…and it really is, actual, wool. One continuous length of clean, combed, white fleece. I even know the breed of sheep it has come from – the texel.
A pedigree texel sheep
It feels wonderful and has that typically woolly scent, which is very evocative for me. I realised as I opened the package and handled the wool, that this is what my Auntie’s house used to smell of, and it took me right back there.
I adored visiting her as a child and some of my happiest early memories were made at her house. She was brilliant at most hand crafts, and always had some wool at some stage of processing for me to get involved in. I remember handling greasy, bitty raw fleece, preparing wool for hand-carding, and even had a go at spinning on her spinning wheel (I was rubbish at it). I tried to knit up my hand-spun yarn and it was hopelessly uneven. But such fun to try. So in a way, embarking on this project feels like a home-coming.
Finding the ends of the strand took a while. I had to tip the wool out of the bag and run my hands along it until eventually one end appeared, and then another. I marked each end with a coloured tie.
Now I have to experiment with preparing the wool for knitting. Although it’s surprisingly sturdy in its unprocessed state, and I could go ahead and arm-knit with it, the kind of structured pieces I intend to make will need a firmer, more ‘finished’ yarn.
Friction felting is not that effective and takes too long, especially with a large batch of wool. Wet felting is probably the way to go, but must be done gently by hand. So I think I’ll be filling the bath tub, swooshing it around, and then trying to get it dry.
The resulting yarn will be thicker than the yarn I used before, so I will have to knit up samples and work out how to adapt my patterns. There may be other advantages which I haven’t discovered yet. What’s really exciting is that there are all kinds of wool tops available, from many different breeds of sheep, some of which are different, natural colours. So I could work with beautiful shades of brown and grey – all undyed, all from the sheep’s natural colour.
If my Auntie was still here, how I’d love to tell her about this! She was, and still is, my inspiration, and there’s a bit of her in all of this.
Knitting Revolution 