the white skein with a small amount of madder root.
I didn’t weigh out the rudbeckia flowers so I’m not sure the WOF ratio I used but it was a strong dye bath. I’d guess it was somewhere near 100% WOF. For the madder root dye bath I used only 2% WOF to achieve a corally pink.
While I worked the dogs provided some good entertainment with fast paced laps and a game of king of the firewood pile. I let the yarn steep in the dye bath for around an hour at 160°f. Then I turned off the flame and continued steeping until the dye bath cooled to lukewarm. The skeins were wrung out and hung on the clothesline to drip before being brought in to finish drying beside the fire.
The pink looks very pink in the photo above but in reality is a much softer coral pink. Since I’m so used to naturally dyeing cellulose fibers I’m always amazed at how a little bit of dyestuff goes a very long way on protein fibers! The yellow skein is some mordanted yarn that I had laying around which I dyed in the exhaust rudbeckia bath. As you can see rudbeckia yields a yellow (and sometimes yellow-green) on white yarn but on gray yarn the outcome is green.
When it was finally time to begin knitting I decided I wanted the flower heads of my Polina to be white. Since I dyed all my white yarn pink, I had to backtrack and spin another skein.
I’m super happy I took the time (3 more evenings!) to spin the extra skein of white. It’s always worth it in the end. I still have to knit the sleeves but this homegrown handspun little ditty is coming right along. I’ll publish a part 2 when this WIP is finished.
