Tuesday, January 15, 2008

ANGORA AND DYEING
























I am hoping that I can get this to do what I want so I will just start out and see what happens.


First, after shearing, there is the fiber. This summer I entered some of it in a an wool compeition at the Eureka Fiber Festival in Eureka Montana, and this was the result. There were no guide lines issued as instructions so what I did was I took all the prime wool for a years duration from one rabbit, and put it in a clear plastic bag for display, and labeled it as required. I figured that by doing that the judge, or anyone else, could see how much prime wool was produced by one rabbit in one year, and could see and feel the texture, and color and crimp. This is the result in the picture above. It was fun....I wish that more fiber festivals has a competiton for angora fibers as well as their wool compeition.


This past year, I took 5 lbs of prime angora wool and took 10 lbs of unwashed white fleeces from my Bluefaced Leicester/shetland cross sheep and sent them off to 13 Mile Mill here in Montana for processing and spinning into 1 ply yarn of 1600 YPP. Since the wool needed washing, picking, and cardiing prior to blending it was reducded in volumne so that the blend came out about 60% wool and 40% angora. It is not as lacey looking as merino blend, but has more substance, but the hand is marvelous, and it is a great knitting yarn. It is also perfectly white.

I plied it it through my spinning wheel into a 2 play yarn... for the most majority. However, I also plied 1 skein of bombyx silk 5/1 with 1 ply of the angora-wool blend as far as that would go, and another skein of 8/1 bombyx with some more of the blend. I wanted the picture inserted here, but I see it went to the top. Fortunately the photos have text added so it can be identified.

The next picture is a close up of the 5/1 silk plied with the wool blend ply...it's just that the luster did not show up on the silk much but it is there.

Then there is a photo of complete skein of the blend and the 5/1 silk yarn. I took all of this and dyed it in rainbow fashion in bright colors and call this batch "SANTE FE" because of the colors remind me of the SW country. There are four color coodinated skeins but each one is different.

Next I did more single skeins of the blend in rainbow fashion in the microwave, and these two singles are the result. They are the blend 2 ply only without the silk ply.

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