First fleece down! I started out with 1 pound 8 ounces of washed Shetland fleece. The listing said the locks were 2-3 inches long, they were actually 4-5 inches long.
Since I only had hand cards, I struggled for a bit to figure out how to do this. Plus it was my first time doing hand carding. Eventually, I got my method down. First I would get a lock, pull the guard hairs and set those aside.
I spun up thread from it to see if it would make a sturdy thread for sewing. I’ve got more of that left which I’m going to spin for warp. Then I took the lock and flicked it on a dog brush to remove the vegetative matter and the felted cut ends. I would flick a whole bunch at once, make a giant floofy fluff pile.
Then I’d card. Since the locks were so long, I would load them onto the first card and only do one carding pass to move them to the second card. Then I would roll the rolags off the second card and drop into the bowl.
Then I spun! That was the easy part. I started working on the fleece february 1st and finished march 2nd and I ended up with 19.6 ounces of singles.
It will be a 3 ply yarn that will eventually become a sweater combined with brown shetland for some color work. I am waiting to ply until my new electric eel wheel arrives because my current wheel is still cranky about plying and it only holds 3oz at a time. It was fun! I got combs just the other day and I’m going to be buying some nice fleeces soon.