Sheep to Shawl

Almost a year ago, my friends, Jack and Betsy McCann, owner's of the True Cost Farm outside of Minneapolis, gifted me a fleece from one of their white Icelandic sheep. (Here's the True Cost website, which offers a CSA for Twin Cities residents: http://www.truecostfarm.com/True_Cost_Farm/Home.html)

Jack and Betsy don't actually raise their sheep for the fiber, but I was curious to try processing a fleece from the beginning to end: wash, card, spin, dye and create a garment. At yarn festivals, teams of fiber artists do this in a weekend in a competition often called "Sheep to Shawl." I pitched the idea to Jack, who was game to letting me try with his fleece.  

Since I live in Laramie and the McCanns are outside Minneapolis, I brought the fleece home in a trash bag stowed in one of my mother-in-law's old suitcases. Once home, I washed it, and began the long, arduous process of handcarding the fleece.  

Below is a picture of the fleece, washed but uncarded:

The carding process ended up being a little bit more complicated than I had expected. Icelandic fleece is actually made of a double coat: a soft interior coat called the thel, and an outer, hairlike coat called the tog. One can separate the coats and spin them separately or spin them up together. Eventually, I resolved to spin them together because I also needed to flick card the thel which had an especially thick layer of lanolin. 

Here's what the washed and carded fleece looked like pre-spinning:

At time to spin, I discovered lots of debris still on the fiber, even after carding, but that worked its way out in the spinning process.

Here's the single ply, still on the bobbin of my ladybug wheel:

I plied a double ply yarn, which came out quite well balanced. On the niddy noddy: 

And finally, in hank form:

In the end, I believe I spun up about 500-600 yards of fiber, ten 50-75 yard hanks worth. 

The ultimate goal was producing a traditional Icelandic or Lopi style sweater. These sweaters are knit in the round with yoke made of gradual decreases, evenly spaced to the neck. The hallmark of this style sweater is the colorful stranded knitting around the yoke, so I couldn't stop at the natural colored yarn. 

I had a class on yarn dying several years back but the part I couldn't quite fathom was what to do with the toxic materials in the dye. Also, Jack and Betsy have built a model in their farm for sustainable agriculture, and I wanted to give them the final products as examples of what was possible with their sheep. 

Of course, I had heard about alternatives, like dying with onion skin or Kool-Aid, but I wanted to take it a step further. On my little patch of paradise, I love to garden, and Blake and I have been pondering the make-up of a large garden with produce and materials for his brewing and vintner hobbies. Why not add in a dye garden? Since our big garden is planned for summer of 2014, I decided to try several plants in my experimental produce gardens: cosmos, hollyhocks, zinnias and veronica. I already have marigolds and chokecherries, so hopefully some of them would actually grow in zone 4a, and I could get a few workable colors. 

For the last couple of weeks, on my run, I have made some additional observations. This year, delphiniums or larkspur were coming up as wildflowers all over my neighborhood, including my backyard. These have been one of the most dependable plants for cultivating in my perennial garden, but I hadn't realized that they pop up all on their own. (Coincidentally, I discovered lupine doing the same thing just this week.) 

On Sunday, Liam and I trimmed the blooms from a bucketful of larkspur without having to leave the pasture on our property.

  

I trimmed the purple blooms from their stalks, dropped them in a few gallons of boiling water* and let them go for an hour until I had a green from the purple flowers and their yellow pollen. I added the Icelandic yarn with some merino/silk blend yarn I also spun up this spring and boiled for an hour and a half. Then I left the yarn in the pot overnight. In the morning, I had green yarn. 

Below is the Icelandic yarn on the left and the merino mix on the right. 

Next step: I'm waiting for more flowers to bloom in Wyoming. There's a yellow wildflower starting out, so that may be my next adventure.

*Even though I'm using natural materials, I still purchased a hot plate, bowl, tongs, and a large enamel pot for dying in the garage. One must be very careful about using dyestuffs in the kitchen and should never use dyepots for anything other than dye.